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Boston.com -- Movie news
In a year of darkness and hope, the movies struggled to keep up. Things fell apart, the economic center didn't hold, the man least expected to win the presidency at the start of the year created a narrative of historical inevitability that just grew and grew and grew. The most engrossing drama I witnessed in 2008 may have been at ...
It would have been tough for the movies to top reality in 2008. Where this year was actually momentous, exciting, and strange, the movies often settled for being merely solemn - which was neither enlightening nor entertaining. The super-successful "The Dark Knight" was solemn, but it was also fun, something increasingly, distressingly absent from the year-end movie-going season. If a ...
***1/2 The Story of Film: An Odyssey This 2011 eight-part documentary made for British television takes in 14 decades, six continents (sorry, Antarctica), and one art form. Like that art form, it’s wildly ambitious, often extremely good, occasionally maddening, and always stimulating. Writer-director Mark Cousins’s unifying conception is cinematic innovation — or as he pronounces it in his Ulster accent (he narrates, too), “en-iv-ay-shun.” (916 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)
***1/2 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia A police procedural set in the Turkish hinterlands, featuring a caravan searching for a recently buried body. The movie, directed by the nearly great Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is full of long, scrupulously composed scenes that unfold in a loose approximation of real time, with wry comedy, frivolous chitchat, and loaded anecdotes. The murder remains elusive, but the filmmaking is exquisite. In Turkish, with subtitles. (157 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)
*** The Color Wheel Alex Ross Perry’s comedy is a road trip involving a graduate student and his estranged younger sister, played by Perry and his co-writer, Carlen Altman, that culminates with them lying together in momentary defiance of platonic fraternity. The incest isn’t funny. It’s serious — and sensual, and the one moment the filmmaking and ideas and verbal jabbing achieve something bold. (88 min., PG) (Wesley Morris)
*** What to Expect When You’re Expecting It’s all in the delivery. The movie turns the best-selling pregnancy guide of the title into one of those glib all-star comedy-dramas with multiple story lines and predictable dilemmas, but the writing is sharp and the performances bright, and there are laughs to be had for those who’ve been there. (110 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
**1/2 Bernie Jack Black dials back the boorishness to play Bernie Tiede, a real-life Texas funeral director and community pillar who in 1996 shot his aged companion (Shirley MacLaine) in the back. Richard Linklater directs it as a loopy black comedy with generous input from local “witnesses” -- the movie’s bouncy, amusing, and wholly lacking in a point. With Matthew McConaughey. (104 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
**1/2 Crooked Arrows What “Cool Runnings” did for bobsledding and “Mighty Ducks” for youth hockey, “Crooked Arrows” should do for lacrosse. A half-Native American former lacrosse star (Brandon Routh) returns to the reservation to help expand a casino. To get tribal approval, he agrees to coach the reservation’s struggling high school lacrosse team. Much of it was filmed around Boston. The action sequences don’t disappoint, and the story transcends the uplifting sports-underdog formula. (100 min., PG-13) (Loren King)
**1/2 Darling Companion A movie for women who love their dogs too much. The first film in nine years from director Lawrence Kasdan (“The Big Chill”) is an overwritten and underplotted vanity project, but Diane Keaton is a joy as a well-to-do surgeon’s wife whose frustrations boil over when her beloved mutt goes missing. With Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, and Richard Jenkins. (103 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
**1/2 The Dictator The despot here is a tall, fit, flamboyantly bearded North African goofball (Sacha Baron Cohen) who winds up working in a Brooklyn food co-op. That’s the best idea in the movie, which lacks the cultural tension in “Borat” and “Bruno,” satires that Cohen and the director Larry Charles previously made together. This one is lazy, a satire that can’t bring itself to properly satirize anything. (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)
**1/2 Men in Black 3 About as good as one could hope for from an unnecessary sequel that’s a decade late to the party. Alien-containment Agent J (Will Smith) time-travels to 1969 to rescue partner K. For all the millions of dollars spent on digital astonishments, the most uncanny special effect is Josh Brolin as the young Tommy Lee Jones. (106 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
** The Hunter Willem Dafoe gets a welcome lead role as a mysterious big-game hunter hired to locate the last Tasmanian tiger. The movie, a sort of romantic hit man eco-drama, becomes increasingly unglued as it goes along, but the locations are stunning and the star holds the frame on the strength of his weathered cheekbones alone. With Frances O’Connor and Sam Neill. (100 min., R) (Ty Burr)
** God Bless America Bobcat Goldthwait’s latest directing effort blasts everything from fear-mongering by TV political pundits to the nincompoopery of “American Idol” fans. Joel Murray (“Mad Men”) is a terminally ill man who decides to grab a gun and take a whole bunch of obnoxious people with him. Tara Lynne Barr is his junior-misanthrope sidekick. There’s some wickedly funny vigilante-fantasy misbehavior, but also a lot of self-indulgent ranting. (104 min., R) (Tom Russo)
** Mansome Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary is so late in noticing a shift in American male grooming that for a documentary on the subject to work Spurlock would either have to pitch it to our grandparents or trace a cultural shift and unpack it. This seems like the outcome of a director seeing his first Details magazine and sensing apocalypse. (82 min., PG-13) (Wesley Morris)
** Surviving Progress Inspired by Ronald Wright’s book “A Short History of Progress,” this Canadian documentary is a slick jeremiad, expertly made and intellectually muddled. Deforestation, Wall Street greed, and Third World debt are bad (fair enough) and byproducts of progress (yes and no). Weighing in are Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, and Stephen Hawking’s voice. “The Ice Age hunter is still in us,” Wright warns. Coming from Liam Neeson that would be a boast. (86 min., unrated) (Mark Feeney)
*1/2 Battleship If you’re going to make a movie based on a board game, you’ve got to fill two hours with something. So why not go the “Transformers” route? Taylor Kitsch (“John Carter”) plays a ne’er-do-well who joins the Navy just in time to fight an alien armada that lands off Hawaii. If only there were more genuine rah-rah fun, instead of seen-it-all-before mayhem. (131 min., PG-13) (Tom Russo)
*** Dark Shadows Tim Burton has got his groove back. This big-screen revamp of the much-loved (if ridiculous) late-’60s Gothic soap opera is both sendup and homage, and it recaptures the show’s doomy vibe with blissful comic precision. Johnny Depp is great fun as Barnabas Collins, an 18th-century vampire having trouble adjusting to the polyester 1970s. With Michelle Pfeiffer and Eva Green. (113 min., PG-13) (Ty Burr)
*** First Position Another kiddie-competition documentary, but more gripping than usual because the competitors — six young ballet dancers vying for awards and contracts in the 2010 Youth America Grand Prix — are so driven and so talented. First-time director Bess Kargman skips lightly over the harsher aspects, but her subjects are compelling and the dancing is phenomenal. (90 min., unrated)
*** Sound of My Voice A schoolteacher (Christopher Denham) named Peter and his girlfriend (Nicole Vicius) join a cult with the intent to expose its leader as a fraud. The mastermind is a serious but approachable young blonde named Maggie (Brit Marling), who epitomizes the cleverness of this half-ridiculous, half-brilliant satirical psychological thriller. Can Maggie turn Peter? Can Marling turn us? (88 min., R) (Wesley Morris)
**1/2 Headhunters A sleek Norwegian crime thriller about an Oslo executive-by-day/art thief-by-night (Aksel Hennie) who gets in over his head. Based on a novel by the best-selling Norwegian author Jo Nesbø, it’s crisp Tom Ripley-esque entertainment even as the bodies and plot absurdities pile up. In Norwegian, with English subtitles. Starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Synnøve Macody Lund. (100 min., R)
Are men more vain in 2012 than any previous point in history?
If you like “Marvel’s The Avengers” (there’s almost nothing to dislike; it’s as close as a movie can come to the fantastical reality of a good comic book), stick around for the closing credits. By this point, your grandfather knows to stick around for the scrap of preview awaiting the last disclaimers and thank-yous (the scrap is called an Easter egg). “The Avengers” puts the egg before most of the credits -- it just feels like the natural end of the movie.
The superhero saga "The Avengers" lived up to its blockbuster buzz with $178.4 million in overseas ticket sales days before it opens in U.S. theaters.
Will Smith may not want to talk about what happened last week in Moscow, but Tommy Lee Jones sure does.
The family of a woman left with brain damage after an accident during the filming of "Transformers 3" has reached an $18.5 million settlement with Paramount Pictures.
Actress Janet Carroll, who played the mother of Tom Cruise's character in the movie "Risky Business," has died. She was 71.
G.I. Joe won't be going into action on the big-screen this summer, after all. The Hollywood Reporter says Paramount Pictures yanked its sequel "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" from its June 29 release date and rescheduled the movie for March 29 next year.
An Italian ex-boyfriend of actress Anne Hathaway is about to be released from a Pennsylvania federal prison following a real-estate scam.
On paper, "The Intouchables" looks like eat-your-vegetables cinema: the story of a wealthy, white disabled man and the troubled black youth from the projects who becomes his reluctant caretaker. Surely, life lessons will be learned by all and an unlikely friendship will form across racial and socioeconomic lines and we'll all feel good about ourselves walking out of the theater ...
Garbage, "Not Your Kind of People" (Stunvolume Records) For a band that's been around for almost two decades, Garbage has released surprisingly few studio albums. Their fifth, "Not Your Kind of People," comes on the heels of a seven-year hiatus, which makes it all the more anticipated.
Berenice Marlohe, the newest Bond girl, has been making the red carpet at the 65th annual Cannes Film Festival look like a day at the beach.
Two-time Olympian Jennifer Nichols' eyes light up with she talks about her sport finally climbing out of the shadows.
A House committee chairman charged Wednesday that the CIA and Defense Department jeopardized national security by cooperating too closely with filmmakers producing a movie on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Charles MacLean is out of his element in Cannes, a town consumed by cinema and celebrity. His element is Scotch whisky -- "uisge beatha," he says, giving it its Gaelic name. The water of life.
Holy cow. The most rapturous audience reception at the Cannes Film Festival has gone to "Holy Motors," a disorienting, whirling dream of a movie by French director Leos Carax.
Fifty-five years after its publication, Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is finally burning on the big screen.
Vampires, Transformers, singing high-schoolers: They can all be tough to outrun. But at the 65th annual Cannes Film Festival, a number of young Hollywood stars are attempting to do just that. By striking out on their own, they hope to move their careers beyond mega franchises and toward more mature roles in bolder films.
There's a moment early on in "Men in Black 3" when Will Smith's Agent J sits down next to his longtime partner, Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K, and bemoans the fact that he's too old for this sort of thing -- for running around New York in matching dark suits, chasing down aliens and zapping them with their shiny metal ...
Johnny Depp has been made an honorary member of the Comanche tribe. Depp is in New Mexico, shooting the film adaptation of "The Lone Ranger." He plays "Ranger" sidekick Tonto in the film.
British director Ken Loach's new movie "The Angels' Share" is set in Scotland -- the perfect excuse to bring out the kilts in Cannes.
British director Ken Loach's new movie "The Angels' Share" is set in Scotland -- the perfect excuse to bring out the kilts in Cannes.
British director Ken Loach's new movie "The Angel's Share" is set in Scotland -- the perfect excuse to bring out the kilts in Cannes.
The stars of the romantic comedy "What to Expect When You're Expecting" had plenty of praise for each other -- and a warning about making out on the hood of a car -- during the film's British premiere in London on Tuesday.
Fifteen years into their relationship, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are like an old married couple, intimately familiar with each other's habits and quirks.
Paul Brannigan, the untrained actor who stars in Ken Loach's latest movie, has gone from being unemployed in a rough Glasgow neighborhood to nude scenes with Scarlett Johansson.
The Cannes Film Festival got its biggest shot of celebrity adrenaline yet on Tuesday, even if it was only half the dose some were expecting.
The Cannes Film Festival got its biggest shot of celebrity adrenaline yet on Tuesday, even if it was only half the dose some were expecting.
The first half of the 65th annual Cannes Film Festival has completed a life cycle in films that range from the motivating spark of child birth to the despair of slow death in old age.
