RECOMMENDED

Synopsis is the devil, but sometimes the devil is in the details. Here’s Tribeca Film’s synopsis of writer-director-actor-producer Edward Burns’ microbudget romantic comedy and fan letter to New York’s upscale Tribeca neighborhood, “Newlyweds”: “Buzzy (Edward Burns) and Katie (Caitlin FitzGerald) are a newly married couple living a seemingly conflict-free life. But when Buzzy’s damaged and impulsive half-sister Linda (Kerry Bishé) arrives at their doorstep expecting to stay for an indefinite period in their Tribeca loft, her antics threaten to disrupt the couple’s commitment to an ‘easy’ marriage.” Sounds like any romantic comedy, but it’s more like Woody Allen on a designer shoestring. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Xavier Durringer’s “The Conquest” (La conquete) is a perky, cheeky take on the rise of French President Nicolas Sarkozy from 2002-2007, featuring a fine turn by veteran comic actor Denis Podalydès as the wife-shedding social striver. Podalydès does a splendid job of typing the small, schlumpfy man’s apparent (and reported) well of arrogance. While there may be subtleties that were more apparent to the local audience, as well as the litany of scandals mentioned, Durringer’s approach is that of the boulevard comedy, of ready and amusing caricatures of politicos behind the scenes—a supremely foul-mouthed Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy as “the chirping magpie”—that beg the question whether it is a diminution of stature in politics or simple satiric instinct that makes such an acerbic portrait ring true. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!” is the promise made in the opening scene of Michel Hazanavicius’ soundly entertaining “The Artist.” Keen pastiche, the terrific new trifle by the maker of the “OSS 117″ spy spoof series, offers a “Singin’ in the Rain”-variety reassurance to the modern movie industry that its origins were joyous and true and good. To appropriate Jonathan Rosenbaum’s phrase, “Goodbye, cinema: hello, cinephilia.” Masses will be entertained, and rightly so. It’s not a feel-good movie; it’s A Feel Great Movie! Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Nothing more than felines. Vincent Bal’s 2001 beguiling Dutch family film, “Miss Minoes,” which won a Best International Feature nod from the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (2002), gets a worthy big-screen outing. Talking cats! But without rampant CGI and conga-line-scaled musical numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

What a generous goof! Contemporary digital-film technology contends that anything is possible: just imagine it, draw it, pre-viz it, throw a few football fields’ worth of computing power in a corporate terabyte farm and it is so! Your millions will come streaming back to you in satisfying increments over the course of your multiyear investment. Too many movies are demonstrating that just isn’t so. Weirdly, all the things that make the motion-capture animation of “The Adventures of Tintin” an almost unwatchable rush of half-baked slapstick and headlong “action,” work in contrary fashion in “Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” the first feature film directed by animation good-guy Brad Bird. Bird bends the physical world to the needs of the faux-physics of the self-aware decamillion-dollar action movie, working with the weft of spectacle and the possibility of an unlikely, but sudden snuff, but also the weave of kinetic potential of composition as surely as he did in “The Incredibles.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Young Adult” is as slim a character study as you can imagine, resting on the shoulders of a very game, very fine Charlize Theron.

This sly snapshot, written by Diablo Cody (“Juno”) and directed by Jason Reitman (“Juno,” “Up in the Air”) is a small watercolor of everyday Midwestern alienation with thirty-seven-year-old Mavis Gary, a ghost writer of a waning young-adult novel series with titles like “Fatally Focused” and “Galloping Toward Trouble,” living in a shabby cell of an apartment in a Minneapolis condo high-rise, surrounded by empty bottles of red wine and vodka, empty Ritz Cracker cartons, more vodka bottles, unreality television: the first words we hear as Mavis stirs to life in her gone-gray Hello Kitty t-shirt come from a TV soundtrack. “Kendra, you’re the most beautiful woman in the world.” Mavis looks tired, haggard yet only seconds away from being radiant. A few galumphing slugs of Diet Coke from the two-liter bottle, our anti-heroine’s day begins. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Fuckin’ Laurelwood.” A profane black comedy of mortification from brash writer-director-producer-editor James Westby, “Rid of Me” is an alarming send-up of small-town smuggery, anchored by a vivid performance by co-producer Katie O’Grady. Newly married Meris (O’Grady) moves to the Oregon hometown of her husband, Mitch (John Keyser) after his business fails, having no idea just how insular life will quickly become in Laurelwood. While Meris is a hopeful, awkward sort, she’s surrounded by unpleasant people, starting with her husband, who’s treating her badly on the road trip to their new apartment. Read the rest of this entry »

Kermit T. Frog, Amy Adams, Jason Segal

By Ray Pride

“The Muppets” wants to be the greatest Muppet movie of all time, but it’s more of a love letter from a stalker who may love just a little too much.

If you don’t have a well of childhood nostalgia for these characters, this first Muppet feature since 1999, and the first under Disney’s name, is going to be a slog. “The Muppet Show,” which viewers of a certain age may have watched repeatedly from the age of ten, comes from a generation of writers now in their seventies or older, who would have had fair acquaintance in their own lifetime of the music hall, burlesque and the panto, watching shows like Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” or Milton Berle. There was a legacy at work, this style of humor was in their bones and in episodes of the TV series, a style that co-writers Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller don’t replicate within their own generation. What was a language of self-mockery becomes a lingo of lame, and the ersatz Muppet behavior here finds them not so much lovable underdogs as self-serious sadsacks. Read the rest of this entry »

Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson

RECOMMENDED

Antiseptic yet endearingly lurid, shiny as a polished stone, Bill Condon’s first of two “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” movies is a couple degrees cooler than camp but at least warmer than the grave. The Oscar-winning writer-director (for the script of “Gods and Monsters”) approaches the material with more tongue-in-cheek, largely in line readings, than earlier directors confronting the sparkly vampires and doggie werewolf boys who surround its hard-crushing teen-girl protagonist Bella. It’s efficient filmmaking shot straight to the heart of its expectant target audience. Kristen Stewart’s nasal murmur, smaller and smaller beside Robert Pattinson, makes for a toothy tiny bride in brown-eyed contacts, blushing, barefoot. Eat, prey, turn? Marry, fuck, thrill? “You have to accept what is,” a character says, meaningfully meaningless. Read the rest of this entry »

George Clooney, Shailene Woodley

By Ray Pride

“The Descendants,” Alexander Payne’s first feature in six years, bookends with two exquisitely measured shots, and in conversation with each other, define what comes between.

The resolution I won’t mention in a review, but it resonates with a rare sense of both closure and completion to a tempest-tossed, frayed-nerve drama about family, responsibility, and legacy that reaches down generations. Read the rest of this entry »