Despite the many things wrong with Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the acting was superbly on-point. De Palma’s little-known cast got class differences right, even while the film’s rhetorical concept was slanting them into the typical Blue State condescension about working-class grunts. This bias infects the latest Iraq War movie, The Messenger, by writer-director Oren Moverman, who lacks De Palma’s instincts for actorly (human) truth. This story about two veterans (Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson) assigned MOS duty to deliver death notices to the deceased’s NOK (next-of-kin), is so bungled up with fashionable ambivalence about the Iraq War that every single behavioral detail is not just prejudicial but wrong. Read more

SHAME ON TYLER PERRY and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious. After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches. They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious’ con job—even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade. Read more Read it in print

GEORGE CLOONEY MEET Dusan Makavejev: Hollywood clown to Yugoslavian art-movie satirist. Clooney’s dismal new comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats makes it essential to re-learn what good political satire means.There’s no richer example than Makavejev’s films, and three of them are now packaged in Criterion’s DVD box set, Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical. Read more Read it in print

Add Robert Zemeckis to the list of filmmakers exposed by Michael Jackson's This is It. The empathetic star-power in that beautiful concert film should have inspired a brilliant remake of A Christmas Carol. Instead, Zemeckis made his pact with technology. Every shot is a gimmick in Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. Strange that Charles Dickens' great, imperishable tale about change-of-heart should be adapted by a filmmaker who has renounced brilliant satire (I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, Back to the Future) in order to sentimentalize and distort human beings (starting with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? then famously with Forest Gump). Read more

Almost 10 years before Vincent Price’s definitive performance as the ghoulish rapper in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Price had already riffed on his career as a veteran Hollywood survivor in 1973’s Theater of Blood (playing this week with Scream of Terror as part of Film Forum’s Halloween double bill). Price rode out the transition from major studio contract leading player in A-list films like Laura (1944) to a star of André de Toth’s atypical thriller House of Wax (1953), which tracked him from icon status through American International’s low-budget grand guignols. Jackson intuited how Price—St. Louis, Missouri’s most urbane export—turned scary into camp. Read more

Fans will cheer Michael Jackson’s This Is It. Haters will sneer (as expected). But Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and other first-class filmmakers who failed to transition Jackson onto the big screen during his pop-idol years ought to weep at the missed opportunities that This Is It makes apparent. Read more

“Pulp Fiction with soul,” was what Boston-born, indie-hack-that-could Troy Duffy’s first screenplay, The Boondock Saints, was crassly dubbed by Hollywood insiders. Duffy, more memorable for the story of his rise and meteoric fall from prominence, is not really interested in the kind of misappropriated nostalgia from which Quentin Tarantino has made a career. Like its predecessor, which found a huge cult following on DVD, Boondock Saints II: All Saint’s Days is much more proud of its pseudo-religious self-righteousness and strained pub humor. This time, however, Duffy offers his small but devoted fanbase an equally meaningless sheen of progressivism. Read more

Among the American Eccentric directors—those filmmakers who came of age in the Star Wars generation—Jared Hess is the most offbeat. That may explain why Hess, director of 2004’s Napoleon Dynamite, has come up with the first American Eccentrics sci-fi movie—Gentlemen Broncos. Fellow Eccentric David Gordon Green, who got a head start with 2000’s George Washington, regularly speaks of eventually making a sci-fi film, but Hess beat him to it. Treading that thin line between empathy and pity that also distinguished Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, Hess deals with the oddball aspirations frequently felt by teenage loners who escape into the fantasy worlds of sci-fi. Gentlemen Broncos directly expresses that weirdness through 17-year-old Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), who longs to turn his isolation and idiosyncrasies into popular art. Read more

HOLLYWOOD PUBLICITY HAS popularly established 1939 as the great signpost of the studio system’s output (the year of Gone with the Wind,Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach and at least a dozen other memorable movies). But films of the ’39 classical era are rivaled by a year in the modernist era: 1962. It marked the highpoint of international, art-film exhibition as well as the beginning of the end of the old Hollywood system, all culminating in extraordinary but—up until now—overlooked riches. Read more Read it in print

HISTORY SHOULD RECORD Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier as cinema’s biggest hoaxster.Von Trier’s never made a good film—Zentropa, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville (most of them part of his “Dogme” movement) were shams perpetrated on the culturally absent-minded—yet von Trier has bamboozled critics and festival organizers into repeatedly showcasing his hoodwinks. Von Trier’s new film Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, is his latest manipulative salvo. The quasi-religious title is misleading provocation; Antichrist is really anti-cinema. Read more