127 Hours
Boyle's followup to his Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire is the true story of hiker Aron Ralston (James Franco), who was trapped in a Utah canyon, his right hand pinned by a fallen boulder, for five days until he took extreme measures to get himself out. It should be no surprise that the two reasons to see this film are Franco's honest… read more!
Another Year
A quietly haunting character study about Tom and Gerri (Leigh stalwarts Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), an aging hippie couple living in the suburbs of London, whose remarkably healthy marriage is contrasted with the seriously screwed-up friends they give their time to. The biggest trainwreck, whose visits to their house over the course of a year (the film is neatly… read more!
Babies
This documentary about four newborns from around the world is about as cute as you would expect it to be. It's also an essentially pointless movie. Balmès took his camera and crew to four different countries to track the first year of life, from birth to walking, of two boys and two girls. The boys – one from Namibia, one… read more!
Black Swan
Icky psychodrama about a neurotic ballerina (Natalie Portman) who's been cast as the lead in a New York production of Swan Lake in which she is tasked to play both the innocent white swan and her evil twin, the alluring black swan. The story of Black Swan is basically Portman's character's descent into madness, as the pressure of trying to… read more!
Blue Valentine
Marketed as a gritty, emotionally draining drama about a disintegrating marriage, Blue Valentine is really a gritty, emotionally chilly drama about a nice guy (Ryan Gosling) whose frigid wife (Michelle Williams) hates him. Cutting back and forth between the ugly final days of this couple's relationship and the first few weeks of their budding romance six years earlier, the film… read more!
Buried
Buried is an exciting cinematic experiment, if not exactly an entertaining movie. The entire film takes place inside a small wooden coffin buried somewhere under the Iraq desert, where Ryan Reynolds, playing an American truck driver working under contract during the war, is being held for ransom by unknown kidnappers. Conveniently, he is supplied with a working cell phone as… read more!
Cairo Time
Patricia Clarkson plays Juliette, a New York magazine editor who arrives in Cairo in order to enjoy a much-needed vacation with her husband, a UN employee overseeing a refugee camp in Gaza. When hubby is delayed for several days because of work, a bored Juliette finds company in the only person she knows in the city: her husband's former colleague… read more!
Catfish
In 2007, twentysomething New York photographer Yaniv Schulman, the brother of one of Catfish's directors, started receiving painted copies of his work in the mail, apparently created by a young Michigan girl named Abby. Schulman's brother Ariel and their friend Henry Joost decided – rather suspiciously, I think – to make a documentary about Schulman's budding friendship with this child… read more!
The Concert
Aleksei Guskov – sort of the Russian Sam Neill – plays Andrei, the disgraced former conductor of Moscow's famed Bolshoi orchestra who, thirty years after his dismissal, now works as a janitor at the very theater he once commanded. In an admittedly contrived turn of events, Andrei intercepts a faxed invitation to the Bolshoi to play in Paris, and decides… read more!
Dogtooth
Bleakly funny surrealist satire about a well-to-do Greek couple who, for reasons unknown, keep their three grown children – two daughters, one son, all in their early twenties – prisoner in their pretty if isolated house. The "children" have spent their entire lives never having left the property, and the parents see to it that they have no knowledge of… read more!
Easier With Practice
The Hurt Locker's Brian Geraghty plays Davy Mitchell, a sad sack writer on a book tour/road trip across the Southwest with his brother. One night, he answers the phone at their motel to find a strange woman named Nicole on the other end – and she wants to have phone sex. Over the course of the following month, Davy and… read more!
Enter the Void
Anybody who sat through the challenging, ultra-violent Irreversible already knows about French cinema's enfant terrible Gaspar Noé, and what he's capable of. So if you have any idea who he is, you've already decided whether you can't wait to be thrilled by the director's visionary new Enter the Void or if you want to stay away from it at all… read more!
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Entertaining "documentary" from the popular British graffiti artist known only as Banksy. What Banksy – his face hidden in shadow, his voice distorted in post-production – explains to us at the beginning of the movie is that a strange, annoying little Frenchman named Thierry Guetta had been videotaping the world's great graffiti artists obsessively, and was going to make a documentary about… read more!
The Extra Man
Paul Dano is Louis, a nervous young man with an interest in 1920s literature and a gnawing curiosity about wearing women's underwear. After a humiliating incident at the New Jersey prep school where he teaches, he relocates to New York City, where he finds a new roommate in Kevin Kline's Henry Harrison, an eccentric dandy who dabbles in being a… read more!
Fair Game
Intriguing dramatization of the so-called Valerie Plame Affair, in which covert CIA operative Plame (Naomi Watts) was publicly outed by enemies in the George W. Bush Administration after her husband, ex-diplomat Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), wrote an article declaring that his government-sponsored trip to Niger turned up no evidence of any sales of uranium to Iraq – even while the… read more!
The Fighter
Hollywood's love affair with Massachusetts continues with what is at least the fifth 2010 drama set in the Bay State, joining other prestige pictures such as The Social Network, The Town, The Company Men, and Shutter Island. The energetic Fighter heads upstate from Boston and unfolds its story mostly in the town of Lowell, home of boxer Micky Ward (Mark… read more!
Get Him to the Greek
This casually entertaining spin-off of the 2008 sleeper comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall pretty much does forget Sarah Marshall – and completely eradicates the memory of that film's lead character (Jason Segal) as well. Instead we get a glimpse into the life of Russell Brand's self-absorbed rock star character Aldous Snow. Quizzically, Jonah Hill, who also starred in Sarah Marshall as… read more!
Get Low
Robert Duvall plays Felix Bush, a cantankerous hermit in a small town somewhere in the South, sometime during the 1930s. Staring his mortality in the face, Felix goes to the local funeral home (led by a strong Bill Murray, in character actor mode) and asks for what we would now call a "living wake" – that is, Felix wants a… read more!
Greenberg
Ben Stiller stars as Roger Greenberg, a lonely fortysomething from New York who has just flown out to Los Angeles to housesit for his rich brother, who's off with his family on a working vacation in Vietnam. Roger arrives with some serious baggage: back home he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an institution for a while. That… read more!
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1
At this point, the saga of everyone's favorite boy wizard feels like it's on autopilot - but that's okay. David Yates, helming the second half of the eight Potter features, may lack the personal vision that Alfonso Cuarón and Mike Newell brought to their installments, but he's a smart guy who knows why audiences keep coming back: It's the cast,… read more!