David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is probably the most fun you'll ever have watching a movie about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud duking it out -- and nurturing a deep-rooted but fragile friendship -- in early 20th century Austria and Switzerland. In fact, when I first saw Viggo Mortensen done up in his trim little Freud beard, I nearly laughed out loud -- not because he looked ridiculous, but because he looked so right. Mortensen has become one of Cronenberg's go-to guys in recent years, and you can see why: Even in a period film like this one -- a picture that runs the heavy risk of being ponderous and stiff -- he can slip himself into the scenery with a "Don't mind me, here in my Sigmund Freud getup" naturalness.
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Can something be considered fan fiction if it's also an official, canonical studio product? I'm going to argue yes, absolutely, because with The Muppets, Jason Segel has crafted what can only be described as the most extravagant work of fan fiction ever, Mary Sue-ing himself into the Muppet universe as a character who helps reunite the gang in order to save their old theater and the day. Segel, who co-wrote the film with Nicholas Stoller, even leaves his own tentative mark on Jim Henson's beloved ensemble by inserting a personal addition in the form of alter ego Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), his character's Muppet brother and the group's most devoted fan even when the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about them. Fandom can be a precarious thing -- someone's devotion to the source material he or she is adapting to screen can sometimes lead to being too cautious with it, too respectful to do what's best for the movie instead of only for the hardcore supporters. But the love Segel has for the Muppets is a genuine, perceivable and positive quality that suffuses this good-hearted revitalization of the franchise, and if some wish fulfillment sneaks in there too, it seldom gets in the way of the enjoyment to be had.
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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part I is such a departure from the previous three Twilight pictures that you could almost consider it a rogue offshoot. Director Bill Condon steers the franchise away from visions of wan, suffering teens and fake-fur werewolf tussles and brings it closer to -- if not necessarily close to -- something resembling human adult sexual obsession and its attendant responsibilities and anxieties. It's like Jules and Jim for the Tiger Beat set.
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Rid of Me, James Westby's scrappy dramedy about marriage, divorce and finding your inner punk rocker, begins with an act that makes flipping someone off or putting a brick through a windshield look passé. It takes place in a grocery store, and is the kind of ballsy, juvenile and legitimately shocking gesture that indie films used to chase after because studio features would never dare. These days the division between the two realms is fuzzy at best, but this film, which premiered earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival, recalls when a little roughness in form and content was part of the charm.
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Alexander Payne's The Descendants has just about everything you need for a male midlife-crisis movie, and more: A big plot of unspoiled family land about to be sold off to developers, sullen teenagers, a wife in a coma. Payne, in his first full-length feature since his 2004 apologia for spoiled wine snobs Sideways, pulls out all the stops, including casting George Clooney, an actor who's aging beautifully but who nonetheless, thankfully, has allowed himself to look his age.
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Australian director George Miller's Happy Feet was one of the surprise pleasures of the 2006 moviegoing year. The story was simple: A young Emperor penguin who has no skill for singing, a necessary skill in wooing a mate, discovers instead that he has a flair for dancing. The picture was fanciful and breezy and, particularly for a big-budget animation feature, showed a wonderful lightness of touch. And it didn't hurt that Savion Glover choreographed the dance moves of the main character, a chubby, awkward-elegant little guy named Mumble, voiced by Elijah Wood.
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As a general rule in the movies, dysfunction is better offered as a side dish rather than a main course, accenting what's really a story of grieving and letting go, or coming of age, or self-acceptance. Screaming, crying, acting out and mistreating others are tougher to take when they're the primary focus instead of symptomatic of something deeper to be excavated and explored.
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First-time director Joshua Leonard's The Lie stretches the truth of its source material -- an obsidian fragment from author T.C. Boyle, published by the New Yorker in 2008 -- until its every glint is polished to a self-affirming glow. There's a dark crackle to Boyle's first-person account of a young man compressed to the point of fracture by the drudgery of his work as a tape logger at a film production house and the shackling disappointment of his domestic lot: He has a law student wife and an infant at home. Unable to face another day at the digital mine, the young man's avoidant, off-white fibbing gives way to an inky whopper, and his sins soon yield a shopping bag full of money. If two decades of Coen brothers movies have taught us anything, it's this: As good as a gun, that thing's going to go off.
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Céline Sciamma's film is titled Tomboy, but the gender issues it delves into are more complex than any supposedly unfeminine preferences for sports and pants-wearing and other associations that linger around that antiquated term.
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There's something almost endearing about the creakily lo-fi quality of 11-11-11, the latest feature from Darren Lynn Bousman, director of Repo! The Genetic Opera and _Saw_s II-IV. The film has the feel of something conceived and whipped together in very little time, perhaps to make its own built-in deadline. It struggles with big ideas -- about the apocalypse, the changing nature of faith and, of course, how a certain date allows for the passage of possibly demonic beings between the worlds -- that it can't possibly accommodate on its small scale. It's a film with maybe a dozen speaking parts and supernatural beings that are clearly dudes in black robes wearing rubber masks that nevertheless tries to suggest seismic spiritual changes are afoot, thanks to the events it chronicles in a beach house in Spain (a country from which I can only assume the film received funding, as there's no other reason for it to be set there and the travel opens up problematic time zone questions).
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As cool-looking, dumb and deadly serious as you could desire, Immortals openly aims to be the heir to 300, and succeeds in at least being a reasonable facsimile that hits many (too many) of the same testosterone-driven beats. The battles are just as imaginatively bloody, the abs painstakingly chiseled, the dialogue tin-eared, only this time around the stakes are not just the fate of the historic(esque) world, but of the divine one as well. There are gods in this film, beautiful, gold-cloaked ones who watch worriedly from atop Olympus as Greece is overrun by the armies of the wicked King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), a man who wants nothing less than to bring about the destruction of their divine order, though they're forbidden to interfere in the world of man for...oh, who knows why? Also, it's in 3-D -- dark, dark 3-D I'd avoid if given the option.
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I'm sure there are more exciting things in life than watching Colin Farrell, dressed in a sleek, dark suit, weave through the streets of London behind the wheel of a saucy black convertible, the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul" rumbling on the soundtrack. But as random weekend movie pleasures go, I'll take it: Farrell is the star, and the unassuming center, of William Monahan's nervy, noir-inflected thriller London Boulevard.
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Despite all of the grumpy and/or gleeful speculation that arose around the internet when it got its first glimpse of Adam Sandler donning a wig and falsies to play his own awkward twin sister, Jack and Jill is not actually the worst movie of all time. Given other recent efforts from Sandler's Happy Madison production company, most notably Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, it'd be hard pressed to even compete for the title of worst of the year. The film, directed by longtime Sandler collaborator Dennis Dugan and written by Steve Koren, presents an at least theoretically standard mix of slapstick, celebrity cameos and not-quite-winking sentimentality. It's sometimes funny, but more often it's just very strange and threaded through with hostility -- at one point, during a montage that involved Jill repeatedly accidentally injuring a myopic Mexican grandmother at a picnic, the colleagues on either side of me leaned in separately to whisper, "What is happening?"
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Lars von Trier's Melancholia is neither the provocation nor the yowl of anguish that his last picture, Antichrist, was. For those reasons, it's less effective and also far less of a workout: Antichrist was the first von Trier movie I genuinely loved, after a decade's worth of railing against the sufferdome atmosphere of pictures like Dogville, Dancer in the Dark, and even the mildly bearable Breaking the Waves. Antichrist stunned and upset me, but it also filled me with compassion toward the man who made it, a feeling I'd never imagined I could have. The gift of Antichrist -- with its horrific depictions of emotional suffering, its wailing-wind subtext of "Nature is everywhere, inside you and outside, and it is not your friend" -- was that von Trier had surprised me. That is a critic's greatest pleasure -- or at least it's mine.
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As Lily Tomlin's Ernestine once said, "There's nothing like a Hoover when you're dealing with dirt." Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar could use more dirt: This is a sensitive, sympathetic portrait of a scummy little man, an earnest attempt to map the contours and contradictions of a complicated son-of-a-bitch. But it's all too earnest, to the point of serving, unwittingly or otherwise, as an apologia. Even Eastwood's attempt at a poignant Hoover death scene fails to hit the mark: I for one would want to stick the guy with a pin to make sure he was really dead.
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