It’s fitting that Len Wiseman’s “Total Recall” remake features a gigantic robot army, given that his films have always demonstrated the bare minimum level of interest in actual people. That’s why Wiseman was a particularly poor choice for adapting Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 masterpiece about a man who discovers that his memories are false and he’s […]
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Benoît Jacquot’s “Farewell, My Queen” tells a familiar story–the downfall of Marie Antoinette at the beginning of the French Revolution–but it does so from a perspective through which the events are rarely considered: that of a servant within Versailles. Adapted from a novel by the French historian Chantal Thomas, the film would function splendidly on
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Anyone who has ever harbored the aspiration of becoming a film director will have a hard time not being blown away by Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild” as it rolls through the projector gate. Even though the first credit on the movie states that it was made by Court 13, a collective of
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Todd Solondz’s films are trips into abysses of intense misery, seriously disturbing examinations of lower-middle-class suburban despair. Almost irreverently infused with shocking dark humor and achingly unsentimental, his better works are beautifully strange pieces of filmmaking, aggressively painful stories that manage to feel profound even as they resemble rides through an emotional hell. Then there’s
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It’s hard to deny that an insidiousness permeates Christopher Nolan’s Batman series, and not just because of the real life unpleasantness that has transpired offscreen. “The Dark Knight Rises” is almost unbearably grim, a tangle of frayed nerves and cultural angst. The fiery and destructive imagery of the ad campaign symbolizes Batman’s rebirth, but could
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In promotional interviews, filmmakers frequently talk about making so-called “personal” movies, but rarely do moviegoers feel the tangible presence of this vague, mildly self-important adjective in the films themselves. Mathieu Demy’s “Americano” is another story; while not autobiographical, it could not more clearly be the work of its maker. Demy’s approach is not simply an
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In order for an “intertwining stories”-formatted ensemble film to succeed, it must offer engaging characters and/or a compelling overarching thesis to unite each segment. As if all his creative juices were expended on last year’s masterwork “Midnight in Paris,” which achieved both feats, writer/director Woody Allen accomplishes neither in “To Rome with Love,” a turgid,
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One of the most valid critiques of the mumblecore movement is that its stories lack universality — that they speak specifically to hipster audiences in their late 20s and early 30s who share a sense of directionless-ness with the characters, as if said characters have nothing in common with any other demographic. The major exception
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This is the Oliver Stone I like. In recent years, the famously intense, quasi-loony auteur has produced one oddity after another, from a big budget catastrophe (“Alexander”) to a saintly solemn portrayal of 9/11 responders (“World Trade Center”) to a schizophrenic hit-piece on President 43 (“W.”). None of them reached the thematic highs of “Platoon,”
When doing press for comic book movies, directors and actors almost always claim that they counted themselves as diehard fans of the source material long before they signed on to the lucrative task of adapting it for the screen. While this is likely more often than not a lie, Mark Webb was clearly telling the
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