On the bus home from a night out at a lesbian club, Fort Greene teenager Alike (Adepero Oduye) swaps her tomboyish outfit for earrings and a pink t-shirt, something clearly not of her own choosing, something selected to appease her mother. Alike is 17 and closeted, at least at home. Her mom Audrey (Kim Wayans) is uptight, religious and almost quivers with the effort of seeing her daughter as she wants her to be and not as she actually is. While Alike's closer to her father Arthur (Charles Parnell), a cop, he's chosen to step back from the tensions at home and in his marriage. Liking boys and makeup comes naturally to her younger sister Sharonda (Shamika Cotton) -- our heroine is alone in her own personal form of camouflage, trying to blend into the background wherever she goes.
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In 2005, when Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published, Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times Book Review, summed up the book's "grand ambition" this way: "To take on the most explosive subject available while showing no passion, giving no offense, adopting no point of view and venturing no sentiment more hazardous than that history is sad and brutal and wouldn't it be nicer if it weren't." Kirn couldn't, at that point, have seen Stephen Daldry's film adaptation of the book. But with that sentence, he pretty much wrote the review in advance.
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Steven Spielberg's War Horse is masterly, accomplished, stirring, a real bang-up, show-off job -- and watching it, I kept wishing it had been made by someone else, someone younger who hasn't already proved dozens of times, beyond the point of redundancy, how much he cares about what he puts on the screen.
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In the Land of Blood and Honey isn't actually Angelina Jolie's first film as a director -- that distinction goes to A Place in Time, a little-seen 2007 documentary showcasing life in different locations around the globe at the same moment, shot with the help of some of her famous friends, including Djimon Hounsou and Anne Hathaway. But like that film, Jolie's narrative debut arrives surrounded by a halo of good intentions and the sense that celebrity is being used as the spoonful of sugar to make the didacticism go down.
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Cameron Crowe can be a big old cheeseball, but he's never been a filmmaker to come across as cynical or calculatedly manipulative. That's one of the reasons We Bought a Zoo doesn't leave your heartstrings feeling brutally manhandled, despite being a treacly tale about how a widower in search of a fresh start buys and moves to a struggling animal park with his two beautiful, sad children. The other reason is Matt Damon, who underplays the role of still-grieving dad Benjamin Mee as much as possible and brings an edge of genuine frustration to his relationship with his teenage son Dylan (Colin Ford). Though overall the film's still as honey-toned as the golden sunshine that slants through most of its scenes, the occasional glimpse of a rough human edge means this isn't just an exercise in mawkishness, though it's also nowhere near as emotionally resonant as it strives to be.
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Now that everyone has grown tired of touting the allegedly thrilling promise of 3-D, we may have some chance of figuring out exactly what its future might be. While I still think 3-D is almost less than a gimmick, I've come to think that its real promise lies not in big-budget filmmaking along the lines of The Adventures of Tintin or even a picture as wonderful as Hugo, but in the hands of directors working on a more modest scale who simply have a good idea and a spark of enthusiasm for the medium. Wim Wenders has brought that spark to a rather unlikely subject, the late German modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch. For years, Wenders and Bausch, longtime friends, had been working on a movie together. Bausch died suddenly in 2009, at age 68, and Pina is Wenders's tribute to her, less a strict documentary than a heartfelt -- and visually gorgeous -- celebration of Bausch's work and her mode of working.
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All of the characters in Albert Nobbs, a mild and mildly stirring adaptation of the George Moore short story, are dreamers. Employees in a mid-19th century Dublin inn, they dream of each other, chiefly, and the ways in which they might be set free. They deceive each other, as well, so that their dreams are often projected onto false fronts -- of character, of obligation, and -- in a couple of cases -- of tightly bound breasts.
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There are times when too much of a good thing and not enough meet halfway and settle into a comfortable middle ground. That's the case with Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin, which would be better if it had been made using more traditional animation techniques rather than that performance-capture nonsense and if 3-D weren't one of its big selling points.
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American versions of foreign films are almost always put in the position of having to swagger onto the scene, justifying their existence almost before they even exist. But when news hit that David Fincher was making a Hollywood version of Stieg Larsson's explosively popular novel Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I didn't hear anyone breathe a sigh of regret; the mood seemed to be one of cautious anticipation.
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Romance! Jealousy! Temptation! There's an alluring new stranger vying for Sherlock Holmes's attentions and affections in Guy Ritchie's turn-of-the-century sleuthing sequel, A Game of Shadows, but it's not the dark and beautiful gypsy woman at the center of Holmes's latest mystery. For that matter, Holmes's on-again, off-again ladyfriend Irene Adler doesn't truly have his heart, either. It's BFF and hetero life partner Dr. Watson who forms the tale's real love triangle with Holmes -- escalating the first film's bromantic undercurrent of mutual admiration and "circumstantial homosexuality" to overt, unabashed man-love and dangerous attraction -- with tantalizingly evil interloper Professor James Moriarty.
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The billion-dollar Alvin and the Chipmunks film franchise, which turns three this Christmas with Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, is not coy about its M.O., which as far as I can tell is providing a delivery system for highly choreographed chipmunk karaoke. I guess the nut hasn't fallen all that far from the tree: Before they were an animated television series, The Chipmunks were a 1950s kitsch "band" with several No. 1 novelty hits. If the characters' looks and attitudes have been tweaked over the years, The Chipmunks have remained hellishly devoted to reflecting the popular appetites of the time.
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Director, producer and distributor Roger Corman's world seems suspended between magnetic poles: At true north he could be described as the godfather of independently produced and independent-minded film; way down south is the Corman who looks more like the godfather to Don Simpson, a crude flipper of hot cake flicks who originated the high concept, sensation-pummeling mainstream cinema we're stuck with today. Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, director Alex Stapleton's annotated filmography of the filmmaker's wildly tentacular career, is less an attempt to reconcile those poles than to show how neatly and necessarily they are bound together, by both the financial nature of filmmaking and the stubborn question of taste.
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In Roman Polanski's Carnage, two couples square off in a 4-way -- or is it a 48-way? -- skirmish involving parenting issues, class resentment, the self-centered nature of our society, and both sexual politics and the other kind. This is a drawing-room comedy set in what just may be one of the outer circles of hell: The well-appointed (but just shabby enough) Brooklyn apartment of a persnickety couple who advertise their liberal ideals perhaps more obviously than they practice them. These two insufferable individuals are meeting with a matched set of same, the perhaps better-heeled (and equally smug) parents of a boy who struck their son with a stick, knocking out a tooth or two in the process. By the time each of these mini-nightmare characters has had a swing at each of the others -- and by the time one of them has vomited on a valuable art book -- the permutations of animosity and indignation have multiplied into an algebraic equation of headachey proportions.
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What does it take to revive a passion for one's work, years on, whether said vocation is saving the world or churning out sequels in a blockbuster franchise? How does one reclaim human contact in today's isolating, gadget-dependent world? These are questions IMF agent Ethan Hunt and his portrayer Tom Cruise face in Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol, Cruise's fourth outing in the spy series, directed entertainingly enough by Pixar veteran Brad Bird. If the hoodied Cruise evokes a touch of Eminem-level moodiness in the posters, it's with good reason: Stopping a maniacal supervillain may be on the docket yet again, but this time around Ethan Hunt has gone emo.
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I don't pretend to be a feminist or even understand feminism beyond accepting the fundamental concept of gender equality. That has always seemed straightforward enough, despite the vagaries and complications evident in myriad cultural examples from Michele Bachmann to Margaret Cho to Diablo Cody, the stripper-turned-scribe whose three produced screenplays to date -- Juno, Jennifer's Body and this week's Young Adult -- make up some of contemporary cinema's rangier ruminations on feminism. Or at least what I think is feminism.
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