Fifty Years On, A Hard Day’s Night Is Still Revelatory

Let’s get the obvious bit over with: The early days of the Beatles, as reflected in Richard Lester’s ebullient shout of freedom A Hard Day’s Night, were all about the optimism of the early 1960s, a thrilling and energizing time when young people, and even some older ones, truly believed…

Bristling Violette Exposes a Creator’s Nerve

Violette is a film consumed by hunger, as was its heroine, the French writer Violette Leduc: hunger for love, for companionship, for artistic validation. Portrayed with flickering levels of ferocity by the supple-faced Emmanuelle Devos, Leduc forcefully grasps at potential paramours and sucks down cigarettes with the intensity of a…

Punk-Girl Blast We Are the Best! Earns Its Title

A truly punk act, a shout of freedom, frustration, and exaltation, hits about halfway through Lukas Moodysson’s girl-punk reverie We Are the Best! The three 13-year-old protagonists, high on the idea of the three-chord band they’ve just started, find some damp garbage bags on the street that, they discover, are…

Tammy Attempts to Housebreak Melissa McCarthy

It’s a relief, after the wretched Identity Thief, to see movies whose makers love Melissa McCarthy as much as audiences do. Identity Thief’s comic centerpiece was predicated on the idea that McCarthy having sex is a hilarious gross-out, like she’s the pie Jason Biggs once had to diddle. Half an…

Paul Haggis’s Third Person Is a Baffling Rough-Draft Epic

If a toddler tried to re-create the mystifying behavior of adults, it would look a lot like Paul Haggis’s Third Person, a drama where grown-ups scream and cry and kiss for reasons that are confounding even to those who understand speech. The film follows a handful of couples, or really,…

Begin Again Won’t Let Mark Ruffalo Play a Real Person

Mark Ruffalo’s great gift, besides those scruffy good looks and that prickish, hungover charisma, is capturing the essence of the guy who’s spinning toward a crash but trying to angle himself back. His greatest performance, in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, one of the best films of the…

E.T. Update Earth to Echo Makes Everything a Device

Earth to Echo is a slender kiddie flick about a quartet of preteens and their palm-sized alien pal that’s at once bland, well-intentioned, and utterly terrifying about the mental development of modern children. As in the most honest kids films, our 5-foot heroes admit to being isolated, unhappy, and cowed…

Obvious Child and Five More Summer Movies Made by Women

In a movie industry shamefully dominated by men, it’s tough to find films made by women, primarily for women. Sure, some men make films for women, but it’s tiresome to never see female directors or screenwriters working on cool, well-advertised projects – especially projects outside the genres of romance and…

Documentary The Internet’s Own Boy Is an Urgent Heartbreaker

In January 2013, an incandescently brilliant American political activist and computer programmer named Aaron Swartz was hounded to suicide by the overzealous U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz. Anyone who argues differently has a desk drawer full of government pay stubs. Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of…

Think Like A Man Too Thinks Like Too Many Other Movies

Comedies about the battle of the sexes tend to have one clear loser: the audience. Driven by an oppositional view of romance that proved outmoded and seldom funny, Think Like a Man introduced us to six men living in Los Angeles and their corresponding flames. Some of these entanglements were…