Blog Profile / Slate - Movies
| URL : | http://www.slate.com/id/2193043/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Film / New Releases | |
| Posts on Regator: | 315 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.2 | |
| Archived Since: | June 9, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Hall Pass reviewed: Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, and the Farrelly brothers achieve new lows in misogyny.
I apologize to my mother for the review I'm about to write, but the Farrelly brothers have driven me to it. Their latest movie, Hall Pass (New Line Cinema), traffics in a brand of misogyny so puzzling that it can only be analyzed by examining the film's raunchy jokes at close range. Show More Summary
Unknown reviewed: Liam Neeson is a gentle, hulking, and lovable action hero.
Unknown (Warner Bros.) wants to be a spy thriller in the Bourne mode: an amnesiac hero, a shadowy international organization, intricately choreographed chases through a chilly European capital. Granted, this is cut-rate Bourne, as befits a late February release. Show More Summary
Thelma & Louise alternate ending: why it would have ruined the film.
I remember seeing Thelma & Louise—just reissued by MGM in a 20th-anniversary Blu-Ray edition—with my mother upon its release in 1991. I must have been home on break from graduate school. I know we enjoyed it, though we stopped somewhere short of full-on love. Show More Summary
Just Go With It reviewed: Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler, Brooklyn Decker, and Nicole Kidman prove that the American romantic comedy is in deep trouble.
You know how we've all been cutting romantic comedies a break these past few years? It isn't just me. There's been a tendency among critics to grade this genre on a curve. We afford extra credit to those rare rom-coms that aren't completely...Show More Summary
The Other Woman with Natalie Portman, reviewed.
"I hate it when the heroine's beautiful but she can't get a date," complains Emilia Greenleaf (Natalie Portman) as she walks out of a romantic movie in The Other Woman (IFC Films), written and directed by Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex) from a novel by Ayelet Waldman. Show More Summary
Javier Bardem in Biutiful reviewed: Get ready to be really depressed.
For a foreign-language film that's an unremitting downer, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful (Roadside Attractions) made a surprisingly strong showing in the Oscar nominations this year, with a best picture nod for the movie and a best actor nod for Javier Bardem. Show More Summary
Jason Statham and Ben Foster find time for some awesome, ridiculous male bonding.
The Mechanic (CBS Films) makes you remember why movies like The Mechanic exist. On paper, the story sounds rote and overfamiliar: A world-class professional hitman teams up with a troubled youth to avenge the death of the young man's father, who was also the hitman's mentor in the art of elite assassination. Show More Summary
The Company Men reviewed: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Costner, Chris Cooper, and Rosemarie Dewitt.
Two years into the global financial crisis, it's time we started thinking about the other guys. The well-off, comfortably oblivious guys, men who might not have been directly responsible for the ruinous market bubble but who certainly enjoyed a long run of benefiting from it before their jobs and lives began to crumble beneath them. Show More Summary
No Strings Attached reviewed: Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher try to be more than friends who have sex all the time.
For the past year or so, I've been grading romantic comedies on a curve: Going the Distance got a break because of the minimalism of its low-concept plot and because it allowed its female lead, played by Drew Barrymore, to crack actual jokes that were occasionally even funny. Show More Summary
Barney's Version reviewed: A bracing jolt of pure, uncut Paul Giamatti.
Do you still laugh whenever you remember Paul Giamatti in Sideways, taking Thomas Haden Church aside to hiss the warning, "I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot"? If Giamatti's particular brand of sad-eyed misanthropy floats your boat,...Show More Summary
The Green Hornet reviewed: Michel Gondry, Seth Rogen, and Jay Chou attempt a superhero movie.
The Green Hornet (Sony Pictures), director Michel Gondry's first foray into mainstream action filmmaking, presents a good test case for the auteur theory. Though he's made only one truly great film so far, the 2004 sci-fi-fantasy/romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry is nothing if not an "author," a filmmaker possessed of an unmistakable personal style. [more...]
Blue Valentine, with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, reviewed.
Within the first 15 minutes of Derek Cianfrance's wrenching romantic drama Blue Valentine (The Weinstein Company), you know more about the intimate, day-to-day details of its characters' lives than you do by the end of most movies. Cindy and Dean (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling) are a married couple in their late 20s or early 30s. Show More Summary
Slatemovie critic Dana Stevens' Top 10 movies of 2010.
The end-of-year 10-best list makes sense neither as an objective ranking system nor as a personal aesthetic manifesto. The first option is absurd on its face; the second subordinates the movies themselves to some idealized critical vision, ignoring the way good films sneak in and rearrange our neat shelves of likes and dislikes. Show More Summary
Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, with Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, reviewed.
I want to be one of those people who loves Sofia Coppola. I've been waiting for years now to see the things in this promising young director's work that so many of my smart colleagues do: a fresh, promising American voice (that much I'll grant) who's maturing and deepening with every film (that's where the Sofia-lovers lose me). Show More Summary
The Coen brothers' new Western, True Grit, with Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, reviewed.
The Coen brothers make two kinds of movies: ones that obsess over the existence of evil and ones that muse on it, accept it merrily, and plow on. True Grit (Paramount Pictures) is the second type, which I tend to prefer. I fear thisShow More Summary
How Do You Know, with Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, and Jack Nicholson, reviewed.
The debate around the new James L. Brooks film How Do You Know (Columbia Pictures) is at least as interesting as the movie itself. Critics have chosen sides on this big, glossy, star-filled romantic comedy: For one camp, it's "a sloppy,...Show More Summary
Tron: Legacy with Jeff Bridges, reviewed.
The idea to make a sequel to the 1982 movie Tron—which was a hit neither with most critics nor with the public and which has amassed, at best, a campy cult following among a niche of gamers and sci-fi fans—is an arrogant overestimation of the original's value. Show More Summary
The Tourist reviewed, with optional spoilers, so you won't have to see it.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, why? Ach du lieber Gott, warum? After the thing of beauty that was The Lives of Others (2006), a stately, serene meditation on love, art, and surveillance in Cold War-era East Germany, why did you accept...Show More Summary
Go see David O. Russell's The Fighter.
David O. Russell loves a good melee. Whether in the mode of road-trip farce (Flirting With Disaster), Gulf War satire (Three Kings), or a difficult-to-classify new genre that might, at a stretch, be called existential romantic comedy (I Heart Huckabees), Russell makes movies that mix it up. Show More Summary
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn't even have funny dufflepuds.
This is a dark hour for Narnia, children. The threat comes not from the fearsome giants of the North, or the warlike Telmarines. As Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) explains at the outset of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (20th Century Fox), those foes have been subdued and there is peace in the kingdom. Show More Summary