Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Michael Cera in <em>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World</em> Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an exotic multiplex confection – a romantic comedy with elements of its visual grammar swiped from comic books and videogames. It's tempting to say that people who are sick of conventional Hollywood love stories will find a bracing alternative here but, unfortunately, Scott Pilgrim isn't much of a love story, unless the affair you're interested in is the one between a boy and his cultural totems. If that's the case, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World should be hugely entertaining. It's a visual knock-out with the sensibility of a pinball machine, caroming from one set piece to the next, turning on lights and spinning little flippy things and ringing bells. It's not Speed Racer – it remains genuinely character-focused and never aims to overwhelm. But it's playful, borrowing concepts like power-ups and extra lives from the RPGs and adventure games that have made them an intuitive part of a certain kind of narrative grammar for a generation.

After.Life

Christina Ricci in <i>After.Life</i> Perhaps funded and distributed on the promise of Christina Ricci in her skivvies and less, After.Life is weirdly compelling for such a marginal movie. Its premise is a little coy, toying with the expectations of audiences that have had their fill, lately, of stories with characters caught in some strange limbo between living and dying where they work out the psychological issues that hectored them in the real world.

Django

Franco Nero in <em>Django</em>

When Django, the title character and hero of director Sergio Corbucci's seminal spaghetti western, first appears on screen, he's slogging on foot through mud, dragging a coffin behind him. The image is evocative and challenging. In classic American films, western heroes had generally been dignified cowboy types saddled up on strong horses. They were lawmen or simple ranchers with a code of honor. They rode into town in a cloud of dust and plainspoken righteousness backed up by a sharp eye and a six-shooter, and they stood for the endurance of traditional values on a wild frontier.

Django thinks those guys were pussies.

Read the full review at FilmFreakCentral.

Life During Wartime

Ciáran Hinds in <em>Life During Wartime</em> Count me among the great admirers of Todd Solondz’ Happiness. Some viewers complained that Solondz mocked his characters, but I never got that. As far as I could see, that was his achievement. Without passing judgment, he investigated the failures of some of the least among us -- the failed songwriter, the unlucky in love -- and dug out the humanity among the worst of us -- the obscene phone caller, the pedophile. The result was an uneasy mix of tone. It wasn’t quite comedy and it wasn’t quite melodrama. You weren’t sure whether to be amused or appalled, and the fact that Solondz could elicit a horrified titter of recognition at some of the most base material showed that he kept the human in human behavior.

Inception

Marion Cotillard and Leonardo DiCaprio in <em>Inception</em>

Note: If you're allergic to SPOILERS, you probably don't want to read this review before seeing the film. If you'd like to try anyway, or if you're willing to give it a skim, I've tried to keep them to the latter half of the review, and I've marked the spot where the spoilers begin in earnest.

Christopher Nolan’s films tend to be ruminations on loss and regret — tender morsels of bleeding humanity wrapped in an increasingly glossy, protective coating of hard-edged technical sophistication. When you get past the estimable Hollywood sparkle, you find simple dramas tightly wound around the center of each film. Leonard Shelby loses his memory and gains the capacity for infinite self-delusion. Bruce Wayne loses his parents and sacrifices his own life for the public good. Robert Angier nurtures a revenge scheme that blossoms into an endlessly cloned act of self-destruction. To be a Nolan protagonist is to perch on a razor’s edge between reason and impulse, between sanity and mania, between reality and dark dreams of aggrandizement and/or immolation of the self. The films are things of beauty, precisely constructed and expertly executed. But you wouldn’t want to live there.

Dogtooth

Image from <em>Dogtooth</em> This no-frills film-festival favorite from Greece is a single-family scenario. Like last year's excellent Belgian film Home, with which it shares a certain dark comedy (but not the earlier film's reluctant optimism), it features a wife and children who exist largely apart from the larger world into which the male breadwinner ventures on a daily basis. But where that separation in Home was generally a question of geography, in Dogtooth it's a matter of patriarchy.

The White Ribbon

The Killer Inside Me

Casey Affleck in <em>The Killer Inside Me</em>

It's impossible to really film The Killer Inside Me. It's a question of medium -- you can't replicate the book's suffocating interior monologue, the puffed-up rant and ramble of a serial killer, because as soon as you dramatize the events in question for a movie camera you make them real in a way that they're not, quite, when they're still sitting on the page. It's the old question of show versus tell.

Winter’s Bone

Jennifer Lawrence in <i>Winter's Bone</i> Opening with an understated, mood-setting vocal performance of "The Missouri Waltz" as a soundtrack for imagery captured deep, deep within flyover country, Winter's Bone hinges largely on the execution of a simple idea — it's a formula mystery story set in rural Missouri.

The Deadly Duo

<i>The Deadly Duo</i> This 1971 Shaw Brothers martial-arts flick is definitely full of action — energetic camerawork, gallons of stage blood, and a widescreen frame full of gracefully choreographed movement on the part of dozens of performers wielding an impressive variety of weapons all contribute to the film's sense of urgent forward motion.

Splice

Delphine Chanéac and Sarah Polley in <i>Splice</i>

What happens when your child rebels against you? That's the subject at the emotional core of Splice, an unsettling and skillfully mounted psychodrama that has some of the flavor of 1970s body-horror (mainly Alien and early David Cronenberg) mixed up with a contemporary retelling of the Frankenstein story. The complexity of the question is notched up by the film's science fiction premise, which has the husband-and-wife team of Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) working in secret to create a new life form that jumbles human DNA in what seems to be a nearly random combination with that of other species.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Banksy in <em>Exit Through the Gift Shop</em> No doubt at least a little bored with his status as the standard-bearer internationally for street art, Banksy takes his career to the next logical step with this documentary-essay film. Exit Through the Gift Shop purports at first to chronicle the street-art movement, vérité style, but eventually reveals itself as a treatise on Bad Art and a screed against what the film argues are tone-deaf patterns of consumption that drive trends in the art world.

Clash of the Titans

Broken Embraces

Vincere

Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi in <em>Vincere</em> In the first scene of Vincere, Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi), addressing a small gathering, borrows a watch, then declares that he is giving God five minutes to strike him dead. To Mussolini, God's failure to do so is proof that He does not exist. It's possible the film's writer and director, Marco Bellocchio, agrees with him on this point at least.

Survival of the Dead

Survival of the Dead

Whatever else you might say about George Romero, it's hard to accuse the guy of just repeating himself. After making his reputation as progenitor of the zombie movie in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, a bleak, Vietnam-era American nightmare, he upped the ante in 1978 with the blatantly satirical Dawn of the Dead, a critique of consumer culture that shifted easily between slapstick farce and the grimmest of horror-movie imagery. His 1985 follow-up, Day of the Dead, was hobbled by budgetary problems, but it offered an ambitious and ultimately depressing perspective on the Reagan-era military-industrial complex.

Green Zone

Matt Damon in <em>Green Zone</em>

Director Paul Greengrass airlifts Jason Bourne to war-torn Baghdad in this Iraq-occupation thriller that casts Matt Damon as a crusading soldier uncovering evidence of lies and misdirection in the American war on terrorism. It’s a less successful companion piece to his almost unbearably tense United 93. Using the language of action movies to build a much larger-than-life experience, these two films build a post-9/11 cinematic mythology, a snapshot of a long moment in U.S. history that reframes debate in aggressively populist terms. United 93 is some kind of masterpiece, but the grander scope and general lack of nuance in Green Zone fuel some awfully stentorian, ham-handed moments that nearly sink the film.

The Ghost Writer

Pierce Brosnan in <em>The Ghost Writer</em>

The Ghost Writer opens, appropriately enough given the film’s generally menacing tone, with the death of a ferry passenger. The man’s absence is discovered through the presence of an empty BMW on deck after all the passengers disembark. His body, bloated with liquor and decay, washes up on the beach. Did the poor bastard simply get soused and totter off a slippery deck? In a Roman Polanski movie? Not bloody likely.

Black Dynamite

Nicole Sullivan, Michael Jai White, and Salli Richardson in <em>Black Dynamite</em>

The 70s exploitation-film spoof Black Dynamite sounds like a fun idea on paper, and it starts to look like a can't-miss proposition when you see the theatrical trailer, which showcases the technical qualities of this loving pastiche. Director Scott Sanders certainly gets the look right, thanks partly to no-frills era-aware photography by DP Shawn Maurer and partly to some digital tweaking that brings the colors in line with that ruddy aesthetic specific to some film prints of the period, and that's crucial to the joke. As the titular bad-ass, a former CIA agent with a reinstated license to kill out to avenge the death of his brother, Michael Jai White combines a deadpan-comic screen presence with enough martial artistry to make a fight scenes work on a more visceral level than pure parody. But something about the execution is flat.

It Might Get Loud

District 13: Ultimatum

Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle in <em>District 13: Ultimatum</em>

District 13: Ultimatum is at its best and silliest in the opening reels, which place French supercop Damien Tomaso (the lanky, bald Cyril Raffaelli, who's also the film's stunt coordinator) in a chaotic undercover assignment — he's in the back room of a nightclub, decked out in a dress with a peekaboo ass and masquerading as a kind of courtesan to a Chinese drug kingpin. When his backup arrives, all hell breaks loose. The sequence is staged with tongue tucked firmly in cheek — the contrast between Raffaelli's muscular, manly frame and that of his obvious female body-double is faintly hilarious — but it more or less brings the goods, staging an extended martial-arts fight that plays as an affectionate tribute to Jackie Chan in his prime. In other words, props matter, from the stepladder that brings the pain when villains are slammed into it to the priceless Van Gogh painting that Tomaso employs as a delicate weapon at his disposal. You'll laugh, you'll wince. It's a good time.

Last Seen

2010 U.S. Releases by Grade