Glenn Close will be widely praised for her subtle work in Albert Nobbs, as the eponymous Irish woman surviving the nineteenth century disguised as a male waiter. Her performance nevertheless seems to be a classic case of undermugging (if one can have a classic case of something I just invented.) While I admire her willingness to try something so tranquil, the result is understated understatedness, which has a strange way of

I’ve seen The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo twice, now, in both the Swedish and Hollywood version. English doesn’t improve it. Given that it has the same flaw--a glacial, hard-to-edit first chapter shocked to life by a gripping second--it appears to be a problem with the story, or at least how the enormously popular Stieg Larsson best-seller travels to the screen. I prefer the Swedish version, starring Noomi Rapace to David Fincher’s

The most deliciously scabrous skit on the mid-nineties HBO comedy series “Mr. Show” was “The Dewey Awards,” which skewered the sanctimonious trend of rewarding A-list Hollywood actors for their “brave” portrayals of the autistic, the mentally retarded, and other less fortunate types. Those rankled by the sight of Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks playing these parts, rather than real-life challenged actors, could gasp in private delight at this long-delayed

Clint Eastwood’s J.Edgar really threw me for a loop. I went in expecting a thriller along the lines of DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd but with more heft, because Hoover was such an enormous figure. Instead I got an epic love story between Hoover and his #2, Clyde Tolson. Whereas a movie like Brokeback Mountain was able to craft an engaging film around their romance, one the filmmakers didn’t dance around, J. Edgar plods along at an excruciatingly

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson exploded onto the international scene in 2007 with his unsettling child vampire flick, ‘Let the Right One In.’ In that film, he took a rather implausible premise and turned it into one of the more unsettling horror films of recent memory. Pushing forward into the realm of the improbable, Alfredson unveils his surefooted adaptation of John Le Carre’s unfilmable novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (the only other adaptation

We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t the first film this year to outlast its immediacy. A novel written by Lionel Shriver in the wake of the Columbine school killings, director Lynne Ramsay has been trying to make the film since her last feature, Morvern Callar, in 2002. The unusually long gestation period has stripped the story of its ripped-from-the-headlines quality. It now plays like a quaint, violent memory. These are the under-parented demon children of not so long ago

The premise of Rachid Bouchareb’s new film London River is simple: as London reels from the catastrophic transit bombings of June 2005, two people are brought together by some aberrant twist of fate. Elisabeth (played by the lovely Brenda Blethyn) comfortably lives out her retirement on a Guernsey Islands farm in England when she catches the news of the terrorist attacks. This immediately yields the question,

A man. A woman. An underground train. Traded looks. Traded fantasies. No one looking. No one aware. The train stops. The lick of her lips. The ring on her finger. Will they? Won’t they? The crowd in the station. The man is Brandon. We soon meet the rest of him. His job. His coldness. His naked body wrapped in blue sheets. His overpowering sexual impulse. Alleys. Back doors, Luxury hotels. His computer tracked off to clean porn.

American audiences who would pass on Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist because a) it’s a silent movie and b) it’s in black and white, will be missing one of the best films in decades. Just like some of its unforgettable elders in the silent-film era, The Artist is funny, touching without being sentimental, with story line and feelings perfectly conveyed without words. If you ever wondered how the great stars of day before yesterday

Who doesn’t love The Muppets? Birds love them. Bees love them. Even monkeys stuck in trees love them. That’s been the case since the 1970s, when Jim Henson first stuck his hand into a green sock and pulled out a cultural icon (I know, he’s not really a green sock.) Why you would have to be a heartless Texas oilman played by Chris Cooper (with his own personal rap!) to want to quash the long-gestating big-screen