What Diane Keaton would say about ‘The Women’

What’s up, bitches? Diane Keaton here. I just got back from seeing The Women and, um, I couldn’t help but notice something: I AM NOT IN THIS MOVIE. Where the fuck am I? I am the queen bee of this shit. The hive mother. Annette Benning wishes she [...]

‘Burn After Reading’ is an astute, brutal comedy

It’s weird, but I don’t even think of Brad Pitt as an actor anymore. I think of him as a photograph—a still image in a tabloid looking serene and carrying around 15 babies. But Pitt does, in fact, act in Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ follow-up to [...]

‘Transsiberian’ brings the Russians back as villains
For a professedly Hitchcockian thriller, Brad Anderson’s follow-up to The Machinist is a little obvious. Some nice Christian women have checkered pasts? No shit. Ben Kingsley looks awesome in a furry Russian hat? So true. But if you concentrate very hard and don’t let the blaring danger cues spoil [...]

‘I Served the King of England’ captures Bohumil Hrabal’s sense of fun

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Prague Spring, when Czechoslovakia—then controlled by the USSR—got a new president who ushered in a season of happy reform: art and literature flourished, the press rediscovered its backbone, civic rights were restored. (Sound familiar?) The joy [...]

‘In Search of a Midnight Kiss’ oozes charm
This little indie movie, exquisitely filmed in black and white digital by Robert Murphy (who also has a small part as a needy, violent hick), is notable primarily for its attempt to see Los Angeles from a pedestrian’s point of view. The climax of the movie is a [...]

‘Traitor’ is strictly TV movie fare

When watching Traitor, the viewer is overcome by the weirdest urge: You want to will the movie to become better than it really is. The story, conceived by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin)—taking a “cop undercover in the mob” movie and shifting it to the FBI [...]

‘The Rocker’ does not totally suck
As the lights dimmed before The Rocker, a kid behind me—trying to scare his sister—moaned, “The Reapah’s heeah! THE REEEAPAAAH!” Good one, kid behind me. That joke was both funnier and more metal than the movie that was to come.
Robert “Fish” Fishman (Rainn Wilson, in his first leading role) is [...]

All hail Steve Coogan in ‘Hamlet 2′

Join me, fellow BBC America junkies, in singing the praises of Steve Coogan, that lizardy, poker-faced mimic who specializes (especially through his long-running character Alan Partridge) in taking fringe celebrity narcissism to new levels of squicky, squirmy bliss. Hamlet 2, Coogan’s debut as an American lead, stands as an [...]

Dear Woody Allen: Dump Scarlett, please
I do hope that this is the last time Woody Allen will cast Scarlett Johansson in anything, because in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, she’s approaching pure trollop. As Cristina, an anything-goes sexpot who entertains artistic pretensions, Johansson could be Brigitte Bardot dubbed with a flat American accent. If you entertain the [...]

The thrills never melt in ‘Frozen River’

A house on a truck keeps pulling up to a falling-down trailer, but then it is driven away. The house is supposed to replace the trailer, but the tough single mother who ordered it and said she’d pay up can’t. So the house keeps leaving again. It’s a tormenting [...]