Wreck-It Ralph
Confirming that cooler (better) heads can prevail, Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph proves the House of Mouse’s wisdom beyond the financial to not only purchase Pixar outright, but to install Pixar’s Creative Director, John Lasseter, as the parent company’s Chief Creative Officer in 2006. Since then, the Disney which, just prior, had seen its rote attempts to duplicate a Little Mermaid here and a Beauty and the Beast there saw increasingly diminished results—both critically and commercially—has slowly begun to steer its trajectory back toward the Second Star to the Left.... read more
Skyfall
James Bond is the elder statesman of action movies, celebrating his 50th anniversary in film this year with the release of his twenty-third(!) feature, Skyfall. It goes without saying that adaptations of characters with such longevity should reflect the prevailing styles of entertainment and tastes of contemporary audiences … or does it?... read more
Festival of Lights
Writer-director Shundell Prasad explores the little-known Indo-Guyanese culture in her first feature, Festival of Lights. Through the story of a troubled teenage girl and her journey to discover her family’s history, Prasad tries to call attention to the larger socio-economic and political issues that displaced immigrants face in both the U.S. and other countries.... read more
The Flat
When Arnon Goldfinger’s grandmother Gerda passes away, he’s left with the task of cleaning out her flat in Tel Aviv. A Jewish couple who moved from Berlin on the eve of the World War II for obvious reasons, Gerda Tuchler and her husband, Kurt, filled their apartment with enough German novels, furniture and knick-knacks to disorient any houseguest. It was a move of physical necessity, so they brought their physical environment with them and created a European oasis in their new locale. But as Goldfinger begins to go through the stashes of photographs, letters and assorted paper stowaways, he finds... read more
The Black Tulip
When’s the last time you’ve seen a movie shot in Afghanistan? If you’re drawing a blank, you’re probably not alone. In the past decade, only a handful of films based on the Taliban have been released, and only a small selection of those films were actually shot on location. To even attempt to film a movie in Afghanistan risks death, so before any critiques are delivered, Sonai Nasser Cole’s latest film, The Black Tulip deserves respect on that front.... read more
Simon and the Oaks
Simon and the Oaks is a lot of things, but above all, it is too much. The film begins on a note of magical realism, then rolls through wartime struggles, familial conflict and growing pains. At times, it seems director Lisa Ohlin might pull off an emotional study of lives changing drastically during World War II. But by the end, it feels like a symphony in which no two instruments can play at once.... read more
A Liar’s Autobiography
Several years before his death in 1989, Monty Python member Graham Chapman recorded himself reading excerpts from his book, A Liar’s Autobiography, an ostensibly fictionalized account of his life. These recordings of his surreal, darkly comic work serve as the basis for this animated adaptation, in which Chapman and (most of) the other Python troupe voice themselves and various other characters. Directors Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett have amassed a number of animation houses to bring the different segments to life, each in a different style.... read more
Jack and Diane
A girl-on-girl werewolf flick may sound similar to a plot line for the ultimate guilty pleasure horror flick, but in reality Jack and Diane may be just a little too John-Mellan-campy for most viewers’ tastes. What starts off as your average New York City indie experiment with potential, takes a quick turn south when the Quay Brothers’ stop-motion graphics are juxtaposed and forced upon the story line. Stunning, sure, but it seems that perhaps writer-director Bradley Rust Gray ( Exploding Girl) wanted an excuse to work with the legendary team and wound up sacrificing the flow of his narrative for... read more
Smashed
Alcoholism kind of sneaks up on the heroine of Smashed. She never throws herself into drink to cope with depression or stardom or loneliness. She just goes about her routine of partying until she realizes that things have gone too far and have to change. The problem is, just because she recognizes the problem doesn’t mean her loved ones do.... read more
Butter
A movie concerned with the seemingly ridiculous world of butter carving may not sound like a smart, tear-jerking, must-watch political satire. Yet Jim Field Smith’s sophomore effort Butter is all of the above and more. Viewers will be as unsuspecting as one of the film’s lead characters, a sweet little girl who enters the Iowa butter carving competition unaware of the cutthroat, sex-crazed world that awaits. Smith offers a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of this beyond-bizarre environment, making Butter a terrific parody, as heartfelt as it is hilarious.... read more
The First Time
Jon Kasdan (son of Lawrence, brother of Jake) has crafted a smart, sensitive portrait of first love: the magic of it, the thrill of it, the awkwardness of it. Over the course of one weekend, high schoolers Aubrey (Britt Robertson) and Dave (rosy-cheeked Dylan O’Brien) meet, fall in love and have sex—to varying degrees of success. In the process, Kasdan both fabricates a fantasy (this is a romance, after all) and dismantles it, creating characters who are cute and articulate, altruistic and adventurous—a dream boy and girl—while exposing the reality of what it’s like to have sex for the first... read more
The Loneliest Planet
Writer/Director Julia Loktev made an auspicious fiction debut with Day Night Day Night, the story of a young, female, Times Square suicide bomber. While not exactly a sophomore slump, in The Loneliest Planet, her latest effort, the narrative stakes are much lower and her long camera takes don’t quite have the bite.... read more
The Other Son
With elections around the corner, candidates are reminding voters how important principles of faith and family have made them capable to lead. But what happens when the two are so much in conflict that you doubt your own identity? In The Other Son (Le Fils de Lautre), director Lorraine Levy shows a world where a shift in family can challenge and perhaps create a new kind of faith.... read more
Cloud Atlas
Within an innovative structure that toys with genre, the individual plots are mere sketches, each worthy of its own full-length script. read more
Pusher
In adapting Nicholas Winding Refn’s 1996 cult favorite Pusher, director Luis Prieto stays close to the original material. So close, in fact, that his English-language remake is essentially a scene-for-scene—sometimes line-for-line—transplanting of Refn’s story from the underworld of Copenhagen to its counterpart in London.... read more
Nobody Walks
From the outset, Ry Russo-Young’s Nobody Walks surges with sexuality. New York artist Martine (Olivia Thirlby in a cute pixie haircut) flies to Los Angeles to work on her experimental film and gets pulled into a hot make-out session before she even gets out of the parking lot. Turns out her partner is the guy she happened to sit next to on the plane. He’s giving her a ride, and although she doesn’t go all the way, it’s like she thinks—or he thinks, or they both think—that she owes him something, and sex is her currency.... read more
Yogawoman
It’s hard to pinpoint when yoga really took off, but sometime in the past decade, women started going to yoga like they were going to lunch or picking up the drycleaning. Studios began popping up like Starbucks in big cities, and suddenly there was such a thing as yoga apparel. Ironically—considering that for centuries, exclusively men practiced yoga—not just the followers were women, but the leaders were, too. The documentary Yogawoman, directed by theater producer and yogi herself, Kate Clare McIntyre, charts how female yoga teachers have transformed yoga into the popular hobby, expertise and lifestyle that it is now.... read more
Gayby
It’s the stuff of sitcom gold: girl and guy want baby, but they don’t want each other. Gayby is strikingly similar to a Will and Grace plotline that never materialized, following a pair of best friends aware that their time for parenting might soon pass them by. Jenn (Jenn Harris) is thankfully not as neurotic as Grace, but she is equally self-deprecating. She suffers under her overbearing boss at work and has no luck choosing male partners. Her best friend, Matt (Matthew Wilkas) is a sweet comic book nerd who also has no luck finding a male partner after an... read more
The Sessions
Hawkes is as wonderful as ever, physically transforming for the role by adopting Mark’s distinct nasal, little-boy voice and lying on a soccer-sized foam ball to achieve the character’s spine curvature. read more
War of the Buttons
Transplanted to 1944 Nazi-occupied France, Louis Pergaud’s 1912 Lord of the Flies-esque novel about a play war between the boys of two neighboring villages takes on metaphoric significance in this adaptation helmed by The Chorus’ Christophe Barratier. Classically styled with a sweeping score, dramatic crane shots and golden hues, War of the Buttons is adorable but sentimental, an earnest whitewash of a painful period during World War II.... read more
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