Movies about misfit fat kids are a tough sell. The surprise of Azazel Jacobs' Terri is that it sets up all the usual traps of the genre and then sidesteps them neatly. This is a modest film that doesn't reach too high, instead spreading out in some interesting ways, exploring what it means to be a reasonably emotionally secure person when everyone around you is busy projecting their own insecurity onto you.
You'll have to hang on to something to get through the hairpins in The Perfect Host, a chamber piece hostage thriller black comedy undone less by its twists than by the stretches of bad road between them. First-time writer and director Nick Tomnay has undertaken a hugely ambitious script, and found the perfect actor to host the blighted dinner party at its center. The casting of David Hyde Pierce as Warwick Wilson, a fastidious Los Angeles bachelor preparing a sumptuous meal for his friends, is so inspired it's obvious, or vice-versa. The initial setup -- the preparations for a flawless gathering are interrupted by a fugitive (Clayne Crawford) looking for a hideout -- works beautifully. Then the evening takes its first turn.
Everyone who's ever loved a car -- a beat-up Plymouth junker, a pristine '67 Mustang, a Hot Wheels Corvette Stingray, it doesn't matter -- knows that cars have personalities of their own. But one of the nice things about cars is that they generally express their feelings in mechanical, comprehensible terms: The need for an oil change has nothing to do with deep-rooted insecurities. Cars don't need a lot from us, emotionally speaking.
Cameron Diaz's character in Bad Teacher is not, to use one of the ugliest coined words to have entered common parlance, "relatable." She's a gold digger, she doesn't give a rat's ass about her job as a nurturer of young minds, she's a frequent and conspicuous user of marijuana and she's desperate to make a quick 10 grand to get a boob job. I don't know about you, but I have nothing in common with her (though there's always room for improvement).
In the spring of 2010, Conan O'Brien walked away from his coveted Tonight Show post when NBC made him an offer he could all too easily refuse: The executives wanted to push his show into a kiss-of-death time slot in order to offer the show's prime real estate to Jay Leno and his career-saving Oklahoma-land-grab machinations. Even casual TV viewers who'd never paid much attention to O'Brien took notice: It wasn't just that O'Brien stood up to the network, in the process severing a 22-year relationship. He also navigated an extremely public feud with catlike grace, standing his ground while also refusing to act like -- and there's no polite way to put it -- a dick.
Are some real-life farces too perfectly stupid to accommodate an onscreen take-off? The Best and the Brightest, set in the self-satirizing world of pre-school placement in New York City depicted in the 2009 documentary Nursery University, is a farce that can't quite find its comic register. First-time writer (with Michael Jaeger) and director Josh Shelov's story of a young couple struggling to get their 5-year-old daughter into a private Manhattan kindergarten offers several different tonal possibilities, and Shelov's mix-and-match approach highlights the improbable difficulty of making sport of something too silly for words.
My heart sank a little when Carlos (Demián Bichir), a Mexican working as a gardener in Los Angeles to support his teenage son Luis (José Julián), lays out all of the reasons he should not buy a truck near the beginning of A Better Life: No license, no papers; fear off getting pulled over, or into an accident. On the terms of the illegal immigrant narrative, fulfillment of the worst case scenario is a foregone conclusion.
The formidable subject of Buck shares his initials and ideals with another, even more imposing romantic hero. Black Beauty, a horse with a human range of intellect and emotion, is the title character and narrator of Anna Sewell's 1877 novel. His life story is marked by hardship and hard work, all of it at the mercy of morally variable owners. Sewell wanted her readers in horse-dependent 19th-century England to see their mounts, carriage-pullers, and field-plowers not as insensible beasts but creatures worthy of respect and compassion. Buck Brannaman, a Wyoming horse trainer with a resume that includes inspiring the Nicholas Evans novel that became Robert Redford's 1998 movie The Horse Whisperer, is the 21st-century embodiment of that same cause.
It's time to save Ryan Reynolds from the comic-book blockbuster or, more broadly, from the kinds of movies that are supposed to turn young men into stars, without really allowing them to be actors. Reynolds is almost good enough to stand up to the gargantuan tower of emptiness that is Green Lantern, but he's fighting a losing battle. Even though he's propped up by the most powerful force in the universe -- "the emerald energy of willpower," as the movie tells us, which sounds like something you can buy in a six-pack down at the Vitamin Shoppe -- there's no way Reynolds can carry the weight of this overblown 3D folly on his shoulders. It's not easy being green, not even for him.
There's genius, somewhere, in the idea of casting Jim Carrey against a mini-flock of penguins: Their stiff, flapping carriage is its own kind of grace, and Carrey -- when he's not mugging, or getting whacked in the nuts with a soccer ball -- is still among the most gracefully physical of actors, no matter how many dud movies he makes.
A friend once told me that his gold standard for new acquaintances involved the Leonard Cohen song "Anthem." "There is a crack, a crack in everything," the song goes. "That's how the light gets in." He applied it as a kind of authenticity test, because -- pace Mr. Cohen -- there are people out there who appear to lack the crack, whether it never fully formed or has been willfully spackled shut. There are films that lack it, too, some more ironically than others. Watching The Art of Getting By, the story of a singular teenager told in oppressively uniform terms, I was reminded of my friend's judgment of a man I was seeing: No crack, no sir.
A few weeks ago at the edge of one of the Brooklyn parks, I passed a guy at a table hawking New York Times home-delivery subscriptions. "Already got one," I said. Like a Jehovah's Witness crossed with a Doberman, he clamped down on me. "How many days?" he demanded, probably thinking I was one of those weenies who just gets the weekend package. "Seven," I said. "I'm hardcore." He didn't laugh. He didn't even look disappointed -- maybe more disgusted than anything. Whatever his spiel was, he didn't get a chance to deliver it, and he looked kind of lonely to boot: Either he'd been trying to preach to the converted all day, or he'd encountered too many devoted digital subscribers. Either way, I hope his lack of sign-ups was a good omen.
Editor's Note: This review may contain spoilers. It all depends on how surprised you want to be by the "secret" plot details of Super 8.
Maybe it's a coincidence that the pop-culture cycle and childhood itself are contracting at a dizzying rate: Today's blockbuster movie based on a comic book is old news by the following Friday, when the next blockbuster movie based on a comic book arrives. Simultaneously, 11-year-olds are often just as savvy about social media, fashion trends and celebrity gossip as their parents are, if not more so. Grown-ups are trying to stay young by revisiting the favorite refuges of their youth, while kids are all too eager to grow up. We're a culture that's simultaneously trying to prolong childhood and squeeze it into a veal pen.
Despite its tai chi pace and genre-friendly characters, it's almost impossible to tell what's happening in the intriguing, intractable Road to Nowhere, Two-Lane Blacktop director Monte Hellman's first feature film in 22 years. And yet individual scenes are often languidly decipherable: The film opens with Shannyn Sossamon -- who plays femme fatale Velma Duran in the film proper and Laurel, a first-time actress playing Velma Duran in the eponymous film being made within Road to Nowhere -- painting and blow-drying her nails in real time. Later, we see healthy chunks of films like The Lady Eve and The Seventh Seal, played as part of a director's private tutoring of his ingénue; they're followed by subdued exchanges about their genius. Hellman's placid long shots belie the film's elaborate tease: Big, pretty swaths of film stitched into an increasingly perverse, unresolved design.
Michael Winterbottom is one of the great unsung directors, if only for his chutzpah: One minute he's brashly cutting new windows into old works by Thomas Hardy and Laurence Sterne; the next he's concocting a version of Jim Thompson's shivery pulp masterpiece The Killer Inside Me that exceeds its source material's grim explicitness (though not in a good way); the next he's tracing the disintegrating arc of a couple's relationship by showing actors engaging in nonsimulated sex. But Winterbottom isn't just a stuntman: He'll try anything, but he'll do it differently every time. And in the process -- even at times in his less-successful experiments -- he'll come up with an intelligent and nuanced take on a complex political situation, or an observation about the things we demand (or recoil from) in a literary adaptation, or just an unexpected insight into what scares people the most, or gives them the most joy. Whatever the subject, he puts on his waders and steps right in.
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