The aliens have already been with us for 20 years at the beginning of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mother ship and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the…
In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s…
Credited as the first “action figure,” G.I. Joe came to life in 1964 as Hasbro’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie doll. There were actually four Joes — one for each branch of the armed forces — and in the imaginations of boys everywhere, they fought Nazis. Forty-odd years later, the Joes…
Top Chef: In praise of the Julia half of Julie & Julia
Love Hurts: (500) Days of Summer
Miamian Ric O’Barry’s The Cove Hits Theaters
Funny People: It’s a Wacky Life
The premise, punched-up puns, and character development are more lightweight than the helium balloons in Up, but Disney’s new CGI-heavy excuse to flood the market with kiddie merch (it’s the year’s first 3-D commercial, and we’re the real guinea pigs) has a box office trick up its shallow sleeve: Jerry…
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m…
If you think it’s impossible to underestimate the cultural significance of American Idol, go see British filmmaker Havana Marking’s documentary about its Afghani imitator, a smash hit TV show whose musical wannabes run the gamut of Afghanistan’s bruising ethnic divisions. The even more socially and geographically heterogeneous audience votes for…
Joshua Leonard came undone at Cannes. It wasn’t just that Humpday, the film in which he stars, had made it into the festival’s prestigious Directors’ Fortnight — unlikely enough for a movie about two straight friends who decide to shoot a gay porn together for art’s sake, and which cost…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps surprising just when one would expect it to be puttering along on…
Moon, directed by British advert tyro Duncan Jones, is a modest science fiction film with major aspirations. Jones’s debut is pleased to engage genre behemoths — 2001, Solaris, Blade Runner — as well as B movie classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The tale of a lonely spaceman might…
“Heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce — a piece such as Turds in Hell, which offered a farrago of sodomy, sadomasochism, incest, coprophagia, bestiality, homosexual…
Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald’s parents didn’t just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate. From a 2004 Jodi Picoult bestseller, My Sister’s Keeper mashes Death Be Not Proud with Irreconcilable Differences. When Kate…
“They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…
Though hardly landmarks of narrative or animation art, the first two Ice Age films were warm and goofy and appealing; John Leguizamo’s adorably sibilant Sid the Sloth remains a much-quoted guy in our household. But as with Shrek and countless other overextended studio franchises, the well has run bone-dry. Part…
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up as entertainment — and be grateful. This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for…
Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life, and less-than-likeable figure. Whatever…
Fifteen minutes after seeing The Proposal, I’d forgotten I’d seen The Proposal. Well, that’s not entirely true: By then, it had simply merged in my memory with a thousand other films just like it — those in which phony lovers bound together by dubious circumstances become honest-to-kissin’ couples in just…
Eddie Murphy is a Denver investment consultant, Evan, with a workaholic schedule that leaves little space for 7-year-old daughter Olivia (Yara Shahidi). Adding to his pressures is the meteoric rise of a co-worker, shtick Native American “Whitefeather,” whose financial consultations come couched in pseudo-mysticism and PowerPoint razzle-dazzle (played by Thomas…
Want to know how a city works? Start by watching 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a primer in which subway hijackers test how long it’ll take a million bucks to pass through Gotham’s plumbing. Turns out an hour is just enough time to roust the hated mayor…
