‘Mister Lonely’ shows us where 20th-century pop culture goes to die
The only good thing about the British director Michael Winterbottom is that he consistently works with a great cinemato-grapher, Marcel Zyskind. And two of Zyskind’s three best-photographed films star Samantha Morton: Code 46 and Mister Lonely. Code 46 is about the future of globalization; Mister [...]

And big humiliation in ‘Standard Operating Procedure’
Errol Morris’s new documentary about the low-ranking “bad apples” who were charged with various forms of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib isn’t exactly revelatory. You’ve already read the facts, and the photographs that shocked the entire world (the hooded figure standing on a box, the dusty piles of naked [...]

David Mamet’s ‘Redbelt’ is not satisfying
We cannot consider Redbelt without considering Never Back Down. The films were released within the space of two months, and one (Redbelt) is the adult/arthouse version of the other (Never Back Down). Both star famous African actors (Chiwetel Ejiofor in Redbelt, Djimon Hounsou in Never Back Down); both stars play [...]

‘Son of Rambow’ authentically captures pre-pubescent innocence
For most boys in the early ’80s, First Blood—in which a still recognizably human Sylvester Stallone wanders into a sleepy Northwest town, gets hassled by the local sheriff, and proceeds to pummel poor deputies like they’re the Vietcong—was a bit of a milestone. John Rambo had scars and a [...]

The touristic pleasures of Hou Hsiao-Hsien
The class of people who frequently watch foreign-language films must not be separated from those who frequently travel to faraway places to experience other worlds. The foreign-film lover is a species of this larger type, the tourist, with the sole exception that he/she doesn’t travel far to see strange things, [...]

The new propaganda film about intelligent design doesn’t just get Darwin wrong. It gets intelligent design wrong, too

The most bizarre thing about the new intelligent design propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed isn’t that former Nixon speech writer Ben Stein is being paid to extol a pseudoscience whose hypotheses can’t be tested (everyone has a [...]

All hail Richard Jenkins. Now, if we can just remember his name
The movie is fine.
The movie is fine, but Richard Jenkins is a miracle. Richard Jenkins has 77 film and TV acting credits to his name since 1974. He’s best known as the father on Six Feet Under. He’s probably lurking in your favorite film, [...]

‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ takes rom-com Mad Libs and fills in the blanks with greatness

Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. I am going totally geronimo-banana-bonkers over here. Someone actually made a really and truly enjoyable romantic comedy! And that “someone” isn’t just any old Uncle Jerry-Joe McMiscellanewhoevers! It happens to [...]

‘Smart People’ isn’t Baumbach, but still worth your time

If, as you settle into your seat at a Smart People matinee, you dream of the next coming of dysfunctional-intellectual family specialist Noah Baumbach, your hopes will be dashed by the very first scene, in which our curmudgeonly hero, Victorian literature professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), parks [...]

‘Street Kings’: An un-thinking man’s cop movie
With its crime pedigree of cowriter James Ellroy (best known for his novels L.A. Confidential and American Tabloid) and director David Ayer (screenwriter of Training Day), you’d hope, maybe even expect, that Street Kings would hit a high-mark for the genre. Instead, it turns out to be a bland [...]