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Film

Cheap Sex

Despite the labels and levity, big-screen Sex and the City is a poor man's knockoff.

By Ella Taylor

Published: May 28, 2008

Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won't tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you've already seen that gown winging its way around the Web. Given the...

Film

Epic Bore

The Children of Huang Shi is just another sweeping, extraordinary journey to redemption.

By Ella Taylor

Published: May 28, 2008

Reluctant though I am to carp about any director who has devoted chunks of his career to bringing the nonwhite world's suffering to Western attention, Roger Spottiswoode's The Children of Huang...

Film

Army of One

A Russian grandmother visits the troops, and brings light to their misguided mission in Chechnya.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 28, 2008

Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in...

Film

The Brave and the Boll

The notorious German director on sparring with his critics and making his latest (intentional) comedy

By Luke Y. Thompson

Published: May 28, 2008

Uwe Boll isn't one to take criticism lying down. In 2006, the prolific German director, best known for his nearly annual output of poorly reviewed videogame adaptations, challenged his most vocal...

Film

The Fall

By Nick Pinkerton

Published: May 28, 2008

Something like a pain-fueled, R-rated Princess Bride, The Fall straddles the intertwined worlds of storytelling and story. One half is a child's-eye-view tour of the convalescent wing of a Los...

Film

Indiana Jones and the Fortress of Sad Decline

Its very own temple of doom, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull digs Indy into a deep hole.

By Robert Wilonsky

Published: May 21, 2008

Here's your hat, Indy, but, really, what's your hurry? Because 19 years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn't, and 15 years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to...

Film

The Way You Make Me Feel

Harmony Korine creates a Neverland for celeb impersonators in the singular and sincere Mister Lonely.

By Jim Ridley

Published: May 21, 2008

A man in a Michael Jackson outfit — red shirt, black jeans, white face mask — rides hunched over the tiny frame of a clown bike. Jutting out to his side, attached by a wire, is a...

Film

The Terrible Infant Speaks

Harmony Korine talks about his new movie Mister Lonely and coming home.

By Jim Ridley, Jack Silverman

Published: May 21, 2008

The snapshot, smudged with soot, shows a man with a puzzled expression propped up in a hospital bed. He is clearly a patient of some kind. The object cradled in his arms explains the puzzlement: a...

Film

Going to Pieces

Fugitive sucks the poetry and the life out of the Holocaust survival tale on which it is based.

By Ella Taylor

Published: May 21, 2008

Canadian poet Anne Michaels' beautiful 1996 novel, Fugitive Pieces — about a Jewish writer immobilized by the memory of his Polish family's murder at the hands of the Nazis —...

Film

A Four-Letter Word

By Ed Gonzalez

Published: May 21, 2008

In praise of Larry Kramer's Faggots , specifically its forked satire, author Reynolds Price wrote: "It offers us oddly entertaining, generally exaggerated copies of foolish or evil behavior in...

Film

Floating Life

Hou Hsiao-hsien and his red balloon watch over a lonely mother and son in this soaring Flight.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 14, 2008

About a thousand movies ago, I made the truculent, unprovable assertion that if Chinese grandmaster Hou Hsiao-hsien were French, he'd be a household name. Now the moment of truth arrives with...

Film

Hearts and Minds

Nick Broomfield and his actors use both in this sympathetic re-creation of the Haditha massacre.

By Anthony Kaufman

Published: May 14, 2008

Nick Broomfield, known for his unseemly documentary portraits of Aileen Wuornos, Heidi Fleiss, and Courtney Love, brings a surprising dose of compassion to his third dramatic feature, an engaging...

Film

Prince (Less) Charming

Facing Indy at the box office, Narnia sequel ups the action and loses some magic

By Ella Taylor

Published: May 14, 2008

Things never happen the same way twice." Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, popping his computer-generated shaggy head briefly into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince...

Film

Get Out of Jail Free

Errol Morris cuts the Abu Ghraib MPs some slack in Standard Operating Procedure.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 7, 2008

It's been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line , a found "noir" that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris' movie...

Film

Fast Track to Nowhere

It's anime on overdrive in the Wachowski brothers' souped-up, tricked-out Speed Racer.

By J. Hoberman

Published: May 7, 2008

Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series — one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American TV — into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy...

Film

New Blood

The joys of DIY filmmaking persist in Son of Rambow.

By Jim Ridley

Published: May 7, 2008

No adult has ever been able to codify what separates a good movie from a classic. In kid terms, though — those favored by Son of Rambow , a chipper tribute to the cinema as both supplier...

Film

Mamet's new film, Redbelt , showing at the SF International Film Fest

By J. Hoberman

Published: April 30, 2008

David Mamet's Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl — call it Roundhouse of Games . The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best...

Film

Here Comes the Bride. Yawn.

McDreamy tries to win over his engaged gal pal in My Best Friend's Made of Honor Wedding.

By Robert Wilonsky

Published: April 30, 2008

In Made of Honor , Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial "fornicator" slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle...

Film

Mighty Avenger

Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man is a thing to marvel.

By Scott Foundas

Published: April 30, 2008

Chalk it up to personal preference, but I've always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. I mean the ones, like Batman 's Bruce Wayne, whose...

Film

Baby Mama Needs a Diaper Change

By Robert Wilonsky

Published: April 23, 2008

Could have sworn I've seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like, sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled "The Baby Show" and aired on the other prime-time series...