Sarah Manvel/Critic's Notebook
An outsider to the Irish film industry would be surprised at the depth and breadth of work available at the 26th Galway Film Fleadh. Held over five days and six nights every July in the largest city on Ireland’s west coast, the Fleadh (pronounced “flah,” Irish Gaelic for festival) brings together new and old talent in one place to act as a doorway to the global scene. Since its winning short automatically becomes eligible for Oscar consideration, the festival is able to punch considerably above its apparent weight.
Continue reading “Troubles Every Day” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Marvel's The Avengers/Marvel Avengers Assemble (2012)
Zade Rosenthal/Marvel
Comic-book fans have eagerly awaited a cinematic outing for superhero troupe, the Avengers, ever since Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige announced in 2005 that Marvel would effectively take ownership of their universe and begin producing its own films. Five films later — two installments of “Iron Man,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Captain America: The First Avenger” and “Thor” — and the time has finally come for our heroic misfits to join forces and fight a common enemy in Joss Whedon’s “Marvel’s The Avengers” (released in Britain as “Marvel Avengers Assemble”).
Continue reading “Revenge Is a Party Platter Best Served Cold” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Margaret (2011)
Myles Aronowitz/Fox Searchlight Pictures
Remember Kenneth Lonergan? It’s been 11 years since his art-house hit and double Oscar nominee “You Can Count on Me.” He started filming its follow-up, “Margaret,” in 2005, and it’s been mired in a legal battle until now. Unsurprisingly, the finished product is discernibly dated — from the post-9/11 debates about the Middle East in the dialogue to the late Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella in producing credits. But is it worth the wait? Absolutely.
Continue reading “Worlds of Wanwood Leafmeal Lie” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Date Night (2010)
Myles Aronowitz/20th Century Fox
“Date Night” achieves the impressive feat of squandering Steve Carell and Tina Fey behind the wheezy action-comedy aesthetic of director Shawn Levy. In films ranging from “Cheaper by the Dozen” to “Night at the Museum,” the now-veteran helmer has demonstrated a far firmer grasp of hoary broad clichés than the nuances of human behavior studied on “The Office” and “30 Rock.” Though well cast and sprinkled with the occasional dose of realistic emotion in its portrait of a marriage gone stale, “Date Night” mostly just spins its wheels through frenetically rendered, meaningless plot developments disguised as a narrative.
Continue reading “Must Flee TV” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
Warner Bros. Pictures
Spike Jonze has spent years putting together this ambitious adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” one of the iconic staples of 20th-century children’s literature. In so doing, he and co-writer Dave Eggers have had to find a way to transform a 337-word story into a full-length feature, padding out the themes of loneliness and mischievousness that characterized Mr. Sendak’s exploration of the child psyche.
Continue reading “Bless the Beasts and Children” »
MOVIE REVIEW
What Doesn't Kill You (2008)
Yari Film Group
Brian Goodman – director and co-writer of “What Doesn’t Kill You” – grew up on the mean streets of South Boston and lived a drug and crime-fueled existence until a prison sentence spurred him to change his life. The steadfast, thorough authenticity that envelops the picture surely derives from that autobiographic connection to the material, and the film is undoubtedly better for it. Besides the verisimilitude that imbues the scenes set in and around the neighborhood with a sort of realist poetry, the movie also serves as a deeply affecting character study, telling the story of a weak man struggling to follow the right path.
Continue reading “Dead End Lives on South End Streets” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Blindness (2008)
Ken Woroner/Miramax Films
In an unidentified, multi-ethnic city, people start going blind. The first man is waiting at a red light when he finds he can no longer see. Another man (Don McKellar, who wrote the screenplay) offers to drive him home and then steals his car. When the first man's wife appears, she takes him to a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who goes blind the next morning when he wakes up next to his wife (Julianne Moore). The other people in his waiting room (including Alice Braga and Danny Glover) are separately brought to a quarantine unit and held under armed guard. Eventually, everyone is blind, in the whole city and maybe the country. Everyone except Ms. Moore.
The author of the book on which "Blindness" is based, José Saramago, recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. The director of this film, Fernando Meirelles, was Oscar-nominated for his first international success, "City of God." The five main actors in this film are among the most garlanded and respected working in the industry today. And yet "Blindness" never takes off. This is because of a failure of imagination at the very source.
Continue reading “Impaired Post-Apocalyptic Vision” »