AltWeeklies Wire
Bland Love in '(500) Days of Summer'new
(500) Days is that it's cloying and dishonest, indulging all of the clichés and false optimism of an average love story while masquerading as something that is questioning those things.
Tags: (500) Days of Summer, Mark Webb
Soccer Journeys in Rudo y Cursinew
Two brothers confront the pitfalls of sudden celebrity as soccer players: wild spending, drugs, gambling, avaricious women, demanding fans.
Tags: Carlos Cuaron, Rudo y Cursi
'Public Enemies' is Less a Biopic Than a Glossy, Stylish Elegynew
What keeps Public Enemies from being a masterpiece is a peculiar lack of emotional accessibility to the key characters.
'Easy Virtue' May Be a Country Manor Movie for People Who Don't Like Themnew
The genre has gone downhill ever since Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game set the standard in 1939. But it's been a long slope with the gentle upswings and plateaus of such films as Gosford Park and Atonement.
Tags: Easy Virtue, Stephan Elliott
'The Proposal' Manages to be Both Predictable & Unbelievable At the Same Timenew
This film, mechanically directed by Anne Fletcher (responsible for last year's worst movie, 27 Dresses), is the second Taming of the Shrew retread appearing this month, after My Life in Ruins, which, in comparison now looks tolerable.
Mike Tyson Reveals and Rationalizes in New Docnew
The mere existence of yet another documentary about Tyson—the latest titled, appropriately, Tyson—speaks to the public's continuing fascination with this defrocked warrior.
'Gomorrah' Is Too Preachy for Its Own Goodnew
In his attempt to redefine mob movies, Matteo Garrone eschews many of the qualities that make cinema interesting and tantalizing. He focuses so squarely on his characters' sinful awfulness that he forgets it's often the sinners who lure the moviegoers.
Three People Vie to Be a Couple in the Freefalling 'Two Lovers'new
From its first frames to its downbeat denouement, this is the most fatalistic film I've ever seen that offers its protagonist two beautiful women to choose between.
Eastwood Updates Himself in 'Gran Torino'new
As an actor, Clint Eastwood is the most distinctly American film icon since John Wayne.
Tags: Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino
'Let the Right One In' is Too Coldnew
Bookended by shots of falling snow, Right One seems to take place in a snow globe, just as still, just as quiet, its compositions just as stiff, with plastic figures arranged in stock situations.
'Quantum of Solace' Gives Us a Neurotic Bondnew
One can adore Bond lore while also recognizing the need to conjure a new paradigm.
One Person Saves 'Zack and Miri': Elizabeth Banksnew
When full-scale T&A supplants a storyline rather than complementing it, a fictional send-up about making a porno begins to adopt the tedium of watching an actual porno.
'I.O.U.S.A.' is an Essential Documentarynew
The film is a grim assessment of America's precarious, unsustainable finance.
A Slice of Past Lives in 'A Girl Cut in Two'new
Veteran French filmmaker Claude Chabrol re-imagines the Stanford White murder.
Tags: Claude Chabrol, A Girl Cut in Two
Bush Gets Stoned in 'W.'new
While Oliver Stone's latest a messy movie without much momentum, it embraces a willful confusion -- one that history might prove to be a perfectly appropriate response to the last eight years.
