- David Denby: “Source Code” and “Meek’s Cutoff.”
8220;Source Code,” a techno-thriller about a dead man who tries to save Chicago from nuclear destruction, is much more enjoyable than “Inception,” “The Adjustment Bureau,” “Limitless,” and other fantastical jaunts of recent seasons. The movie may begin as a sci-fi . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “True Grit,” “The Company Men,” “Somewhere,” and “The Tempest.”
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ enjoyably astringent remake of the maudlin John Wayne Western from 1969, the characters all speak in formal diction. They abjure contractions (typical sentence: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”), and they avoid the fanciful, “fuck . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “True Grit,” “The Company Men,” “Somewhere,” and “The Tempest.”
In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers’ enjoyably astringent remake of the maudlin John Wayne Western from 1969, the characters all speak in formal diction. They abjure contractions (typical sentence: “He has abandoned me to a congress of louts”), and they avoid the fanciful, “fuck . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “The Last Station,” “Crazy Heart,” “Brothers,” and “The Lovely Bones.”
In “The Last Station,” Christopher Plummer, at the crest of a long career, gives an impassioned portrait of the artist as an old man—Leo Tolstoy in his eighties, imposing, stentorian, and almost alarmingly active. Helen Mirren, letting her age show and still the most sexual actress . . ....
- David Denby: “Bernie,” “The Three Stooges,” “Lockout” reviews.
Richard Linklater’s “Bernie” is devoted to a young man with exceptionally beautiful manners. Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), stout and soft-spoken, works as an assistant funeral director in the small town of Carthage, in East Texas. He puts on a good show. He dresses the bodies . . ....
- David Denby: “Ride the High Country,” at BAM.
In the nineteen-fifties, Fred Zinnemann (“High Noon”) and George Stevens (“Shane”) tried to freeze the Western genre into a single archetypal film, while directors like Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann were taking it in bitter new directions. “Ride the High Country,” Sam Peckinpah . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Robin Hood.”
What do you get if you mix “Gladiator,” “The Return of Martin Guerre,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elizabeth,” “Troy,” “The Seventh Seal,” and a hundred buckets of mud? The answer is “Robin Hood”—the latest version . . ....
- George Saunders: “Escape from Spiderhead.”
8220;Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.
“What’s in it?” I said.
“Hilarious,” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.
I said out . . ....
- David Denby: “This Is Not a Film,” “Wanderlust,” “Safe House” reviews.
Jafar Panahi is a fifty-one-year-old Iranian film director with a restlessly intense manner and a sturdy, undefeatable sense of the absurd. A maker of nonpolitical films (“The White Balloon,” “The Circle”), Panahi has nevertheless been sentenced by the Iranian authorities to six years . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Knight and Day” and “Winter’s Bone.”
Tom Cruise was very funny in the 1999 movie “Magnolia.” Playing a satanic sex guru dressed in black, he effectively spoofed the over-galvanized acting style of his youth. But in “Knight and Day” he has reverted to his old whirling-arms, flashing-choppers mode of . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Dance Fall Preview
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New York City Ballet presents masterpieces by George Balanchine (“Apollo,” “Episodes,” and “Jewels”) at the David H. Koch (Sept. 13-Oct. 9), but the big deal of the season is “Ocean’s Kingdom,” with music by Paul McCartney . . ....
- David Denby: “Waiting for Superman.”
The most upsetting images to be seen in a movie so far this year arrive at the end of “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” a hot-under-the-collar documentary about the failings of the American school system. All through the film, Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth . . ....
- David Denby: “Red Riding Hood” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.”
The new “Red Riding Hood” is more “Twilight” than Grimm. Yes, the wolf is out there in the forest, and the young heroine, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), walks through the woods and visits her grandmother, who (in a dream, at least) has big teeth, the better to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Chronicle,” “In Darkness” reviews.
8220;Chronicle” is a mildly experimental commercial film, and, for the most part, it’s loose-limbed fun. The picture takes off from “The Blair Witch Project” and other movies that use point-of-view techniques: we see footage shot by a character’s digital . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Hall Pass,” “Take Me Home Tonight,” and “Jane Eyre.”
In “Hall Pass,” two fortyish husbands (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are given a week of liberty by their wives (Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate). Go for it, the women tell them. You stare at every shapely young female body you see, so get it out of your . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “The Adventures of Tintin,” “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” reviews.
You can’t take your eyes off Rooney Mara as the notorious Lisbeth Salander, in the American movie version of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (opening December 21st). Slender, sheathed in black leather, with short ebony hair standing up in a tuft . . ....
- David Denby: “Hanna,” “Arthur,” and “The Princess of Montpensier.”
The opening of Joe Wright’s entertainingly nutty action thriller, “Hanna,” comes close to outright parody. A fifteen-year-old girl tracks a reindeer through Finland’s northern woods and ice fields, her breath nearly freezing in midair. She brings the beast down with a bow . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Feeding on Dreams” review.
This latest memoir by the Chilean-American author and former Allende adviser resumes the tale of his countless “dislocations” since fleeing Chile, in 1973. Dorfman shuttles among three continents and two languages, adrift in “an eternal victimhood of regret.” The resulting “wrath” may help . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “No Strings Attached,” “Cold Weather,” and “Uncle Kent.”
Why is Natalie Portman working with Ashton Kutcher? His hair hanging low over his forehead, Kutcher, seen in closeup in “No Strings Attached,” resembles a pensive mushroom. He seems puzzled a lot of the time, a little slow, though slyly amused around women. All in all, he’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “No Strings Attached,” “Cold Weather,” and “Uncle Kent.”
Why is Natalie Portman working with Ashton Kutcher? His hair hanging low over his forehead, Kutcher, seen in closeup in “No Strings Attached,” resembles a pensive mushroom. He seems puzzled a lot of the time, a little slow, though slyly amused around women. All in all, he’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “Black Swan” and “Love and Other Drugs.”
Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” is a luridly beautiful farrago—a violent fantasia that mixes the tensions of preparing a new production of “Swan Lake” with sex, blood, and horror-film flourishes. Natalie Portman is Nina, a soloist in a New York ballet company . . ....
- David Denby: “The Red Riding Trilogy.”
8220;This is the North—we do what we want.” These defiantly jocular words are spoken by a policeman as he throws a young reporter out the back of a van. The scene takes place in “Red Riding: 1974,” the first in a series of films . . ....
- David Denby: “John Carter,” “The Deep Blue Sea” reviews.
The season of quarter-billion-dollar movies has kicked off with a mess. Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter,” based on an ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (written at about the same time as “Tarzan”), begins with a battle on Mars, or Barsoom, as Burroughs . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: The long, strange history of 3-D.
Did you enjoy “Rottweiler”? How about “Bwana Devil” or “Black Lolita”? Maybe you preferred “International Stewardesses,” although you might know it under the more thoughtful title of “Supersonic Supergirls.” You will not need reminding that these are among the crowning . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Nine,” “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,” “The Young Victoria,” and “A Single Man.”
The beginning of “Nine” feels like an end. The first words we hear are “You kill your film,” uttered at a press conference by an Italian movie director named Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis). We then find him at the Cinecittà film studios, in Rome . . ....
- Hilton Als: “Porgy and Bess,” reimagined by Diane Paulus.
As audience members took their seats before a recent performance of the director Diane Paulus’s politically radical and dramaturgically original musical adaptation of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin’s “American folk opera” “Porgy and Bess” (at the American Repertory . . ....
- David Denby: “Greenberg” and “Vincere.”
Many of us have known someone like Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), the prickly failure who is the hero of Noah Baumbach’s new movie, “Greenberg.” And many of us, with a sigh, have pulled away from him—not when he was young, perhaps, but certainly by . . ....
- David Denby: “44 Inch Chest” and “Police, Adjective.”
The new British movie “44 Inch Chest” is a very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way. Five of the best actors in England have been handed a ranting, foulmouthed script by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the same vituperative pair who wrote . . ....
