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Loren Cass (2009): B-
Chris Fuller’s Loren Cass invites comparisons to Harmony Korine’s work not simply because it’s a ragged avant-garde snapshot of wayward teens living despairing lives in a ramshackle environment, but because Gummo’s spaghetti-bath-water “protagonist” Jacob Reynolds is actually part of the cast. The difference between the two works, however, is that Fuller’s portrait of three St.…
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Up in the Air (2009): C+
Amiable and innocuous, Up in the Air offers a disingenuously smooth flight over choppy waters and rugged terrain. Based on Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, Jason Reitman’s follow-up to Juno has timeliness on its side, focused as it is on the plight of a man, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who fires other companies’ employees for a…
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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009): B
Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans partakes in loopiness often enough to make one wish its rote policier concerns were shunted even further into the background. Sharing a title with, but none of the tortured spiritual wrestling found in, Abel Ferrara’s 1992 masterpiece, Herzog sets his tale in a chalkboard-gray post-Katrina Big…
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2012 (2009): D
2012 may be the dimmest, most clichéd, most simultaneously maudlin and callous big-ticket film of the year, a dunderheaded end-of-the-world special-effects extravaganza that stands as the defining entrant in, and the nadir of, the disaster porn genre. Roland Emmerich’s epic slab of cinematic compost concerns the planet’s destruction in 2012, the date that the Mayans…
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A Serious Man (2009): B+
The title of the Coen Bros.’ A Serious Man is both ironic and not, as the filmmaking duo’s latest is a borderline-farce about a 1967 Midwestern Jewish family’s disintegration that slowly reveals layers of ever-graver fatalism. Of a thematic piece with their prior No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, the Coens’ tale…
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The White Ribbon (2009): C+
Michael Haneke tones down the admonitory audience haranguing with his Palme d'Or-winning The White Ribbon, a welcome relief that nonetheless doesn’t salvage the film from being another of the Funny Games auteur’s unpersuasively rigid portraits of man’s venality. In the small Austrian agricultural village of Eichwald in the years preceding WWI, a place where church…
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Paranormal Activity (2009): C
On the evidence of Paranormal Activity, ten years is how long filmmakers must wait before blatantly ripping off cult classics. Oren Peli’s super-low-budget film is a shameless domestic variation on The Blair Witch Project, not only in its use of faux-verité documentary footage for a ghost story but with regards to its actual finale, which…
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The Messenger (2009): B+
Staying out of an actor’s way is a considerable directorial skill, and one that Oren Moverman exhibits with assurance throughout The Messenger, the tale of a decorated Iraqi war hero named Will (Ben Foster) who, upon returning to the States, is assigned to spend his last three months of active duty alongside old pro Tony…
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Adventureland (2009): C+
Adventureland has a potent sense of time (1987), place (suburbia) and setting (a local amusement park, the summer after college graduation). What writer/director Greg Mottola’s semi-autobiographical follow-up to Superbad is crucially lacking, however, is verve, as his story – about James’ (Jesse Eisenberg) efforts to navigate issues of love and friendship while working at the…
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An Education (2009): C
Little more than a teen-targeted public service announcement for both avoiding relationships with mature men and staying in school, An Education plays like something fit for a high school heath education class. In 1960s England, 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) spends her days and nights following demanding daddy’s (Alfred Molina) orders to keep grades up in…
