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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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Post-Thanks Feast
Into the awards-season typhoon I now eagerly go, so no chit-chat – here's this week's new stuff, including my contribution to Time Out New York's Best Movies of the Decade poll and my thoughts on Disney's The Princess and the Frog. The TONY Top 50 Movies of the Decade, and my ballot Out Now:The Princess…
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Dynamic Duo
Ok, well, these two new articles probably aren't exactly "dynamic," but it's Friday, and I'm tired, and that's the first title that came to mind. Nonetheless, here's this week's new published stuff, aside from the reviews of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and The Road that appear directly below this post. The Sandbox:…
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The Road (2009): B+
Whereas Cormac McCarthy is an author to whom cynicism comes easy, director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) is a filmmaker whose doubt about mankind’s capacity for good comes laced with a tinge of humanistic hopefulness. And while McCarthy’s curt, hard prose best reflects his worldview’s bleakness, Hillcoat’s direction of the novelist’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road captures,…
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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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Fitfully Fantastic
A busy week ahead, as awards-season films start screening for press. In the meantime, though, here are links to five reviews, only two of which have something nice to say. Out Now:Fantastic Mr. Fox (Slant magazine)Red Cliff (Slant magazine)Pirate Radio (Slant magazine)Staten Island (Slant magazine)Fix (Slant magazine)
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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…
