By Ray Pride

As I write, I am surrounded on three sides by books; one window looks out onto the horizontal play of snowfall. Inside it’s warm: books do furnish a room.

Ways of reading and ways of writing are shifting; that opening paragraph’s fourteen characters too long to Twitter. Whatever to do! From the cool hearth glow of computers and laptops, rampant idle bloggotry is committed every hour of the day and night. Everybody’s writing about movies even if no one’s making a remunerative career of it for the moment. Scanning these bookshelves, especially of the titles on film from past decades that seemed important enough to acquire, alphabetize and dust, I wonder how many tomes on the subject will be committed between covers, hard or soft, in coming years. The tacky tens: the decade when the listicle became literature!

For me, the year’s most important film book is “Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber” (Library of America, $40). Read the rest of this entry »

Top 5 U.S. Films
“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow
“The Limits of Control,” Jim Jarmusch
“A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen
“Two Lovers,” James Gray
“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Wes Anderson
—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films
“Summer Hours,” Olivier Assayas
“The Headless Woman,” Lucrecia Martel
“35 Shots of Rum,” Claire Denis
“You, the Living,” Roy Andersson
“Night and Day,” Hong Sang-soo
—Ray Pride Read the rest of this entry »

By Tom Lynch

50. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” Shane Black, 2005

49. “In America,” Jim Sheridan, 2002

48. “The Lives of Others,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006

47. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro, 2006

46. “Best in Show,” Christopher Guest, 2000

45. “Michael Clayton,” Tony Gilroy, 2007

44. “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan, 2008 Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Wes Anderson is seated at a table when I enter a conference room at the Peninsula Hotel and I immediately realize the room’s darkly patterned, deep green wallpaper matches Anderson’s green, narrow-wale corduroy suit, and almost as quickly realize he’s wearing, for a belt, a white polka-dotted green length of silk, mauve socks and Clark’s Wallabees. He’s less dressed than he is art-directed.

In his brisk, new stop-motion animated movie, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” adapted with his friend Noah Baumbach from Roald Dahl’s sour little novel, Anderson even invests his titular Vulpus Vulpus (voiced by George Clooney) with a tan corduroy suit patterned after an earlier one of his own. Strangely, it may be the most “Wes Anderson” of Wes Anderson movies: the level of control in the adventures of an animal trying to sustain family life is exacting, but with comic detailing in sets and behaviors that matches the goofball dialogue and the interpersonal dynamics. Read the rest of this entry »

John Jeffcoat’s feature debut, “Outsourced,” is a culture-clash office romcom rah-rah-for-us fairytale of small ambition and almost as much accomplishment. When Todd Anderson, the manager (Josh Hamilton, almost as bland as his character’s name) of a Seattle call center is relocated to India, all the obvious and predictable jokes are packed in his luggage to be unfurled over the next ninety minutes like fine raiment. (Cue vulgar Kama Sutra joke again and again.) While Ayesha Dharker brings some dignity to Asha, Todd’s immediate love interest, there’s not much to recommend unless you’re a fan of grating gags about contemporary customary service, toilet paper and weak stomachs. A movie like this makes the underappreciated complexities of Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” grow dearer in memory. Better to seek out docs on the topic like Ashim Ahluwalia’s “John & Jane Toll Free” or Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal’s “Bombay Calling.” 98m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Garth Jennings’ “Son of Rambow” takes the same rude clay as Michel Gondry’s “Be Kind Rewind” with much more fruitful results. In the case of “Rambow,” two English 11-year-olds in the early 1980s get the idea of remaking “Rambo: First Blood” out the wilds of their imagination. The two boys are marvelous casting coups, from Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), a member of a puritanical sect, whose first movie experience is a bootleg VHS of the Stallone-starrer he becomes obsessed with, and local bad-boy Lee Carter (Will Poulter), always identified by both names. Will Proudfoot! What a name, especially applied to Milner’s small pale bright eyes! This episodic, mildly sentimental tale has drawn comparisons to Wes Anderson and Jeunet-Caro, a more fruitful parallel to this joyful endeavor is “My Life as a Dog”: there’s genuine heart amid the prankish tomfoolery, and an overt homage to “Midnight Cowboy” is not misplaced. There’s Keatonesque comedy framing as well. The kids are beauties. It’s terrific when Jennings gets to them becoming “blood brothers” by a pond in a glade and in super-close shots of them we discover suddenly that the cheekbones of both are festooned with freckles. There are so many small, bright surprises it’d be a shame to give them away: this is one of those happy incidents I just like to point in the direction of and mouth the word, “Go!” (The early-1980s New Romantic music homages are giddy and knowing, to give away one bit of the fabric.) Jennings and longtime production partner Nick Goldsmith (who make videos under the Hammer & Tongs label and collaborated on “Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy”) are wonderfully aware of the goodness in naughty lads, prehensile geniuses in their splendid bloom. Plus footnotes to their own childhood experiences that glow in on-screen exaggeration. (Ray Pride)