Navel-Gazing

Astronomers will love The City Dark

Relaying stargazers’ complaints about city lights, the first half of the documentary film The City Dark risks becoming a platform for a fringe user group, until filmmaker Ian Cheney finally moves from anecdote to evidence, denouncing electric light as a harmful pollutant.

Wednesday, January 25,2012
Movie Reviews

A Tame Approach

A Dangerous Method is a serious misnomer

David Riedel

One of the pleasures of watching a David Cronenberg film is the guarantee that something nasty will happen. The violence in his films lurks beneath the surface, hinted at in the cold, clinical dialogue uttered by his characters.

Tuesday, January 17,2012
Movie Reviews

Muted Emotions

Sex and…more meaningless sex in Shame

David Riedel

As Shame presents it, sex addiction prevents the addict from having meaningful contact with another person. All conversations are perfunctory. In fact, all human contact is superficial. All business success is meaningless because everything comes down to this: How will I get laid next? How will that act keep everything at arm’s length? Sounds great, right?

Tuesday, January 10,2012
Movie Reviews

Comic Strip

The life and times of a French provocateur

Ann Lewinson

Serge Gainsbourg has no American equivalent. The homely and hard-living French singer-songwriter’s astoundingly wide-ranging output was often overshadowed by his affairs with the world’s most beautiful women and obscene outbursts on talk shows.

Wednesday, January 4,2012
Movie Reviews

The Pictures Got Loud

A French love letter to American silent cinema

Ann Lewinson

Hard on the heels of Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s mash note to Georges Méliès and Harold Lloyd, comes the considerably less expensive—and considerably more charming—The Artist, a black-and-white, nearly wordless return to silent storytelling, made by Frenchmen and filmed in Hollywood. Set at the dawn of the talkies, its tale is as familiar as Singin’ in the Rain and A Star Is Born.

Wednesday, December 21,2011
Movie Reviews

A Good Horse

The thoroughbred in War Horse deserves a better movie

David Riedel

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse is a grand, sweeping, lush and magnificent movie. It’s filmmaking that self-consciously recalls a John Ford epic, such as The Searchers or The Quiet Man. If only it were as good.

Wednesday, December 14,2011
Movie Reviews

Help from the Help

Sixth floor provides setting for droll romantic fantasy

David Riedel

Paris, 1962: Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini) and his wife, Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain), have white-people problems, namely the family housekeeper. She’s a nasty old French bitch who won’t let Suzanne clear out her dead mother-in-law’s room.

Wednesday, December 7,2011
Movie Reviews

In the End

Melancholia has us choose acceptance or fear

Kirsten Dunst’s dimple-pointed smile lights up the opening scenes of Melancholia. She exudes such happiness that we don’t suspect an impending cosmic catastrophe, though we do begin to sense that she feigns happiness for the benefit of others.

Wednesday, November 30,2011
Movie Reviews

What's in His Head?

Real or imagined, the storm in Take Shelter carries us away

David Riedel

Here’s something you don’t often get at the movies: genuine surprise. Take Shelter, however, offers plenty, not just in its story, but also in the idea that a deliberately paced family drama can entertain while serving up liberal doses of economic allegory and psychological thriller.

Wednesday, November 23,2011
Movie Reviews

An ascending descendant

Rough start on redemption road in The Descendants

David Riedel

The Descendants opens with a boating accident. It follows with a George Clooney, as the character Matt King, voice-over: “My friends on the mainland think, because I live in Hawaii, I live in paradise. Are they nuts?”