Even Neil Young couldn’t resist. “This is a town in north Ontario,” he says at the beginning of Neil Young Journeys, Jonathan Demme’s uneven, engrossing combination of road-trip documentary and concert film. Journeys opens with Young in his hometown of Omemee, which alert Ontarians might note is not actually all that far north. It’s less than two hours from Toronto by car, which is how Young and Demme travel there, in a stately 1956 Ford Crown Victoria, for a gig at the city’s famed Massey Hall.
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There was talk, back a week or so ago, about the perfect Father’s Day movie. Some made jokes about That’s My Boy, others took the opportunity to reassert the paternal themes across the work of Wes Anderson, including his latest, Moonrise Kingdom. I couldn’t help thinking, watching Beasts of the Southern Wild, a dreamy, boisterous, folk-inflected allegory of American independence and its foes, among other things, that for a certain type of father and daughter, at least, the story of a benevolent universe-ruler named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her willful dad Wink (Dwight Henry) would unleash the floodgates like no other.
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Take This Waltz is an unusually kind film about infidelity -- not because it sidesteps or shortchanges heartbreak, but because it doesn't let any one of its characters bear the full burden of blame. That such a thing needs to or should even be assigned in this scenario is beside the point, as the film defers to the vagueries of the human heart and the way we can, despite our better judgment, form a connection with someone that can't easily be set aside.
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If you’ve seen the red band trailer for Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a grown man whose best friend is his talking teddy bear, you may think you’ve seen the whole thing: Beware the comedy trailer that’s so packed with hilarity that you just know it’s cobbled from the best bits in the movie. But miraculously, Ted manages to sustain itself.
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To say there’s nothing on the contemporary movie landscape like Alex Kurtzman’s People Like Us is to suggest that the picture is a groundbreaking work with special effects unlike any we’ve ever seen, that it’s fresh and original in its use of characters or situations from old movies (or even older comic books), that its 3-D wow factor rivals that of Avatar. But People Like Us is something odder: This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That’s more of a rarity on today’s landscape than it should be.
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Like the world of male stripping it inhabits, Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike is naughty in gaudy but sanctioned and unthreatening ways. It teases with the promise of outrageousness, but underneath the G-string it's a practically minded coming-of-age story about a young man reaching the end of a years-long spiritual spring break. Choreographed stripteases and celebrity cast aside, the film has a lot in common with the director's 2009 The Girlfriend Experience — both are set in corners of the sex industry, share an undercurrent of economic instability and deal with how their protagonists' professions, the perception and the performative aspect of them, clank up against their personal lives. more »
It’s not every day you see a movie and ask yourself, “Why does this thing even exist?” But I’m truly puzzled by the existence of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I get that it’s based on a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, part of a pop literary genre — launched by Grahame-Smith himself — that takes famous figures, fictional or otherwise, and pits them against vampires and zombies. I get that it’s directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the zany Russian-Kazakh mastermind behind cult apocalyptic favorites Night Watch and Day Watch (2004 and 2006, respectively), not to mention the stupidly entertaining 2008 action thriller Wanted. I even grant you that it’s probably OK to make up wholly imaginary motives for why Abraham Lincoln might have wanted to end slavery, motives having to do not with the preservation of human dignity, equality between all people and all that rot, but because it was kind of a handy sideline to the task of ridding the world of vampires. I know and accept all of this. And still I ask — Why?
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It's hard to know exactly how to review something like The Invisible War, how to step back and look at it as a movie through the steady barrage of emotional devastation it presents. The stranger sitting next to me at my screening spent the latter half of the runtime sobbing into a fistful of tissues, and I couldn't blame her — the film, the latest documentary from the Oscar-nominated Kirby Dick (Outrage, This Film Is Not Yet Rated) presents a sickening chorus of accounts not just of rape but of institutional betrayal, of a system that's utterly failed to protect or serve those who've joined it.
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Pixar is at its best when it’s making movies about rats working in restaurants and families of superheroes with not-so-super powers; not so much when it's spinning cautionary environmental tales with robots-in-love subplots and sentimental weepers about grumpy codgers “learning to love again.” Somewhere at the more golden end of that yardstick is Brave, in which a peppery redheaded Scottish princess from days of yore named Merida – her voice is provided by the wonderful Glasgow-born actress Kelly Macdonald – decides she doesn’t want to marry from the selection of gents her parents have chosen for her and would much prefer traipsing through the forest with her trusty bow-and-arrow.
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If the world were ending imminently — say, in three weeks — would you throw off the shackles of social confines and indulge in every crazy impulse the moment inspired? Would you seek out your loved ones in order to spend your last days in their company? Would you just stay put and continue on as normal right up until the final moment? Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the directorial debut of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist writer Lorene Scafaria, combines a deviously tragicomic take on the approaching annihilation of mankind with a irritatingly unconvincing and unnecessary love story.
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Before last year’s wistfully joyous Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s movies had gotten so self-conscious and sour-spirited — alleged “returns to form” Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream and Vicky Cristina Barcelona included — that it was hard to have any hope for his future. Do older filmmakers really need a future, especially if, as Allen has, they’ve already banked more than a career’s worth of fine work amid the failures? If they really enjoy working, as Allen seems to, I think they do — a future to shoot for, even if it’s just tomorrow as opposed to next year, might be the very thing that makes them feel alive.
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Watching a thriller requires a certain willingness to be a dupe. The whole idea is to give yourself over, and the ideal is to find yourself moving from scene to scene – as if you were cautiously exploring the rooms of a very mysterious house -- asking, “And then what?” In the Paris-underworld thriller The Woman in the Fifth, director Pawel Pawlikowski is skillful enough to keep you wondering, from scene to scene, exactly what that what is going to be, and I was with the movie every step of the way, right until the final credits began rolling – at which point I realized that the whole thing made no sense whatsoever, and that none of my nagging questions about what the hell was going on would ever be answered. There’s a distinction to be made between being a dupe and being had.
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In the opening scene of Lynn Shelton’s fourth feature we join a conversation in progress. Or a few conversations: Voices overlap, rise and fall, fade in and out; it’s a party, small enough to sustain a few low-volume simultaneous conversations, large enough to fill the room with chatter. As in Shelton’s previous films, My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday, in Your Sister’s Sister we join the central characters at a moment of convergence, after a period of separation or crisis and before it becomes clear things can’t go on as they were before.
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Many of us who were alive in the 1980s claimed not to listen to heavy metal or its almost indistinguishable twin, hard rock. But we did listen, or at least we heard it — it was unavoidable, an omnipresent aural beast slithering out of car radios, grungy bars and retail-establishment stereo systems. Even if you were more attuned to punk or jazz or just about anything else, it was part of the background noise of your life whether you liked it or not. If nothing else, Rock of Ages — adapted from the Broadway show of the same name, in which ’80s metal hits from the likes of Def Leppard, Foreigner and Night Ranger were woven into a rudimentary boy-meets-girl love story — reminds us just how good many of those songs we were pretending not to listen to really were. The picture has a good-natured, if self-conscious, spring to its step, at least until you-know-who shows up in a bejeweled devil’s head codpiece. The movie almost doesn’t survive his slurpy tongue bath.
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"After the show I have to really put some more attention to sex in my life," Marina Abramovic vows near the beginning of Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, an elegantly observed, sleekly packaged look at an artist whose career-long balance of enigma and self-exposure culminated in a 2010 retrospective at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. "Semi-intellectual artist at the top of her career," goes Abramovic’s self-drafted personal ad, "looking for single male." My head completed a few full rotations taking in what all’s going on in that sentence, but let’s begin with the part about being on top.
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