Whenever I throw away one of those large round plastic lids from an orange-juice jug, in my head I hear my mother saying, as she would have said to my 8-year-old self, “That would make a great table-top for a doll’s house.” As an adult I don’t have a dollhouse, but I still have a hard time throwing away those orange-juice lids; the mentality dies hard. So why — with one luminous exception — can’t I love the movies of Wes Anderson, the most dollhousey of all filmmakers? Why, specifically, can’t I love Moonrise Kingdom, a sweet-natured picture set in 1965 on a mythical New Englandy island, in which two oddball kids run away together and pledge undying love?
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The Intouchables hits so many audience-pleasing buttons, meticulously and dutifully, that it ought to be called The Irresistibles. This is the French movie you’ve been hearing about, a megahit in its native country and currently spreading across Europe like a cheerful, robust strain of flu. Based on a true story about a wheelchair-bound rich guy and his caretaker, a small-time crook from the projects, The Intouchables is a movie about life, love and the enduring power of Earth Wind & Fire. You have been forewarned.
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Dustin Lance Black spoke of his conservative Mormon upbringing when he won the 2009 Oscar for best original screenplay for Milk, and traces of that childhood are all over his most recent directorial effort Virginia, a garbled coming-of-age story and portrait of a mentally ill mother. The titular character, played by a blonde Jennifer Connelly, suffers from traumatic onset schizophrenia — she's a fey, childlike woman who lives alone with her protective teenage son Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson) and has been carrying on a decades-long affair with the town sheriff Dick Tipton (Ed Harris), a devout Mormon who's married with kids.
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Some days you just need to see, as SCTV’s Farm Film Report guys Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok used to put it, stuff blowed up real good. If you’re having one of those days, Peter Berg’s Battleship is as good a choice as any. Beyond that, you should know a few things going in: Battleship is allegedly based on the Hasbro game of the same name, but never in the film is the line “You sunk my battleship!” uttered, so don’t expect a refund. Also, one of the invading aliens – spoiler, sorry! – looks a little like the guy from that ’90s Swedish band Stakka Bo.
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A former grifter gets out of prison after serving 25 years for killing his partner in The Samaritan, and in a tale as old as time (or at least as old as the movies), tries to go straight, only to get pulled in for one last job. His name is Foley, and he's played by Samuel L. Jackson, and this film from Canadian director David Weaver is svelte enough in its reassembling of familiar elements to be, for a while, as comfortably pleasant as sipping on what once used to be your go-to drink — until The Samaritan takes a jarring turn right out of Park Chan-wook, and from there takes a tumble into ludicrousness from which it doesn't recover.
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Hollywood, a humble request? I realize that abortion is has become too divisive a topic these days to drop into a mainstream movie product like What To Expect When You're Expecting, especially in what's an overall innocuous ensemble comedy based, somehow, on a bestselling pregnancy guidebook (between this and Battleship, it's one strange week for source material). It's also a tough topic from which to wring laughs. And in something carefully calculated to be as broad in appeal as possible, any mention of the option of terminating a pregnancy is just going to be one more thing that could isolate potential movie audiences, like an ugly poster, being in a foreign language or attempting analysis of the Iraq War.
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Anyone who’s ever seen or used a rabbit vibrator can attest to the device’s utter adorableness as a totem. Whoever designed this miraculous pink rubbery thing, with its Peter Cottontail-worthy quivering ears, probably thought, Why does a vibrator have to be ugly? Why not make it cute? Tanya Wexler may have had the same idea when she was making Hysteria, a romantic comedy and highly fictionalized history of the vibrator. The picture is, in places, too adorable for words, and when it’s not adorable, it suffers from an excess of neo-suffragette preachiness. But the picture is at least spirited, a jaunty trifle that’s low on eroticism but high on cartoony coquettishness. Like the little motorized whatsit that is its subject, it does have its charms.
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Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles’ The Dictator is indefensible and hilarious, an unruly thing that invites you to laugh at things you feel you shouldn’t. I’ve heard people — even some who like the picture — referring to The Dictator as offensive, and one of the guys sitting behind me at the screening laughed at some jokes and remained awkwardly mute during others. After one of these pauses — the vibrations of his uneasiness were traveling right through my seat back — I heard him say to his pal, “I’m not sure how I feel about this.” But as the end credits rolled he announced joyously, “That was great!” as if he’d endured an enema cleansing that made him feel a whole lot better afterward. Cohen has many gifts as a performer, and with The Dictator he reveals yet another one: He knows how to flush stuff right out of you.
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What if The Sting's Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker could be your surrogate parents? And what if they were also SoCal slackers? That seems to be the thought at the center of Brian Crano's directorial debut, an uneven but appealing dramedy about two car thieves and petty con-artists who end up taking charge of an abandoned 12-year-old boy. It's a film that should be appallingly twee, but more often than not is actually scruffy and sweet, thanks to a nicely underplayed turn by Chandler Canterbury as the kid, Kelsey, and the chemistry between Jason Ritter and Jake Sandvig (who co-wrote the film with Crano) as hipster grifters Ben and Alan.
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There are enough terrific, elegant old-style Tim Burton touches in Dark Shadows that, now and then, you might be fooled into thinking the once-mad genius had finally come back to his senses: A young girl gazes dreamily through the window of a train slipping through the New England countryside, the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” serving as an aural curtain for her reverie; a wispy ghost woman floats toward the waiting arms of a giant chandelier, her hair and tattered skirt winding around its crystals like jellyfish tendrils; a secret button reveals a passageway whose opening is framed by mechanical ocean waves and a cadre of cast-iron wolves raising their snouts to the moon in a hearty salute. Parts of Dark Shadows look lovely. So what happened to the story?
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Comedian-turned-director Bobcat Goldthwait has always displayed an incredibly dark sense of humor in his work behind the camera, from his 1991 alcoholic birthday party performer debut Shakes the Clown to bestiality-themed rom-com Sleeping Dogs Lie to World's Greatest Dad, in which Robin Williams plays a high-school English teacher whose son's death becomes a way for him to realize his unfulfilled dreams of being a writer. But no matter how black the comedy, these films had warmth to them, too, and the possibility of things getting better and characters, however painfully, changing and growing.
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It’s dangerous business to begin a movie with a voice-over monologue introducing “a long tale of women dressed in black.” Run, while there’s still time! Yet it’s a testament to director and actress Nadine Labaki’s gracefulness she pulls off this story as well as she does in Where Do We Go Now?, a fable set in a fictional town, presumably in Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims live together in bumptious accord, if not in complete harmony.
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Teenage Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez) is lacking in role models. Her father’s unknown, her best friend (Raini Rodriguez) is faithful but a little dull, and her mother Grace (Eva Mendes) is a hotcha-cha mess who dates married dudes and behaves less like a mom than a deadbeat roommate. So when her English teacher (Patricia Arquette, vital in a too-brief role) introduces the concept of the coming-of-age narrative, hyper-precocious Ansiedad decides to use it as a kind of emancipation blueprint.
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At age 15, Chloë Grace Moretz is now right in the center of the child/adult Venn diagram. Pretty soon we’ll have to accept that she really is a young woman, but for now, it’s slightly discomfiting to see her in the jailbait short shorts and tiny halter tops she wears in Derick Martini’s Hick. Even in the old days, girlhood went by in a flash, and most contemporary parents will tell you that today those years of innocence — or at least perceived innocence — are even more compressed. Plus, some girls just move faster than others: Moretz’s character in Hick is an unhappy 13-year-old named Luli who doesn’t yet know how to use her sexual allure, though she’s vaguely aware that she’s got some. She can’t wait to grow up and get the hell away from her tiny, repressive Nebraska town and her heedless parents (played by Juliette Lewis and Anson Mount), and her urgency gives the movie whatever momentum it has.
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Documentaries don’t have to be technically great to be irresistible, and Bess Kargman’s First Position, which follows six young ballet dancers as they prepare for an elite competition, is a case in point. You may think you can guess what’s going to happen by the end of First Position: Some will win and others won’t, there will be some tears shed, this or that dancer will be sidelined by an injury – and yet somehow, even though nothing hugely surprising happens, the details Kargman captures somehow feel fresh. Maybe that’s because this isn’t just a documentary about ballet and the extraordinary discipline it requires; it’s also about youth and its attendant hopes and risks, spelled out in language that’s painfully universal.
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