Unfolding like a mid ’90s TV movie (complete with C-list movie star and A-list TV actor), Stolen doesn’t do much other than offer Jon Hamm the chance to prove that he’s more than Mad Men’s Don Draper. Read more

In a telling cultural twist, Criterion advertises its DVD release of Leo McCarey’s 1937 Make Way for Tomorrow as the film that inspired Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 Tokyo Story. It’s as if McCarey’s very American tale of an elderly couple who become a burden to their adult children—a genuine Hollywood masterpiece—needed clout from art-house exotica. This parallels the festival circuit’s current enthusiasm for Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother, a tribute to parenthood that only differs from Hollywood family genre in the way it shifts and perverts Hollywood sentiment into ugliness. Read more

GREEN ZONE COMES from the British production company Working Title and English director Paul Greengrass, but it stars American actor Matt Damon and represents the new phenomenon of homegrown Anti-Americanism. Playing off their profitable Bourne Conspiracy/Ultimatum film series, Greengrass and Damon concoct a Bush-bashing action movie that (way-late into Obama’s first term and continuance of the war) pretends to rip the lid off the Iraq War’s Weapons of Mass Destruction concept. “Shock and Awe” is mentioned to cue audience skepticism, yet that’s also how Working Title, Greengrass and Damon work:They use mainstream movie industry shock-andawe to brainwash audience sympathy. Read more Read it in print

EVER SINCE PRESIDENT OBAMA gave a shout out to The Wire, it’s been impossible for popular culture to portray the African-American experience as anything other than ghetto crime stereotype. Obama’s validation of racist clichés explains the lousy new Antoine Fuqua movie Brooklyn’s Finest, which merges police corruption and African-American fatalism. We’re meant to enjoy this overlong exploration of how three cops interact in the urban chaos as if it were a grand explanation for all that’s gone wrong in big city life, that is, a big-screen version of HBO’s The Wire. Read more Read it in print

TIM BURTON SUFFERS the same fate as misunderstood actors. He gets miscast in big-budget prestige products—like the new 3-D Alice in Wonderland—depressingly at odds with his always-odd sense of satire and grotesquerie. His 2008 film of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd was, at least, a pretty-looking debacle. But his Alice in Wonderland is determinedly grim and dour-looking. It never displays the brilliance of pure inspiration that makes the Irish animated film The Secret of Kells one of the most beautiful works of animation ever. Too bad Burton didn’t essay The Secret of Kells. Read more

Breck Eisner’s remake of George Romero’s The Crazies is one of those movies dishonest critics use for target practice. It has no big names or budget that they feel compelled to respect and so disrespect inspires them to ignore its visual wit and skillful pacing. True, director Eisner’s reboot of Romero’s 1973 original has absolutely no political resonance. But it’s better that way. Read more

TIME HAS SHOWN that the 1970s was the greatest period for American movies since… the 1950s. But the ’70s—known as the American Movie Renaissance—are not coming back. That fact is proven by this week’s unheralded premiere of The Yellow Handkerchief alongside Film Forum’s revival of Five Easy Pieces, the 1970 New York Film Critics Circle Best Picture winner. Both are road movies—the genre by which ’70s films most clearly revealed modern American behavior, language and habitat. But cultural examination no longer excites contemporary film culture, which is devoted to CGI escapism and indie navel-gazing. That means Five Easy Pieces is now just a curio, despite having defined the important and still-relevant archetype of the privileged, yet dissatisfied, American loner (Jack Nicholson as itchy rich kid Bobby Dupea). The Yellow Handkerchief updates FEP with its downscale, woebegone ex-con protagonist Brett Hanson—an original and moving characterization by William Hurt. Read more Read it in print

BLACK ACADEMICS LIKE to hedge their career bets by justifying egregious pop culture stereotype as “tricksters.” Tracy Morgan is the first comedian to understand this game and plays it embarrassingly well in Cop Out, in which he portrays Paul Hodges, a juvenile, doofus black police detective and nine-year buddy/partner to Bruce Willis’ Jimmy Monroe. Read more

IN EASIER WITH PRACTICE, directorwriter Kyle Patrick Alvarez gets right at Davy Mitchell’s (Brian Geraghty) emotional issues by openly focusing on his lack of experience. As a short story writer on a cross-country book tour with his younger brother, Davy is like any number of contemporary semi-pros on public display before their lives have really developed.Think of all that amateur writing on the Internet where know-it-all-postures hide what is actually desperation to communicate. Read more

BEHIND ITS CAVALCADE of streetkid travails, A Prophet hides sheer contempt for Malik (Tahar Rahim), a 16-year-old Muslim youth sentenced to six years in a French prison. Director Jacques Audiard imitates the latest trend in sociological extravaganzas that detail intricate criminal networks, pretending that violent bravado assesses society’s true, ugly values. The long, pseudo-serious story of Malik’s corruption in prison and how he becomes a kingpin in the Parisian underworld resembles Gomorrah and Il Divo as well as our own yearning-for-epic-status American Gangster. All glorified exploitation-movie gimmicks. Read more