The notion of a haunted house is almost quaint to those who live in big cities, where there is barely room -- literally and spiritually -- for their own lives, much less the legacy of those that came before. Apartments especially turn over every couple of years instead of once a generation. The inflections of essentially temporary living are beyond what we can be conscious of, and meaningful consideration of the narrative history of one's present, private habitat is among the many things omitted for space. Eleanor Roosevelt's Union Square crash pad got a plaque, it's true, but Bobby Fischer grew up in a building down the Brooklyn block from where I'm sitting now, and you'd never know it to pass by.
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Editor's note: This review may contain spoilers, particularly for those who haven't read the books.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 was an in-between moment of a movie, a picture that left many fans of this most unusual movie franchise -- not to mention the books they're based on -- feeling adrift and forlorn. By necessity, it was only a story half-told: Adapting the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling's series required splitting the story into two parts. Now, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves guide the story to a graceful and satisfying end. The movie's final moments are the equivalent of the half-jubilant, half-mournful thrill you get when you close the cover of a book you've savored.
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Errol Morris's Tabloid isn't quite as juicy as its title might lead you to believe, but it does tell a suitably twisted, outlandish tale: In 1977 Joyce McKinney, a North Carolina-born beauty queen who'd been ditched by her Mormon boyfriend -- he "disappeared" because he'd been called on his mission -- trekked to England to snatch him from the clutches of his church.
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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a nice little story about two women -- or, rather, two sets of women living some 180 years apart -- who vow "eternal commitment" and frequently stare at one another with dewy adoration. To invoke Pauline Kael's review of Diane Kurys's Entre Nous, it's about two women not having a lesbian affair.
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Sweet as anything and just as slender, the new Winnie the Pooh movie features no adjustments, adjuncts, or fancy add-ons in its title. It's not called Winnie, Pooh, Winnie the Two, or The New Winnie the Pooh Movie. It's Winnie the Pooh to you, and in the desperate age of "re" -- rejigger, reconstitute, reboot, remember to send your accountant a meat-of-the-month club membership -- that means a lot.
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A small story is laid out in broad, biblical terms in Life, Above All, a ye-who-is-without-sin parable set in contemporary, AIDS-stricken South Africa. Director Oliver Schmitz takes great and often very photogenic pains to indict the shame and secrecy attached to the epidemic that has made South Africa the country with the highest incidence of HIV infections in the world.
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The Ward, John Carpenter's first directorial effort in 10 years, is not an ideal hiatus-buster. The premise itself -- a psych ward for young women is the site of a killing spree -- is somewhat pre-Carpenter, and the toe-dip into torture porn feels a little desperate. But his budget-blond lead, B-movie mistress Amber Heard, is well-chosen, and the combination of an excellent supporting cast and a pliable theme work to offset the sizable debits incurred by the often rote direction and seriously iffy ending.
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A possible calculus for Kevin James films: The more pathetic his typically schlubby, confidence-challenged character, the bigger the cash-grabbing cojones behind the production. Consider the audacity of calling Zookeeper -- James's latest interminable march through the crudest possible gestures toward character, conceit, and comedy -- a movie. This "story" of a middle-aged zookeeper (James) trying to win back his status-obsessed ex (Leslie Bibb) with the help of the cheerful inmates at his animal prison -- while his gorgeous, soulful co-worker (Rosario Dawson) looks on -- pushes past banality and onto the surreal plane being staked out by bad movies that are bad in a new and genuinely dispiriting way.
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Generally speaking, it's good that we're seeing more R-rated comedies. There's nothing less raunchy -- or less funny -- than implied raunchiness, gags that aren't allowed to go the distance because they might corrupt a minor. Comedies that don't have to fit into PG-13 constraints allow writers, directors and actors to give us characters who are free to talk the way real people talk and do the things real people do.
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Catherine Breillat's movies are so bold and brash in their views of women's sexuality that no one could accuse her of being subtle. (Tampon teabag, anyone?) But Breillat's latest, The Sleeping Beauty, originally made for French television, is so visually and stylistically delicate that watching it, you can almost forget how forthright, in characteristic Breillat style, it is. I gasped at some of its images, like that of a young princess, dressed in a pink coat trimmed with white fur, crossing the snowy landscape of Lapland on the back of a doe, the Northern Lights shimmering in the vast sky behind her. Personally, I don't remember the journey from girlhood to womanhood as being all that pretty (or, luckily, all that perilous), but I'll take it when I see it.
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In Project Nim we are invited to observe the tics, tweaks, and expressive details embedded in the story of a behavioral experiment as told by the social scientists who attempted to raise a chimpanzee as a human being. The camera is its own kind of cage, and director James Marsh (Man on Wire) frames all of the key players in the quintessentially 1970's project as captive specimens. Each interview subject sits before the same gray background and is introduced with a showy, investigative pan; a second pan away signals that subject's release from the narrative. Between pans the players speak to the camera, and their emotions, aversions, contradictions and language choices embellish the oral history with unintended ironies. Very quickly it becomes clear that the life of Nim Chimpsky is foremost a story about the human animal, and human behavior.
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Getting a movie's setup right is one thing. But following through on an intriguing premise is the hard part, and that's where Matthew Chapman's The Ledge, a thriller that wrangles with intricate ideas about faith and religious extremism, goes splat.
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Now that nearly every action or comic-book movie wants to be as big, loud and spectacular as a Michael Bay movie, there's something refreshingly straightforward -- homespun, even -- about an actual Michael Bay movie like Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The picture wears its ambitions on its whirring, rumbling, clanking, heavily CGI'ed sleeve, and it pretends to be nothing more than it is: a honking, 40-karat piece of entertainment that will cost you dearly if you take your family to see it in the theaters, especially when you factor in that 3-D surcharge. Yet Dark of the Moon, the third installment in the unkillable Transformers franchise, shouldn't be seen any other way. Bay doesn't care about your soul, he just wants your money -- but he at least makes sure you go home feeling exhausted and spent rather than vaguely dissatisfied. It's a fair exchange.
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I note with a shiver that, as a person over 40 who has frequently expressed a desire to see fewer mainstream movies based on comic books and more roles for actors over, oh, age 25, I'm the target audience for Larry Crowne.
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Paris's transformative powers have been well documented on screen: Audrey Hepburn took the Gallic cure to become a woman (or at least become alluring to men) in Sabrina; in the recent Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson rides a Studebaker back to the halcyon Paris of the 1920s. The young, small-town Texas women who star in Monte Carlo have the kind of grandiose but vaguely defined idea of the city that could only come from the movies. "Something big is about to happen for me," says Emma (Katie Cassidy), a waitress whose modeling dreams were frozen in the amber of a Clip 'N Save cover. Her co-worker Grace (Selena Gomez) has similarly overblown expectations for their week in France -- something about re-inventing herself after four years of blending into the gym walls of her high school. No one has told them that the perfect pair of espadrilles can only do so much.
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