Echoing the quandary my great, great grandfather, Shmuel the Philosopher, voiced when he asked, “Who’s to say what’s real?” filmmaker Richard Linklater takes truth and reality as entertainment to a whole nother level in “Bernie.” Loosely based on the circumstances revolving around a 1996 murder in Carthage, Texas, it is oddly charming…very oddly.
Explaining Johnny Depp’s niche in the film world, my daughter Erin, a promising player in the New York art scene, informed that the lead in Tim Burton’s “Dark Shadows” is an iconoclast for the masses. Joanne, her mother, my wife and a college professor, simply exclaimed, “I just want to see my Johnny.” My...
Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers,” a superhero answer to Kellogg’s Variety Pak featuring Captain America, The Black Widow, Iron Man, The Hulk, Hawkeye and Thor, is like a 4th of July celebration, except that its fireworks finale lasts about sixty minutes. This is mostly dessert with little main course, a cacophonous sugar rush of special...
Filmmaker Nicholas Stoller’s “The Five-Year Engagement” humorously and sweetly reminds that of all the folly we foment in this human existence, few pursuits are more profound with sheer, dizzying, bedeviling joy than love and marriage. ‘Tis the masks of comedy and tragedy put into full play by no less a wily director than Mr....
Director Lasse Hallström’s “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” reminds me how much I enjoy the regaling of someone’s passions. In this case it’s a rich sheik’s love for salmon fishing and the similarly enthused ruminations of the Scottish piscatorial expert who joins him in a venture that makes for one whale of a fish...
Dr. Halberstoddter, my favorite professor and mentor back at Olde Ivy Film Criticism College, would roll over in his grave if he read my review of the Brothers Farrelly’s “The Three Stooges.” I liked it. Not in the Facebook sense. But in the way we really liked Sally Field when she won the Oscar....
“American Reunion,” another paltry attempt to cash in on the raunch/nostalgia quotient set in motion by Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) and pals in “American Pie” (1999), is a typical example of the one hit wonder that spawns a successful franchise despite itself. It is solely for diehards and others who just can’t seem to...
A witty update of the Brothers Grimm rendition of “Snow White,” what director Tarsem Singh’s satiric paean lacks in pacing it nearly ameliorates via elegant design and topnotch production values. And even if Disney’s Sneezy and Co. have been replaced by a new gang, Julia Roberts’s watershed portrayal of the evil queen is still...
I’m baffled. I have followed Linsanity with rapt joy, agonized over where Messrs. Manning and Tebow would buy their next split levels, and was plum torn up when the Kardashian-Humphries nuptials fell apart. How then, I ask, did “The Hunger Games” phenomenon, now a theater-packing film by Gary Ross, totally fly under my radar?
Though one might initially add “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” to a list of films inspired by the recession, it isn’t economic cataclysm that has kept our title character ensconced in the comfort and security of his mother’s basement. Nope, it’s much more complex, a psychological conundrum the directorial Brothers Duplass tackle with mixed...
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