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Ty Burr
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The unrivaled year for moviemaking: 1939
It’s an article of faith that 1939 was the pinnacle of American movies and it has all been downhill ever since. To say otherwise is, in certain circles, to risk having your Criterion DVDs revoked and be sentenced to eternally wander the multiplex in sackcloth and ashes. The glow of that annus mirabilis extends into the future: The Academy of ...
In 'Dillinger is Dead,' alienation lives
Pity the unsuspecting moviegoer who wanders into the Brattle expecting to see the new Johnny Depp film. “Dillinger Is Dead’’ is, instead, an unearthed rarity: a dryly rapturous 1969 drama of modern alienation directed by the excellent, underrated Italian filmmaker Marco Ferreri (1928-97). With sizable debts owed to mid-’60s Jean-Luc Godard, “Dillinger’’ is one of those artful endurance tests that ...'I Love You, Beth Cooper' rehashes teen films
“I Love You, Beth Cooper’’ is unusual in that it’s the rare teen stu-com - shorthand for “stupid comedy,’’ a proud lineage that goes back to “Porky’s’’ and beyond - that’s based on a novel. On the other hand, maybe not so unusual, since author Larry Doyle has written for “The Simpsons’’ and “Beavis and Butt-Head’’ (and The New Yorker, ...‘Public Enemies’ has powerful stars, problematic script
How could “Public Enemies’’ go wrong? The director is Michael Mann, one of the smartest mainstream mavericks working. Star Johnny Depp brings his sizable intelligence and charisma to bear on the role of John Dillinger, the legendary Depression-era bank robber. Christian Bale plays Dillinger’s implacable FBI hellhound, Melvin Purvis. The shoot-outs have been shot with a fastidiousness that extends to ...As the older woman, Pfeiffer shines in ‘Cheri’
It takes a while for “Cheri’’ to limber up and get to the heart of the matter. A Belle Époque romantic drama reuniting some of the talents from 1988’s “Dangerous Liaisons’’ - director Stephen Frears, star Michelle Pfeiffer, writer Christopher Hampton - the movie at first seems a waxwork parody of Merchant Ivory-style filmmaking. It’s all bustles and brocades and ...‘Whatever Works’ gets caught up in caricature development
‘Whatever Works’’? That sounds like Woody Allen’s approach to his career these days. The 73-year-old director made his last film in Spain because that was where the money was; his new one is based on a script written three decades ago for Zero Mostel and pulled out of mothballs when a writers’ strike loomed last year. Allen’s habit of getting ...‘My Sister’s Keeper’ alters the novel, but not the need for hankies
The domestic afflictions in “My Sister’s Keeper’’ pile onto the Fitzgerald family with biblical fury. Sixteen-year-old Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) has battled leukemia for most of her life. Eleven-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin) has had it with being a “donor child,’’ born to provide marrow and tissue for her sister, and is suing for legal emancipation. Oldest son Jesse (Evan Ellingson) is ...Movie Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’’ is - there’s no polite way to say this - 2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture. Giant robots smash each other to rivets, Shanghai and the Egyptian pyramids are reduced to rubble, fighter jets scream across the sky, bombs burst in air, and Megan Fox’s measurements are deployed on the screen ..."Year One'' takes a charmless trip back in time
When the movie summer of 2009 is writ in the annals, Hank Azaria may turn out to have been its secret star. Certainly he deserves a plaque for most saves. He alone made “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian’’ bearable as the prissy evil pharaoh, and his handful of scenes as the biblical patriarch Abraham - promising mass ..."Departures'' confronts death -- gently
‘Departures’’ is an art-house crowd pleaser about death, a film that touches on profound matters even as it sentimentalizes them into emotional compost. It’s easy to see why the film won the foreign-language Oscar in February over better, tougher works like “Waltz With Bashir,’’ “The Class,’’ and “Revanche.’’ This is the kind of tastefully poignant drama that asks its audience ...Voices are heard loudly in "Burma''
To watch the riveting documentary “Burma VJ’’ at the precise moment when the upheaval over Iran’s election is playing out in the news is a giddy, distressing deja vu experience. Here’s a film about the late-summer 2007 uprisings in Myanmar, one of the most brutally controlled countries on the planet, cobbled together from video and cellphone camera footage, tape recordings, ..."Treeless Mountain'' shares sad story of two Seoul sisters
It’s a tricky business when smart, articulate filmmakers examine inarticulate lives. How much do you show and how much do you tell? When do you push your characters to where you want them to go and when do you let them get there on their own? Directors in the school of what a recent New York Times article called “neo-neo ...Rising nervousness over where, what is home
Something is in the air, and it's not just Carl Frederickson's cozy pastel cottage in the Disney/Pixar hit "Up."
Francis Ford Coppola: at home on the far side of the digital divide
Yes, Virginia, there is a Francis Ford Coppola, and, yes, he's still making movies. Back in the bad old days of the New Hollywood, the legendary filmmaker, now 70, directed "The Godfather" (the best movie of all time? discuss) and "The Conversation," and almost lost his mind bringing "Apocalypse Now" to the screen. To moviegoers under 30, though, he may ...
'O'Horten' reveals the mysterious universe to a retired train engineer
'O'Horten" is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism - a Bent Hamer movie, in other words. The hero is a 67-year-old Oslo train engineer named Odd Horten (Bård Owe), but, really, there's nothing very odd about him. He's neatly pressed, polite, reserved. The only time he seems to unbend is in the cab of his train as it cuts ...'Pelham' stays on track for almost the entire ride
Once upon a time, in a land called the early 1970s, New York City was a hole. A bankrupt, dirty, cynical, exhausted sewer of urban blight, light years away from the city's current status as shiny tourist destination. There were movies made about this New York - "Dog Day Afternoon," "The French Connection," "The Out of Towners" - and one ...David Carradine: An appreciation
A true wild child of Hollywood, David Carradine was a member of a performing dynasty, a '60s survivor, a legendary hell-raiser, and a consistently underrated actor. His death at 72 in a Bangkok hotel room robs us of a chance to see where his comeback in the "Kill Bill" movies would have ultimately led.
'Hangover' hurts so good
About 15 minutes into "The Hangover," the movie arrives at the scene that unquestionably served as the screenwriters' initial inspiration. It's a worst-case-scenario of bachelor party morning-after, and it is howlingly funny. A blow-up doll floats in the Jacuzzi, and a chicken struts through the living room. One of the chairs is on fire. There's a tiger in the bathroom. ...Ferrell, chased by dinosaurs, aliens, and '70s schlock in 'Land of the Lost'
About halfway into "Land of the Lost," our intrepid time-space travelers stumble into a desert wasteland filled with the half-buried bric-a-brac of human civilization: Ferris wheels and catapults, convertibles and fast food signs, swimming pools and phone booths and ice cream trucks. It's a cultural boneyard. Not at all coincidentally, so's the movie. Genially terrible, "Lost" is lazy, sloppy multiplex ...'Easy Virtue' provides a risky trip to the Roaring Twenties
'Easy Virtue" is based on a 1925 Noel Coward play, and it strains like mad to hoist his weightless, witty Jazz Age banter into the 21st century. The strain shows, but not so badly as you might think; if you can ignore a ridiculously overbearing soundtrack - a big if - the film's a pleasant bauble. Still, those coming in ...Pixar's 'Up' is a fantastical voyage
I think we can safely say at this point that Pixar has entered its Baroque period. When "Toy Story" came out in 1995, who would have guessed that within 15 years the company would be creating the richest, most resonant entertainments in Hollywood - on such subjects as culinary rats and a robot sentinel left in charge of a junkyard ...'Katyn' brings a WWII massacre to light
'Katyn" is a history lesson for a country and a people forced to forget at gunpoint. A quietly epic, very precise re-creation of events leading up to and following the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Polish Army officers and POWs by Soviet troops in the Katyn forest and elsewhere, the film is a national reckoning brought to the screen by possibly ...In 'The Brothers Bloom,' a cascade of cute cons doesn't know when to quit
There's clever and there's clever, and "The Brothers Bloom" is so self-consciously, adorably, aggressively clever that it ties itself in knots even before the title credits come on. A con game about con games, the second film from writer-director Rian Johnson is breezily enjoyable for about 10 minutes, until you realize the entire movie is going to be pitched at ...Not much new or funny in second visit to 'Museum'
'People, Mr. Daly, want the next thing," says a character to ex-museum guard Larry Daly (Ben Stiller) in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian," and there's Hollywood's rationale for sequelitis in an over-budgeted, computer-generated nutshell. The follow-up to the surprise 2006 hit movie reeks of No. 2: It's bigger, noisier, shinier, and dumber, and it has no earthly ...'Little Ashes' provides more schlock than shock
'Little Ashes" is without question the only movie in the entire history of the medium whose potential audience includes both teenage mall-chicks and devotees of 1920s Spanish surrealism. Since that's an awfully small piece of the Venn diagram, we may as well throw in lovers of bad cinema. At least they'll go home happy.In 'The Girlfriend Experience,' everyone is selling something
Fair warning: I had to see "The Girlfriend Experience" twice before its pieces settled into coherent shape. At first the movie seems as wayward and affectless as its main character, a high-priced Manhattan escort played by porn star Sasha Grey. From what we see here, the jury's still out on whether Grey can act in the traditionally accepted mainstream-movie manner, ...'Terminator' is back with a vengeance
At a certain point in "Terminator Salvation," grizzled savior of mankind John Connor (Christian Bale) heads out the door to do battle, turns to his pregnant wife (Bryce Dallas Howard), and growls, "I'll be back."On Demand picks
MIGHTY APHRODITE (Encore on Comcast ) Not quite top-drawer Woody Allen, but pretty funny anyway. Allen deftly delivers his own lines, and Mira Sorvino (above, with Allen) is terrific as the sweet, dumb prostitute who is the birth mother of the child Allen's character and his wife adopted. (R; runs through June 11)
'Management' whimsically traces a creepy kind of love
Don't be fooled by the star wattage: "Management" is a small, underwhelming indie comedy about the cuteness of the long-distance stalker.'Rudo y Cursi' examines the goals of two men and an entire society
'Rudo y Cursi" is a grave and calculated affront to the men of Mexico, and that's the source of its roistering charm. A soccer story in which, perversely, the game itself is rarely shown, the movie's democratic in spirit - everyone goes home a loser. But what can you expect, asks writer-director Carlos Cuaron, of a country where all the ...Swirl of themes, story lines weave through 'Adoration'
'Adoration," the latest cool blue puzzle-box from Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan, has a lot on its plate. Terrorism, adolescence, anti-Arab racism, mixed marriages, online communities, teacher-student relations, the sins of fathers, the anger of children, the Nativity, and tow-truck ethics are some of the many issues the filmmaker chews over here. That the movie doesn't quite topple over like a ...'Tulpan' explores tension between old ways and modern times
In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," "Tulpan" drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there. This particular nowhere is the Hunger Steppe in southern Kazakhstan, a terrain awe-inspiring in its vastness and lack of defining features. The place feels like Earth 1.0, ...