The Concert (review)

This is how you get your arthouse-averse friends to watch a foreign fil-um: show them The Concert. Yes, they’ll have to read subtitles, but it is just simply crammed with so much Hollywood feel-good that a studio remake is surely just around the corner, probably starring Reese Witherspoon with a French accent and Stanley Tucci pulling a Russian one.

The Lincoln Lawyer (review)

Josh Lucas and Matthew McConaughey have never actually appeared onscreen together before. It had been entirely possible, up till this moment, that they were the same person, in a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of way. Would this be how the universe ends, with parallel-universe versions of the same actor causing all of infinity to collapse into some hellish singularity?

His & Hers (review)

From a girl-infant’s cries as her father puts her down to the laments of elderly women who’ve outlived their husbands, here are 70 women talking about the men in their lives with the kind of casual frankness, bald honesty, and total love that typically gets bypassed on film in favor of empty rom-com fantasies.

Limitless (review)

It’s total utter complete fantasy of the best stripe, and just the kind that plugs into an ambitious but procrastinating brain. What if I could write my novel and make a million on the stock market and learn Japanese without even breaking a sweat? What else would I do? The what-if, as it turns out, is not all that, so much.

Chalet Girl (review)

Behold! It’s a romantic comedy about a young woman who’s not looking for a boyfriend! A rom-com about a human female whose life is not consumed by the terror that she will be Alone Forever! A rom-com about a person of the not-male persuasion who has ambitions beyond the romantic!

Battle: Los Angeles (review)

Battle: Los Angeles may be about invasion, but it’s not about aliens: it’s about us. This isn’t science fiction: It’s a bleak fantasy about karma being a bitch. It’s about collective cultural guilt. Looked at from that angle, it’s fascinating.

Paul (review)

What if you and your most superbly geeky bestest friend ever met an alien? I mean a real life honest-to-Carl Sagan extry terrestrial. What if? You would plotz. You would. Like Nick Frost’s Clive does here, you would giggle like a loon and then faint, out cold from the sheer splendidness of this happenstance. I know I would.

The Tempest (review)

There’s a little bit of Hammer horror in Julie Taymor’s messy but thrilling adaptation of Shakespeare’s last play, and there’s more than a little turning-of-the-tables, all of which brings a new perspective on the play, and a new appreciation for it, which is the best we can ask for the umpteenth adaptation of a centuries-old work.

The Adjustment Bureau (review)

It keeps us on our intellectual and emotional toes as it blithely bounces us around thorny philosophical koans and lets us peek behind the scenes of the universe at the charming puppetmasters who pull the strings. But for the heaviness of the film’s metaphysics, there is something ineffably light and charming about it. If Frank Capra made The Matrix, it would be The Adjustment Bureau.