Who are these beautiful, sharply dressed, slightly orange people gliding so effortlessly through a glittery, postcard-worthy version of New York in New Year's Eve? They're stars, of course, a galaxy of stars of varying luminescence. New Year's Eve is Garry Marshall's follow-up to last year's Valentine's Day, which he also directed, and like that film it uses its titular holiday as a ruthless star delivery system in which a menagerie of assembled celebs sprints through a collection of interconnected narrative threads that briskly accelerate from alleged comedy to syrupy sentimentality.
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Even though it's something of a slick mess, Madonna's W.E. is just the kind of movie you'd expect from an artist who once, with a delightful lack of irony, declared herself a material girl. A weirdly sympathetic portrait of Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom a king gave up his throne, W.E. is the story of a life told through stuff: Evening gloves, cocktail shakers, baubles from Cartier, little hats trimmed with netting. It's as if Madonna went back in time and forgot to talk to actual people, to find out how they lived and what they thought -- but she sure did a lot of shopping.
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Having begun his career as American independent film's great hope with delicate, languid features like George Washington and All the Real Girls, David Gordon Green has devoted the last few years to turning out goofball stoner comedies that, aside from their hip and very current casts, could seem like forgotten oddball '80s artifacts discovered in a box of dusty VHS tapes at a garage sale. While it's not a career trajectory anyone who went googly-eyed over his early output would have guessed for him, there's an unmistakable undercurrent of glee to these recent films that suggests Green -- who still works with many of the crew members with which he started, including composer David Wingo and DP Tim Orr -- is having a great time making exactly the type of movies he wants to.
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Perhaps it's fitting that talking about I Melt With You means talking about all the things it tries -- and fails -- to be. The story of a boom-and-bust weekend shared by four reuniting college cronies, I Melt With You is driven by music from its title on, setting the perennial crisis in middle-aged masculinity to glittery eighties beats. An industrial grade melodrama with more cuts than a pound of Bolivian marching powder, the movie aspires to all sorts of aesthetic heights -- from Reagan-era reckoning to Iron John implosion to feature-length video for a Jay McInerney cover band. That might make it sound like more fun than it is: Although a stark performative moment here and a cold, sexy shot there slip through, all of the film's lesser ambitions are undone by its most risible one -- to be serious, and thus be taken seriously.
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If I had been working as a film critic in 1968, I would have warned pregnant women against seeing Rosemary's Baby. Today I'd say the same thing about We Need to Talk About Kevin: You don't know what you might be getting when your little bundle finally arrives, and it's probably better not to think about it in advance.
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Some movies come directly to you, begging for your attention if not demanding it outright. And other movies sit still and quiet even as they hold out a hand, beckoning you closer until you've been drawn in almost in spite of yourself. Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy, an adaptation of John Le Carré's 1974 novel, is the latter type.
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Steve McQueen's Shame is perhaps mistitled: It's the story of a man who has sex more often than he probably wants it, though still not as often as he needs it, which is a pretty fine distinction to make. And the word "shame" by itself is too loaded, too inherently judgmental. The idea isn't that this character -- his name is Brandon and he's played, superbly, by Michael Fassbender -- is doing anything he ought to be ashamed of. It's simply that the shame he feels is nearly unbearable. Shame could have gone all wrong with the wrong actor. Luckily, McQueen has the right one in Fassbender, and that makes all the difference.
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Movies with multiple intersecting storylines aren't exclusive to Los Angeles, but it's a city for which they seem ideally suited, perhaps because it's one in which incidental contact with the lives of strangers is less common and therefore more weighted with meaning. (Or maybe it's just that L.A. has such an abundance of screenwriters sitting in coffee shops projecting potential narratives on passers-by.) Out of disparate threads we're meant to draw common themes or emotional resonances, from Crash's "everyone's a little bit racist" to Magnolia's ideas about loneliness and coming to terms with the past. Answers to Nothing, written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler (Dead & Breakfast), follows a group of linked lost souls navigating personal obstacles against the backdrop of a missing neighborhood girl, as they all come to discover that it's OK to be an awful person, as long as you don't tell anyone about it.
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When Australian writer-director Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty made its debut at Cannes last May, the responses among critics I talked to veered from bland outrage to vexed boredom. That doesn't leave a lot of middle ground, and I had to see Sleeping Beauty a second time before I was reasonably sure what I thought about it. I'm still not reasonably sure what I think about it: The picture is clinical in its approach and its technique, yet it leaves so many questions unanswered -- it's straightforward in a vague, maddening way. It's also strangely, obliquely compelling.
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It's dangerous to underestimate modern-day reinterpretations of Shakespeare, a la Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, not because Shakespeare necessarily needs to be modernized, but because it's astonishing how much retooling, rejiggering and restuffing he can withstand: His work is like a magic carpet bag that never gets filled up or worn out.
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There's something immobile at the center of The Lady, a kind of Botoxed biopic with an unlikely director -- Luc Besson -- manning the syringe. Technically, that something is the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi: Here the Burmese activist is played by Michelle Yeoh, who gets the already wearisome Shepard Fairey treatment on the film's poster, and seems to have attended the special edition stamp school of acting in preparation for the role. Almost to a scene, Yeoh is so still and serene she's practically submerged, her dialogue seeming to rise like beatific air bubbles that burst into tiny, untroubled smiles at the surface. Rather than ripple out -- and risk the suggestion of any small mercy of movement whatever -- Yeoh's performance forms a kind of undertow that pulls the surrounding story and characters into the hagiographic shallows, where they float like sea monkeys with better set dressing, blooping away about Burmese democracy.
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We rarely think of as great movies as breezy ones: Breeziness is supposedly only for disposable entertainment, though achieving filmmaking greatness in the way we normally think of it -- with impressive sets, heavy-duty acting and ultra-polished cinematography -- is probably easier than brushing a movie with just the right amount of gold dust. Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist is a gold dust movie, a picture whose very boldness lies in its perceived lightness. This is a silent movie in black-and-white, and if it were only that, it would be a pleasant novelty. But The Artist isn't a nostalgia trip, nor is it a scolding admonishment to honor the past. Instead, it's a picture that romances its audience into watching in a new way -- by, paradoxically, asking us to watch in an old way. The Artist is perhaps the most modern movie imaginable right now.
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There are some movies that have little or nothing to recommend them, except as a frame for a performance. My Week with Marilyn is that kind of movie. Based on writer and documentary filmmaker Colin Clark's memoir of the time he spent with Marilyn Monroe while working as an assistant to Laurence Olivier on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, My Week with Marilyn manages to be both slender and overworked, a picture that states over and over again, in the baldest terms, how emotionally fragile Monroe was. We know, we know already. My Week with Marilyn has a TV-biopic sheen, and you could dismiss it easily -- except for the fact that Michelle Williams, as Marilyn, both anchors the movie and upends it. Miss it and you'll miss one of the finest performances of this year.
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God help filmmakers who become legendary: Even if they manage to avoid becoming prisoners of their own high standards, there's no escaping those of their audience. And so Martin Scorsese has taken perhaps one of the biggest risks of his career -- bigger, even, than making a radiant, low-key movie about the origins of the Dalai Lama -- in adapting Brian Selznick's subtle and wondrous children's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret. You just know there's going to be some asshole at the dinner party asking, "Yes, but how does it compare with Taxi Driver?"
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To dispatch with the pleasantries and get straight to the but: Arthur Christmas favors the late-century style of computer animation that turns characters into smooth, plasticky dirigibles, adding a Made-in-China cello-skin to faces and scenery alike and vacuum-sealing the works for maximum digital freshness. I've never cared for the look -- if cartoons could be embalmed, that's how I imagine they'd be -- and in sharing a release weekend with a Muppets revival, the limits of Arthur's CGI puppeteering seem even more stark. That is of course, until you consider almost everything outside of my but -- which may well not be yours -- which is to say the near-total mitigation of aesthetic bummers with an avalanche of charm, wit, and enlivening, highly oxygenated performances.
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