To understand how memory is fluid, just ask two relatives to recall the same incident. More often than not, their recollections will have major discrepancies. Next, throw in more family members from different generations, and layer onto that a mealy mix of secrets; pretty soon a simple story turns into a Russian novel. That’s what […]
Author: Chris Barsanti
Love Is All You Need
Starting off your movie with a round of Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” is never promising, especially when the story features broken-hearted northern Europeans reconnecting with love down in sunny Italy. To be sure, Susanne Bier’s romance comes slathered in a certain kind of schmaltz. But she holds back at certain key moments, keeping her film […]
The Iceman
Pity the cast of Ariel Vromen’s dreckish and embarrassing hitman saga The Iceman. With a few exceptions (say, David Schwimmer, who can’t escape his character’s marked-for-death imbecility), the performers here take Vromen and Morgan Land’s screenplay about real-life assassin Richard Kuklinski quite seriously indeed. It’s understandable, since one does have to go to work with […]
In the House
Francois Ozon’s almost perfect comedy about a teacher obsessed with a student, who’s himself obsessed with a classmate, has a sneaking satiric soul dressed up in the pretty attire of a hothouse melodrama. It’s like a Lifetime original potboiler starched up by a postmodern literary theorist with a crackling wit and clockwork timing. The film […]
Ebert is Dead; Long Live Ebert!
It goes without saying that Roger Ebert, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 70, was America’s movie critic. It also goes without saying that there will never be another like him, especially not in these media-atomized times. No other critic was better known or (arguably) more listened to; at least as much […]
The Company You Keep
The ghosts of other, greater film whisper through Robert Redford’s stilted drama about sixties radicalism and millennial ennui, highlighting just how pat and unambitious an effort this is. This shouldn’t be a surprise coming from Redford, given that his directorial efforts (Quiz Show to The Horse Whisperer) have tended towards the lachrymose. What makes The […]
Blancanieves
It’s nice to see that in this time of “reimagined” childrens’ stories from Jack and the Beanstalk to Alice a filmmaker can import a classic tale into a brand-new template and retain the dreamy dark beauty and cruel logic (for none of those old stories were light-hearted in their original form) that always fascinated audiences. […]
Oz the Great and Powerful
Sam Raimi’s big and splashy but tin-eared prequel Oz the Great and Powerful turns the spirit of the 1937 The Wizard of Oz inside out. Oz is no longer the place where misguided Earth youths like Dorothy can discover how special home really is. This time, Oz — with its expensively imagined rainbow- and candy-colored […]
Repo Man
The scuzz-punk doom comedy of Alex Cox’s 1984 underground touchstone makes for a creepy visitation from a fracturing society. Released at the midpoint of the Reagan era’s celebration of suburban consumerism, it had a gutter-level view of Los Angeles’ bleached-out sprawl and social entropy. Its characters tend toward the feral: repo men who hunt the […]
Les Miserables (2012)
Some stories are so bulletproof that even a tuneless Russell Crowe can’t deliver a mortal wound. There are also some so prone to overwrought pathos that even a fearsomely committed Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, working every creative muscle in their bodies, can’t quite elevate to greatness. In Tom Hooper’s labor-of-love adaptation of the workhorse […]
This Is 40
In 2007’s Knocked Up — also known as the last funny movie Judd Apatow directed — Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) were the fractious married couple who served as a warning to the commitment-phobic Ben Stone (Seth Rogen). With This Is 40, Apatow makes the wildly unnecessary move of spinning them off into […]