I think it was William Carlos Williams who wrote, "So much depends on a woman's pubic hair, glazed and freshly shaved." I don't know why they don't quote him on the poster for Trance. It does, after all, contain what may be cinema's most audacious plot contrivance for getting an actress to go full frontal. Danny Boyle, ladies and gentlemen, fresh from tossing the Queen of England out of a helicopter for the Olympics, has now tossed Rosario Dawson's modesty into the same deep ocean where he hopes the rest of us have buried our intelligence.

But then, that's just one of many contrivances that forms the skeleton of Trance, which is less a movie and more a series of stacked convolutions and non-sequiturs, building to a big reveal that actually unveils very little. I...Read the entire review

18-year-old India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) has a tendency to keep her emotions beneath the surface. When she loses the person in her life she was closest to, her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney), it doesn't seem to affect her much on the outside. Instead, her curiosity is piqued by the appearance of a young, handsome man she's never met, who watches the funeral from a distance before appearing at the reception afterward. Despite her relationship with her father, nobody has ever told India about her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), who gives off a dangerous, yet alluring air as he decides to stay with India and her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) while they try and adjust to life without Richard. It's clear to India almost immediately that Charlie has a dark side, but she's less prepared for how his dark side brings out her own.

Stoker is the first American production by popular Korean director Ch...Read the entire review

Stoker is the creepy and weird new film by Oldboy director Park Chan-wook. It's a paranoid horror thriller, a la old-school Polanski, but with a striking visual style that brings to mind both Tom Ford's exquisite A Single Man and Joe Wright's audacious adaptation of Anna Karenina. Alas, Stoker is not as good as either of those films--or, for that matter, either Rosemary's Baby or Repulsion. Even ...Read the entire review

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho and changed the way a lot of people thought about movies. More than fifty years later, and they've now made a movie about the making of Psycho, and while Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock isn't going to change cinema as we know it, that doesn't stop it from being a damn entertaining motion picture all the same.

Anthony Hopkins and a whole lot of make-up and padding star as the rotund Master of Suspense. As Hitchcock opens, the director is exiting the highly successful premiere of North by Northwest. Despite the latest in a long line of triumphs, t...Read the entire review

Ruby Sparks isn't a real girl. She is a figment of a writer's imagination. While this is true of all characters we see in movies, it's especially true of Ruby, the title character of the new film Ruby Sparks, the first directorial effort by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris since 2006's breakout hit Little Miss Sunshine. No clue why they waited so long to get behind the camera again. Perhaps they suffered from the same pangs of success as the made-up author in this follow-up.

Ruby Sparks reteams the directors with Paul Dano, the troubled teen of Little Miss Sunshine and the lanky preacher from There...Read the entire review

When Harry (Chris Messina) reads the first section of the new novel by his brother Calvin (Paul Dano), he has one critique. But it's a big one: he doesn't believe Ruby, the primary female character. "Quirky, messy women whose problems only make them endearing are not real," he insists, and the more knowing audience members will smile, because Calvin has written a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl. It's probably fair to assume that Zoe Kazan, the adorable young actress who plays Ruby (and who wrote this screenplay) has been offered her fair share of MPDs, most of them presumably written by men not unlike Calvin. For a while, Ruby Sparks promises to be less the contribution to the subgenre that its ads suggest, and more a commentary/critique of it. Disappointingly, this angle is teased bu...Read the entire review

The new film Beasts of the Southern Wild is set in an indeterminate future when the sea levels have risen and covered much of the coastal U.S. (Or so we gather from the brief glimpse of a map we are given.) To fortify the remaining "dry" country, the government has built a levy to hold back the ocean. Below that is an area now commonly referred to as "the Bathtub," a small patch of land that didn't sink. It is still inhabited by the poor, the drunk, and the stubborn, and when it comes to a lot of folks, they might be all three.

Wink is such a person. He lives in a rundown shack with his daughter, Hushpuppy. Beasts of the Southern Wild is her story. The father and child are played by Dwight Henry and Quvenzhan Wallis, non-actors. Like much of the movie's cast, t...Read the entire review

Mark and Jeremy did the do-deca-pentathlon back in the summer of 1990, when they were teenagers. It consisted of 25 events, a fierce competition between two brothers who took it very, very seriously; it ended in a draw, during the very last event, when their father shut the whole thing down. The do-deca left them "embittered and estranged," according to the opening crawl of the Duplass Brothers' The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, on such bad terms that Mark hasn't invited Jeremy to his birthday weekend. Jeremy shows up anyway. "Surprised to see me?" he asks, and Mark replies with a sharp and immediate "No."

It is perhaps appropriate that this story, which concerns the very height of sibling rivalry, is being told by two brothers (who say it's based on a real event, though not on...Read the entire review

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a movie that sneaks up on you, and then wrecks you. It's a wildly unconventional picture, light on plot and heavy on mood; it introduces its characters, dithers around with them a while, observes them, joins them in their flights of fancy. Director Benh Zietlin is less interested in notions of routine narrative than he is in creating a feeling, a tone, one that is carefully crafted and impeccably sustained. It is, for a long time, a film that seems to be amiably going nowhere, until it arrives. Boy, does it ever.

Its protagonist is six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhan Wallis), who lives with her daddy Wink (Dwight Henry) in "the Bathtub," a fictional Louisiana floodplain on the wrong side of the levee. Hushpuppy is tiny but fierce, stubbor...Read the entire review

The indie romantic comedy is an odd subgenre, often detailing the lives of relatively well-to-do bohemian types who seemingly have little to worry about in terms of rent and a career and thus have more time to obsess over their personal travails. The four main characters in Lola Versus, for instance, are a painter, an actress, the lead singer in a band, and a graduate student writing about 19th-century French poetry. The latter is Lola, and she works, but it's as a waitress in her parents' restaurant, so her shifts appear to mainly consist of talking with her mom. Lola is played with the usual pluck but far less of the expected quirks by Greta Gerwig, recently so good in Whit Stillman's Damsels in Dis...Read the entire review

The first four films by director/writer Wes Anderson are an interesting balancing act between Anderson's "just-so" visual and tonal sensibilities and the limitation of control he has over the real people that inhabit his films, both in terms of his friends (Owen Wilson's excited-kid performance gives Bottle Rocket its comic snap) and marquee names whose reputations said "great actor" and "temperamental" in equal measure (Gene Hackman, Bill Murray, James Caan). Like a yin-and-yang, one element helped cut through and contrasted the other in all the right ways. By 2007, however, Anderson had clout, clout that affords him the ability to cast actors he's accustomed to working with and an increasing level of control over every single element in the frame. I don't mean to knock Anderson's ability to realize his artistic vision, but his recent output is as artfully designed as it is lifeless.

For awhi...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

"I know that change is inevitable," admits Lola (Greta Gerwig) in the opening narration of Daryl Wein's Lola Versus, "but what if I don't want things to change? What if I like my life exactly as it is?" You can't blame her; at 29, she's got a handsome artist fianc e with a killer rent-controlled loft, and she's close to completing her graduate school dissertation. Good friends, good guy, good life--and then she comes home from a busy day of wedding planning and finds her husband to be (Joel Kinnaman) sitting on the couch with a look of stern worry.

Wein cuts from that to Lola, crying, alone; he skips the break-up scene, because we've seen enough movies not ...Read the entire review

The Descendantsis a tale about families, the necessity of love, and the determinationto be capable of moving forward. It's a story about hope, courage, andthereasons why we must remember ourselves. Matt King (George Clooney) is alandowner in Hawaii. He owns some of the most treasured and sacred land intheentire state. In a way...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

For all his Oscars and supermodel girlfriends, George Clooney is unusually adept at playing the average, flawed American man. His Matt King, the back-up parent to two daughters and husband to an unhappy wife, is overextended and unaware of the turbulence at home. Matt is forced to remedy this neglect when his wife is seriously injured in a boating accident, and realizes he knows little about the daily lives of his family. The Descendants, which director Alexander Payne adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, is an insightful, tough drama about loss and reconciliation that Clooney spearheads with an excel...Read the entire review

In the opening sequence of Steve McQueen's Shame, protagonist Brandon (Michael Fassbender) flirts silently with a woman sitting near him on the subway. The filmmaker shows, and demands, incredible patience in this wordless scene; he lingers on the details (his fleeting glance, her ringed hand, the way she uncrosses her legs). McQueen intercuts that sequence with short, staccato glimpses of Brandon's day-to-day life, the rituals of his routine, which appears to consist primarily of the spaces between sex. There's nothing terribly expositional happening, but we feel, very quickly, like we know exactly who this guy is.

Put simply, he's a sex addict. He spends his nights on the make, cruising for a fix; if he can't pick up a girl, then a prostitute (or maybe a boy) will d...Read the entire review

It's all in a name. Everything one might love or hate about Alexander Payne's The Descendants is right there in the moniker he chooses for his main character: Matt King. The first name is common, the last is regal. Matt is a regular man who imagines himself the master of his own existence, but he is about to find out how wrong he is. Payne does this kind of thing throughout The Descendants. He flirts with the obvious, burying his fortunes just beneath the familiar veneer. One point of view might brand the film maddeningly clich . For me, Payne has provided an easy entryway to access an emotionally fulfilling life experience.

The always-amazing George Clooney plays Matt. Even without the ill-fitting Hawaiian shirts and shlumpy khakis, Clooney is a master at offse...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2011 New York Film Festival

The phrase "slice of life" has been tossed around so haphazardly, for so long, that it's become something of a pejorative--the kind of descriptor that sounds alarm bells of laziness, or preciousness, or predictability. If considering only its broad strokes, Alexander Payne's new film The Descendants sounds as though it could easily fall into those traps; it is the story of a man wrestling with new responsibilities and old secrets as his wife lies on her deathbed. It's in the playing that the film finds its flavor--in Payne's unique ear for dialogue and tone, and in the keenly felt performances, particularly a leading turn by George Clooney that is among his finest...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Grit gets delivered with panache as Dum Maaro Dum provides us with Bollywood's take on a crime drama. Rohan Sippy's film hits many of the right notes by stepping outside the boundaries that many Indian films place around themselves. This is a tightly paced, stylishly shot ensemble piece that has the good sense not to overstay its welcome.

Our tale revolves around the drug trade that has infected Goa. Apparently not all the tourists are there for just the sun and the sand. Some also want the jollies that are being provided by a number of gangs including those run by the Russians, the Nigerians, the British, the French and the local mafia. As you can see, the crime landscape is pretty crowded but thankfully there is one master criminal who helps keeps things organized. His name is Lorsa Biscuita (Aditya Pancholi) and he is a businessman at heart. If some of his ve...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2011 New York Film Festival

The group lives communally, on a farmhouse up in the Catskills. By day they work; everyone has their job, their place. At night, the men eat first, in silence, while the women sit tensely in the next room and wait for them to finish. Once the men are done, the women take their places at the table. They sleep several members to the room; the only one who gets a room of his own is Patrick (John Hawkes), the leader, though he insists, with false modesty, that the home belongs to all of them. And then early one morning, before anyone is awake, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) runs away.

What happens to her next, as she attempts to understand her time with the group and why it h...Read the entire review

If "The Tree of Life" is a full-course dinner of philosophy and emotional reflection, the sci-fi snoozer "Another Earth" is a particularly chewy intellectual amuse-bouche. A plodding melodrama concerning the effects of loss and the potential for soulful rebirth, "Another Earth" doesn't pursue its provocative ideas with any sort of narrative momentum. Instead, it's all dreary navel-gazing and cinematographic posturing hoping to wade into a profound philosophical bath, using the mysteries of the universe as a way to hypnotize an audience more likely to be annoyed by this story than entranced.

Bound by guilt after killing three people during a drunk driving accident as a teen, Rhoda (Brit Marling) has been released from prison, finding herself depressed and directionless. In the ...Read the entire review

"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" features a sensitive story of bittersweet separation, reportedly altered quite a bit from author Lisa See's original 2005 novel. A tale of patchy sisterhood and the circular patterns of betrayals and mistakes, director Wayne Wang has his hands full with melodrama and historical reflection, exploring China's foot-binding past while returning to the intricacies of Asian culture, which served him well in the 1993 hit, "The Joy Luck Club." Wang's also made perhaps the most flavorless, outright boring picture of 2011, breaking down the plot into tiny, inert pieces of meaninglessness.

When damaged soul Sophia (Gianna Jun) is badly hurt in a bike accident, word reaches old friend Nina (Li Bingbing), who rushes to the side of the unconscious woman, dis...Read the entire review

Many films, independent and otherwise, are brought down by a poor ending or an unbelievable plot twist, usually because the film in question has too much staked on these moments for their ineffectiveness or unbelievability to be overlooked. Another Earth has both of these elements, and yet it succeeds, because the film is built around resonant elements that are not inextricably tied to the film's plot or ending or direction. It is also a starmaking turn for lead actress and co-writer Brit Marling, who almost single-handedly holds the film together from beginning to end.

As one might guess from the title, Another Earth opens with the announcement that a planet similar to ours has magically appeared in the sky in the form of a tiny blue star. Over the course of several years, the blue star turns into a full-blown mirror image of Earth that hangs in the sky even during the day. (The story ...Read the entire review

"The Art of Getting By" is a decidedly formulaic motion picture, but it's reassuring to see writer/director Gavin Wiesen present some effort into combating the clich s, eliciting acceptable performances and a few relatable beats of teen malaise as the script follows a familiar path of self-discovery and the heartbreak of first love. It's a rickety picture, but one that captures a strong feel for city life and the reluctance of personal application.

With existential concerns and artistic impulses keeping his head out of his homework, George (Freddie Highmore) is losing ground at school, finding the academic effort unappealing despite pronounced concern from his principal (Blair Underwood). Into his life comes Sally (Emma Roberts), a popular girl who takes a shine to George's ou...Read the entire review

Terrence Malick's Tree of Life is an often-dazzling, frequently engaging, powerful spectacle. There are times when the movie grips the viewer with an unexpected intensity, as if Malick is pushing directly on emotional pressure points. At the same time, the film is frustratingly ethereal. To expect a movie like this to give the viewer easy answers or to hold their hand through many of the film's deeply abstract visual passages is unrealistic, but even gathering the film up in one's head is a nearly insurmountable challenge, with pieces from one part so disconnected from another, it's as if someone took several gorgeous, unique puzzles, shuffled them together, and asked the audience to try and form a single image.

The first 40 or so minutes are devoted to a history of the universe, shown essentially without comment, drifting through the birth of the universe and passing on through an era with di...Read the entire review

Writing about Terrence Malick's new movie, The Tree of Life, is a bit like trying to describe a particular segment of a backwoods stream--a beautifully lit and photographed segment of stream, mind you, but a stream nonetheless. The task is like living out the old Heraclitus quote about how you can never step in the same river twice. The water moves too fast, by the time you dip your toes in, it has moved on.

I also struggle with writing about it, because to do so, I feel like I will break the spell it has cast over me. The Tree of Life hasn't left my thoughts since I left the theatre. To do so is to also pretend that I got it, which I don't think I did--at least not entirely. My impressions at this point are shallow. To stick with the river analogy, I am maybe i...Read the entire review

Before anyone dares enter the cinematic realm of "The Tree of Life," this much must be emphasized: it's a Terrence Malick motion picture. The famously enigmatic filmmaker emerges from the shadows once again with this mystifying elegy, returning for his fifth motion picture since 1973. Malick doesn't work a whole lot, but when the man feels the urge to create, he doesn't screw around. A meditation on life, family, innocence, grief, and the origins of the universe, "The Tree of Life" is essentially Malick calling his shot, stepping up with Babe Ruth swagger to examine, you know, the meaning of life. And bless his no-publicity heart, he actually achieves a few tangible answers.

If there's a plot to "The Tree of Life," and that's open for debate, I suppose it would concern ...Read the entire review

I'm still processing The Tree of Life - still turning over its many ingredients, layers, and moments. The fact that it's been two weeks since the screening and my brain is still stewing means that the film is special and unusual. Yet I don't think I wholly enjoyed Terrence Malick's Palm d'Or-winning sixth feature.

The Tree of Life is everything and nothing - a moving masterpiece and a magisterial mess, gloppy with pretension yet riddled with some of the most jarring and memorable imagery ever committed to film. Good performances and bad dialogue live side by side in Terrence Malick's sixth and most maddening film, as do profound beauty and incoherent editorial choices. The crux of the movie's soulful confusion is that it is both a visionary cosmic sta...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is a taut, harrowing thriller that unfolds with palpable tension and nightmarish logic. It's an odd hybrid of backstage melodrama and psychological horror, anchored by two splendid supporting performances and Natalie Portman's best work to date. Aronofsky has never been our subtlest filmmaker, and his operatic tendencies occasionally get the best of him here. But generally speaking, the picture is scary, sexy, and terrific--a freaky mindfuck of the first order.

Nina (Portman) is a soloist with a New York ballet company; focused and intensely dedicated, she's itching for a spotlight in the upcoming season. The company's director Thom (Vincent Cassel, all oily brilliance) is opening Swan Lake--"Done to death, I know," he admits, "but not like this." The same could be said of the backstage intrigue that follows, which finds Nina ...Read the entire review

The Film:

Thomas McCarthy's films play in such a deliberately minor key, there is a danger--as you're watching them, anyway--of them flitting off into the ether. They dwell at an intersection of quiet drama and character comedy, easygoing and naturalistic, frequently amusing but short on big laughs (or the easy punch lines those big laughs so often require). It is always in retrospect that they gain they power; it's not until a few hours or days or even weeks later that you realize you're still thinking about the characters in a film like The Station Agent or The Visitor. That's how he works on you. His pic...Read the entire review

Writer/director Thomas McCarthy has made a name for himself through the delivery of rich characterizations, using formulaic plots to help establish the mood while developing three-dimensional personalities set loose inside a turbulent event of emotions. "Win Win" is generally more of the same from the filmmaker, though it suffers from a lopsided execution, struggling to stabilize dramatic footing with this fascinating group of lost souls. It's a pleasant film with marvelous performances, but it loses a great deal of stamina in the second half once McCarthy succumbs to predictability.

An attorney struggling to makes ends meet, Mike (Paul Giamatti) is losing his battle with stress, looking to keep his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) calm and deal with his job as coach of the local high s...Read the entire review