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Seen in some quarters as the feminist reply to Superbad or Knocked Up, Juno seems more like the film that actually speaks like the kids-only even more so. It comes equipped with its own special hip factor; one that automatically assumes that teens are not merely our future, they’re our present.
Atonement is the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s bestselling novel. Starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Vanessa Redgrave, it starts on a very hot day in 1935 when 13-year-old Briony sees her older sister, Cecilia (Knightley), take off her clothes and jump in the country house’s fountain in front of their housekeeper’s son (McAvoy).
Much of Margot at the Wedding takes place in a single location-a bleak East Coast family home by the seashore. It should be a pleasant scene, here by the sea. Margot (Nicole Kidman) has come for the wedding of her slightly loony sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh). But the weather seems perpetually gray and windy, the ancient family tree is up for removal-in fact and in metaphor-and family relations keep heading south for various reasons.<
Good books can be a blessing and a curse; a sweet killer of a combo for cinema. Films need stories to tell and rich characters to people them with, and often the best writer for the job is a novelist rather than a screenwriter saddled with screenwriting thoughts and formulae.
Frank Langella has been choosy about the roles he decides to play on the big screen. Meanwhile, he has cultivated a remarkable career in the theater, winning three Tony awards, including one for best actor this past June for his instantly legendary portrayal on Broadway of President Richard Nixon in the play Frost/Nixon.
Never one to undermine the efforts of fellow comrades involved in organized workers’ struggles, let’s just say it pangs me to point out that movies like this tend to deflate the currently striking Hollywood writers’ contention that they should henceforth be treated like artistes.
Just in time for the holiday season, What Would Jesus Buy? arrives on the scene with a simple but subversive message: “Stop shopping-start giving.” Despite the title, this documentary-produced by Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame)-is light on religious dogma and long on humor.
The Coen brothers’ new film, No Country for Old Men, has been called a masterpiece by several national critics, and it’s the second most roundly praised film of the year behind Ratatouille. Based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Cormac McCarthy, the movie is about the chain of events that happen after Llewelyn Moss grabs a bag of money from the site of a drug deal gone wrong.
An entertaining combination of animation and live action (but heavy on the latter), Enchanted takes every trope of classic Disney animation-helpful forest critters, love at first sight, poisoned apples, the very concept of the movie musical-and puts them up against the forces of modernity, with unexpected results: an updated fairy tale that could almost be characterized as feminist.
Todd Haynes’s head-trippy quasi-biopic of Bob Dylan is not the first film to utilize the jarring effect of multiple actors for a single role. Among the notable experiments in the subgenre are Luis Bu±uel’s surreal That Obscure Object of Desire and, recently, Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, which aims to unsettle the viewer even beyond the inherently bizarre conceit of musical chair actors.
