Searching For Sugar Man, which tells the improbable story of how a singer-songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez rose, fell, and found superstardom in what amounts to a parallel universe, is an elegy in several keys. One is clear and familiar: Upon his excited discovery by a noted producer, the music business circa 1969 ate Rodriguez for breakfast, and a talent still acknowledged by his peers went to waste. The second is more personal, and although Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul leaves a distinct and ultimately frustrating berth around the man at the center of his documentary, it becomes poignantly clear that an abbreviated resume and a family to feed didn’t keep Rodriguez from living an artist’s life.
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The title character of Ruby Sparks is a 26-year-old painter from Dayton, Ohio played by Zoe Kazan, who also wrote the film's screenplay, She has bangs and wears brightly colored tights. Her first crushes were on John Lennon and Humphrey Bogart. She loves to cook, can't drive and doesn't own a computer. Her problems, as someone points out, are all of the "endearing" variety.
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There’s a case to be made for the idea that Greece has more ghosts than the average country. This argument would involve space – having relatively little, especially for their dead, Greeks rent out cemetery plots for three years maximum before the body is exhumed to make room – but also the fact that Greece’s is one of the more fully recorded histories we have. And what ghosts exist that are not remembered?
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At first glance, Mira Sorvino’s character in Union Square, a claustrophobic but well-acted sibling chamber piece, bears a striking resemblance to Linda Ash, the tacky hooker with the heart of gold from Mighty Aphrodite. The latter role won Sorvino an Oscar in 1996, and though she has worked steadily since that time the actress has suffered from that vague but chronic condition of feeling under-seen. With its small cast and focus on performance, Union Square promises to be a welcome showcase for Sorvino, and the early rhymes with Miss Linda are intriguingly open-ended.
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We don’t see the writer in Robert Longfellow (Martin Donovan) for some significant time in Collaborator, Donovan’s pensive, carefully woven writing and directing debut. Robert is a stalled playwright, and when we meet him, he's fleeing New York after poison-tipped reviews have slain his latest, long-awaited effort. Headed home to Los Angeles swaddled in self-pity, he must attend to his mother (Katherine Helmond), some Hollywood hack work, a simmering movie star (Olivia Williams) and a frustrated wife (former Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur) stashed in a frosty East Coast locale. But Robert looks mostly inward, giving everyone else the vague but warm-eyed attention Donovan has brought to his work as a Hal Hartley muse and in a host of supporting roles.
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It’s hard to say how much can be blamed on the timing of the release of The Do-Deca-Pentathlon and how much on the movie’s self-amused mediocrity, but the latest from brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (who co-wrote and directed) seems to expose the limits of a certain kind of realism by stretching them one man-child too far.
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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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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 »
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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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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"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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Both of the trailers that preceded the screening I attended of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted featured burps as punchlines. Like, each one built to and then peaked with a bug-eyed animated creature’s belch. After the first burp the little kids a few rows ahead of me erupted in jubilant, little kid laughter; the second was met with bored silence. If even your short-limbed target audience doesn’t like being played for a chump, how to keep them entertained across two previews, much less two sequels?
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Though he plays one of the great roués of literature – the social climbing, bloomer-dropping hero at the center of Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel – the focus on Robert Pattinson in Bel Ami is notably above the belt. This is certainly true in the literal sense, where first-time directing team Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod lavish attention on Pattinson’s extraordinary face, even get a little lost in it at times. But it also feels like the source of a larger lack – that of the libidinous physicality and charismatic breadth of a well-rounded scoundrel.
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Filmmaker Chris Eyre made his name with his 1998 debut Smoke Signals, a delicate indie adapted from a short story by Sherman Alexie about two young men living on the Coeur D'Alene Indian Reservation who go an a road trip to retrieve the belongings of one's recently deceased estranged father. It was a small, wistful thing that offered a look at characters and a community that don't get a lot of time on screen. Hide Away, Eyre's newest work -- since Smoke Signals he's made four features that have mostly headed to TV — is in the same emotional vein as that first film, but heads away from the rez for a setting that's more figurative and characters that are more generic (by choice, though it's also a problem). It's a slender story of mourning that manages some lovely bits of mood while also being dreary and a little preposterous in its spareness.
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