The Change-Up is a studio hybrid both so advanced and so primitive it defies parsing. Partly derived from the old Freaky Friday switcheroo comedy, partly bent on what feels like the pre-Enlightenment theme of men fretting over whether to live selfishly or with personal and social responsibility, it's post-Hays code, state-of-the-art obscenity mingled with the pre-feminist option of treating women as problems against which a man's life is defined. If Philip Roth and Ivan Reitman had a celluloid baby? Does it come from the future? Or did its everything-and-nothing-ness lower from the sky in a toxic, crowd-sourcing cloud? Have we burned our gender constructs so far into the ground they now have to be taught to us by soullessly motivated filmmakers beholden to brainless focus testing?
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Plenty has been written about the novelistic pleasures of long-form television: Making your way, episode through episode, of a series like The Wire or Treme isn't so different from the way American readers waited on the docks for the latest installment of Dickens to come in, needing to know if Little Nell died or not. Long movies can offer that same kind of narrative luxuriousness -- except so few people make four-hour-plus movies, especially today. That's what makes Raúl Ruiz' Mysteries of Lisbon -- which clocks in at four and a half hours -- both a novelty and a treat. It takes a certain amount of discipline to watch a picture like that in one go, but that's part of the fun. It's like stretching a muscle you'd forgotten you had.
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Sometimes a movie's social conscience is better expressed through the faces of its actors than through its words. That's the case with The Whistleblower, in which Rachel Weisz plays an American police officer who takes a job as a peacekeeper in postwar Bosnia only to learn that keeping any nominal notion of peace is impossible: She discovers that the area is rife with human trafficking, and that contractors working under the auspices of the United Nations and the State Department are directly involved.
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Ken Kesey felt that the novel was no match for what was happening around him in 1964. After rising to literary prominence with his debut, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in 1962, Kesey wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, a union-busting saga set in an Oregon logging town. Due in New York for the book's publication, which coincided with the World's Fair happening there, Kesey decided to make an event of the trip, and to document the proceedings with a creative instrument more suited to the quickening times: A 16-millimeter camera.
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Crazy, Stupid, Love. is, for the most part, an effective love story, but the two figures in thrall to one another aren't the ones you think: The magnetism between the movie's two male stars, Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling, is what really makes the movie tick. The women -- and we're talking about women like Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei and coltish relative newcomer Annaleigh Tipton -- almost function as accessories, although, as wonderful as these actresses are, that still isn't necessarily a liability. Everyone in Crazy, Stupid, Love. is served well by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's crisp, intelligent direction. Their instincts keep the story moving deftly; if only, right at the finish line, the movie didn't suffer from a giant failure of nerve.
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A not-uncommon prologue: Miranda July drives me crazy, in the best and worst ways. Whether I'm watching her films, reading her stories, or taking a crack at her various, Web-documented performances pieces, I can't seem to get off the fence. I want to get off the fence. I want it so badly that attached to every primary response -- every swing across the fence and back again -- I experienced while watching The Future, the plangent follow-up to her 2005 feature debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, was the secondary desire to shoulder-pin myself there, if only for clarity's sake. What seems most difficult to accept and so tremendously inconvenient to her appeal is that the talking cat -- or whatever other of her grindingly earnest narrative totems -- is not negotiable; it's not even regrettable. If you want Miranda July, you want the talking cat.
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For those weary of parsing which part of the post-Dirty Harry, post-Tarantino cops and robbers homage is demonstrating its fondness for the genre and which is just declaring it, writer and director John Michael McDonagh's The Guard is more exhausting than entertaining. Ideally one would have better things to do while in the act of watching a movie -- like say watching the movie -- but from its assaultive, nihilistic prologue to its last flat invocation of American culture, The Guard foregrounds the extent to which it is leaning on artifice and affect to get over.
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The gangster fairy tale is transplanted into a Baghdad palace -- or is it the other way around? -- in The Devil's Double, the story of the Iraqi man induced into service as a double for Uday Hussein, the notorious, psychopath son of Saddam. Director Lee Tamahori has built an undeniably sleek, action-driven vehicle -- the film begins with a town car convoy racing through the Iraqi desert and ends with a shootout in a Porsche -- so much so that the question of who's zoomin' who extends to the story's flashy framework. If the dynamic that develops between Uday and Latif Yahia (whose memoir is the film's putative source) were better defined, or Gulf War-era Iraq drawn in as something more than backdrop, the balancing act may have worked in Tamahori's favor. As it is, The Devil's Double, a handsome and occasionally dazzling thriller with at least one dynamo performance from its star, is ultimately dominated by its style.
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The bartender at my favorite local saloon knows what I do for a living, and so on one of my recent excursions to his own workplace, he asked, "Hey, seen The Smurfs yet?" I replied affirmatively. "And? Should I go?" Well, I told him, it depends.
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Attack the Block stems from an intriguing, clever idea: What if the neighborhood thugs you hope not to encounter on your walk home from the subway turn out to be the very people who save the Earth from alien invaders? The problem is that writer-director Joe Cornish -- a cohort of Edgar Wright's, and, along with Wright, one of the writers of Steven Spielberg's upcoming The Adventures of Tintin -- doesn't take the idea quite far enough: He begins to explore some pretty complex racial and class issues, only to let them drift out of his grasp. The picture's finale isn't as smart as it ought to be. Cornish tries to make a damning social statement, but the only thing you take away from the movie is how cool it is to kick alien ass.
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The B-movie marquee title of Cowboys and Aliens suggests a picture that's more irreverent, imaginative, and fun than the turgid movie that stands behind it. Rather than goosing the Western and sci-fi genres into the ring for a showdown, Jon Favreau's follow-up to the Iron Man franchise takes a pretty radical structural shortcut: Replace the Indians in a classic, mix-'em-up Western with jacked-up, gold-greedy aliens. What's most disappointing about the raucous but ultimately cumbersome result is the feeling -- which only progresses as the improbable posse at the center of the film closes in on its intergalactic enemy -- that Cowboys and Aliens may just as easily have been Cowboys and Zombies, or Werewolves, or Wall Street Time Travelers Venturing into the Past for Capital.
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As we near the end of a summer season stuffed to bursting with big, ambitious comic-book movies -- from the buffed, Wagnerian pecs of Thor to the pompous clutter of Green Lantern -- here comes Captain America: The First Avenger, limping behind the rest of the parade. The picture is almost admirably boring, as if director Joe Johnston (The Wolfman, The Rocketeer), had wanted to distinguish his movie by not packing it with action, or even bothering much to define the characters. It's a lopsided experiment that might have worked -- the movie takes so long to get going, you're fooled into thinking it might be going somewhere -- but Captain America just doesn't have the stuff. Like its lead character, it's 4F for sure and desperately hoping to hide it.
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The idea of romantic comedies is that you want to see the two leads get past all their false starts and misunderstandings and get together. But what happens if you just don't care? Scratch that: What happens if the leads in question are Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis and you still don't care?
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What's daring about The Myth of the American Sleepover, a modest, untroubled elegy for the passages of middle-American youth, is as straightforward as it is uncommon. Working within a well-worn format -- the hometown coming-of-age drama -- the effect of feature-debut writer and director David Robert Mitchell's intensely personal attention to tone and the flow of emotional currents is one of negative exposure, a setting of the genre into a stark and original relief. Conspicuous among his choices was to set and shoot the film in his native suburban Michigan and give it a largely local, unknown cast, several with twanging accents intact. The girls are built as girls that age tend to be -- with variety, but tending toward awkwardness -- and the boys are as small and reedy as we rarely remember them to be. In other words, it looks more like your teenage world than such films generally allow, and it's not pretty. It's beautiful.
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A mindbending darling of this year's Sundance Film Festival, Another Earth arrives in theaters this week on a wave of laurelled adulation for its contributions to the cinema of science. And it's true -- there is a lot of science to be parsed and digested, to say nothing of the It-Girl phenomenon of leading lady/co-writer Brit Marling. That's all fine and good, except that there's not quite enough art.
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