Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” underscores the Julie & Julia scene where Julie (Amy Adams) is called “lobster killer” by her husband as she prepares a dish from Julia Child’s cookbook. It’s an inane music-movie idea, but the Heads classic gives this pedestrian film a couple minutes of genuine art—and fun. Surely director Nora Ephron nixed
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When dark-eyed Stanley Black, a long-jawed, macho Morrissey type, picks up a spark plug and kisses it, Hell Drivers gets off to a great start. It’s part of Film Forum’s Brit Noir series (screening Aug. 21 & 22 in a double feature with Never Let Go), a marketable slant on what should be looked upon
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More laughs—belly-deep, thought-provoking ones—are to be had in the first 10 minutes of Roy Andersson’s You, the Living than in all of Judd Apatow’s Funny People. If this suggests that Hollywood’s current comedy kingpin is a less effective humorist than some relatively unknown Swedish cinema artiste who quotes Goethe, here’s why: Andersson’s a filmmaker of
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Bad boy Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook gives himself away in the birthday party orgy of Thirst when Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), a tantrummy young housewife, gets her wish: The undead priest Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) punctures Tae-ju’s arteries and makes her one of the unholy. It’s a brat’s dream come true. Tae-ju tries to out-do the priest
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Belgian film team Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne do small things profoundly. Their new movie, titled Lorna’s Silence, makes its strongest, most persuasive moments when Albanian immigrant Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) silently weighs her options and her moral choices. She marries a Belgian junkie (Jérémie Renier) to get citizenship status, then parlays that into a criminal scheme
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Gerard Butler’s dance with Thandi Newton in Guy Ritchie’s underrated, multilayered gangster extravaganza RocknRolla was a lovely, funny flirtation—the sexiest musical moment in recent movies. Largely because Butler and Newton aren’t cookie-cutter media types, they redefined male-female principles through their own personalities: His hunky masculinity, her sylph-like femininity. She wriggled, he parried: Yin-yang in motion.
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Coincidenceville would have been a better title for Shrink, the film in which psychiatrist Henry Carter (Kevin Spacey) and a handful of Los Angelinos crisscross past credulity but for the convenience of showing our interrelatedness. Director Jonas Pate quotes a Norman Mailer line about people who “shrink from the purpose we’re here for” but, clearly,
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Astoundingly unimaginative, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ruins the idea of popular entertainment. It’s the sixth tie-in with J.K. Rowling’s lucrative series of children’s books. All of the film versions have been pedestrian and overlong, as if trying to literally retell the book stories merely by adding up-to-date special effects—yet using them without creativity.
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Josh Lucas is a moderately talented actor who has made a successful career out of being the poor man’s Matthew McConaughey. But he’s certainly not talented enough to go the Serious Actor route and disguise his gorgeousness under flabby flesh. Yet that’s exactly what he does in the ludicrous Death in Love, which overwhelms his
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Convenient Political Correctness is what stunts Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor and keeps him from being a great comic artist. It’s why his 2007 film Borat ultimately was worthless. Because Borat catered to liberal/conservative partisanship, even GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination) came to expect that Baron Cohen’s latest film, the homophobia charade Bruno,
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