“Judy, Judy,” Jimmy Stewart famously told Kim Novak in Vertigo, as he forced her to change her appearance to that of his dead lover. “It can’t make that much difference to you.”This was Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous and revealing line in his 1958 classic, a meditation on the male gaze. I thought of it when I read about Haywire’s post-production. Director Steven Soderbergh deepened the voice of star Gina Carano

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

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

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.

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

Pauline Kael famously stated that great films are rarely perfect films. Do we ever wonder about the opposite? Are perfect films rarely great films? As the ultimate easy swallow, The Descendants, the latest release from Sideways writer/director Alexander Payne, has been practically pieced together by magical gold statuettes in the advanced laboratory of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s been, why, since

I don’t think I’ve seen anything lately quite like the ending of the 2011 Sundance Jury Prize winner Like Crazy. Spending time watching the rise and disintegration of a marriage, I wondered, is there really a moment when a romance ends? When the present becomes irretrievably the past? If so, then we’ve already passed it, and tied no cloth around a tree to mark where we left the main road. The choices these two young people make –

With rum-soaked deadpan bemusement, Johnny Depp plays Kemp, a new reporter at the worst newspaper in Puerto Rico. Kemp is a talented writer and a talented drinker at a newspaper short of the former and full of the latter. His adventures in Puerto Rico range from drinking to cockfighting to bowling to drinking. He pools his poor pay for a crummy apartment with a pair of oddball newsmen (Michael Rispoli and

Why are art films becoming horror films? Perhaps art film directors are finding that the most effective way to relate to our frazzled age is to mask it in the aesthetics of terror. Last year’s apocalyptic ballet movie, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, heralded this new trend--that movie might as well have had zombie dancers. This year it’s Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols' story of mental illness, marriage, and prophecies of doom. Shelter stars