Attention, Jews of generations X through Z: In case you missed it, novelist Joseph Epstein laid down a pretty severe gauntlet in last week’s issue of Newsweek. After deriding your parents for giving you inflated trust funds and WASPy first names, he accused you of frivolity, assimilation, and too-frequent intermarriage…
Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex day-care as “Mo” Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts from which they’re reciting. Mo has abstained…
In theory, 3-D filmmaking should amplify the effect Roland Barthes foresaw in Cinemascope — that of the viewer becoming a “little god” free to float about at will in the frame’s capacious space. In practice, it’s typically like watching a shitty movie with the added sensation of getting poked in…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works, in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman very, very slowly approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind. Yustman…
No writer ever gazed deeper or more despairingly into the prison of middle-class American conformity than Richard Yates, which might explain why none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies in his lifetime and why it has taken more than 40 years for one of them to reach the…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious — a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story, about a man born in the twilight of life and gradually regressing toward dawn, that has been adapted into a two-ton, Oscar-season white elephant. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth,…
Walt Kowalski growls a lot — a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest he sell his house in a gang-infested corner of…
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…
It’s July 20, 1944, and Adolf Hitler has been assassinated—the victim of a bomb blast organized and executed by a cabal of high-ranking German army officers seeking to wrest control of the country away from the Third Reich and, with luck, bring an end to World War II. Duped into…
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19 — and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with the…
With the fanboys eagerly eying Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation, Frank Miller’s version of The Spirit sneaks into theaters almost unnoticed Christmas Day — good thing too. Miller, comics-writing icon turned director, has rendered comics-industry revolutionary Will Eisner’s crime fighter Denny Colt a grim shade of dull — all talk, no…
For so major a movie star — at least, once upon a time — Jim Carrey seems to make a lot of awfully minor films, several of them over and over again. Isn’t Yes Man, in which Carrey’s self-absorbed Debbie Downer green-lights every bad decision in an effort to reinvent…
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Writing at the time, I…
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it’s no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic over-reacher Darren Aronofsky’s relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It’s also a canny example. You want to make a comeback…
I hear America singing, and I see … Richard Nixon. Not the man but the muse: Has any president since Lincoln inspired more movies, TV miniseries, and operas? As Nixon’s beetle brows, ski nose, and mirthless grin were made for caricature, so his rampant pathology was a gift for novelists…
As in the original 1951 film by Robert Wise (but with little regard to Harry Bates’s original pulp short story “Farewell to the Master”), the arrival on Earth of a near-omnipotent being named Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) is met with a trigger-happy response. Only the widowed Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly)…
It really shouldn’t have been so hard to make a decent Punisher movie. The Marvel Comics character, who shot to prominence in the late ’80s after Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns proved there was an appetite for psychotic and homicidal superheroes, is basically Death Wish’s Paul Kersey on steroids…
During World War II, a Nazi officer (David Thewlis) receives a promotion and moves his wife (Vera Farmiga), teenage daughter (Amber Beattie), and eight-year-old son Bruno (Asa Butterfield) to a remote country house. Almost immediately, Bruno spies through his bedroom window a nearby “farm” where the workers wear “striped pajamas.”…
Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular novel, Twilight — the first in a four-book series about a 17-year-old girl who falls in love with the hunky vampire who sits next to her in biology class — bored me silly, but that’s clearly a minority opinion. In the novel, Bella and her cold-to-the-touch…
Gus Van Sant has never been what you’d call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully there might be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant’s steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible, and his eyes are fixed firmly…
To brand, and then dismiss, Four Christmases as a disappointment would be giving it too much credit — never, for a second, did this New Line Cinema castoff scream or even whisper decent in the runup to its opening. It’s the story of couple Kate (Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Vince…
