The White Ribbon
Starring:
Review: Don't let anyone tell you too much about this spellbinder from Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke (Caché). Shot in stunning black-and-white by the gifted Christian Berger, The White Ribbon is a toxic blossom of images that burn into your memory. In pre-World War I Germany, a farm village is beset by accidents that may not be accidents. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) dominates the village economy, just as the Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) holds brutal sway over the morality of the villagers and their families. It's on the faces of the children that Haneke tells his story of corruption and the grip of fascism. This haunting film never pushes itself on you. It trusts you to suss out the horror that lies beneath the veneer of innocence. You'll be knocked for a loop.
Rating:
3.5 Stars
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Starring:
Heath Ledger
Review:
Heath Ledger's last screen performance, a remarkable one
interrupted by his tragic death at age 28 in 2008, comes wrapped in
the kind of passionate provocation of a movie that the Aussie actor
favored. (
Peter Travers reviews The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus in
his weekly video podcast, "At the Movies with Peter Travers.")
Terry Gilliam, the mad visionary behind Brazil, Time
Bandits and Monty Python, was ready to scrap the film after
the passing of Ledger, who had filmed only the London scenes. As
the movie was conceived, Ledger's con man, Tony, would join the
traveling horse-drawn caravan of Dr. Parnassus (a terrific
Christopher Plummer) and lead customers behind a mirror to a
parallel world of computer-generated fantasy. What saved the film
was Gilliam's decision to call on three of...
Rating:
3 Stars
Sherlock Holmes
Starring:
Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams
Review:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never imagined his cerebral London
detective as a ball-busting action hero. But director Guy Ritchie
did. And he's persuaded Robert Downey Jr. to mainline testosterone.
You never saw Basil Rathbone, the best movie Holmes, or Jeremy
Brett, the best TV Holmes, strip down in a freestyle-fight ring.
You do here. Even old Dr. Watson is a scrapper in the studly person
of Jude Law. Ritchie directs with the kind of Lock, Stock and
Two Smoking Barrels gusto that's meant to batter you into
submission.
Peter Travers reviews Sherlock Holmes in his weekly video
podcast, "At the Movies with Peter Travers."
The time is 1891, and the place is still London, but Ritchie
can't be bothered with period details, especially dialogue.
Noticing that the villainous Lord Blackwood (Mark...
Rating:
2 Stars
It's Complicated
Starring:
Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin
Review:
People over 50 talking about sex and — yikes! —
having it! Welcome to It's Complicated, a romcom that
qualifies as a waking nightmare for teens and infantile men whose
definition of "hot" hovers around jailbait. Screw them. (
Peter Travers reviews It's Complicated in his weekly video
podcast, "At the Movies with Peter Travers.") In this
unapologetic chick flick from writer-director Nancy Meyers —
she profitably reinvented the genre with What Women Want
and Something's Gotta Give — Meryl Streep plays a
divorced mother of three grown children who winds up slutting
around with the rat bastard (Alec Baldwin) who divorced her for a
younger model (Lake Bell). Streep even has an amiable architect
(Steve Martin) sniffing after her. Meyers panders to another
popular fem...
Rating:
2.5 Stars
Avatar
Starring:
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana
Review:
Oscar can relax. The epic crowd-pleaser the Academy lusted for
is here, the one to show that the geezer voters are hip to what the
kids want (3-D IMAX) and what the industry needs (the kind of
wowser you'll pay to see on a big screen). James Cameron's
tone-deaf but thunderously exciting Avatar, costing a
record $300 million, is just the thing to pump box-office blood
into Oscar's idiotically expanded Best Picture category (10
nominees instead of the usual five). Nevermind my preference for
the life-sized likes of Precious, The Hurt
Locker, Up in the Air and An Education. They
look puny next to the computerized giants at play in the fields of
Lord Cameron.
Unlike hack-of-the-decade Michael Bay, who can transform
anything into instant stupid, Cameron knows how to harness
technology...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Nine
Starring:
Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman
Review:
Rob Marshall's flawed but frequently dazzling Nine is a
hot-blooded musical fantasia full of song, dance, raging emotion
and simmering sexuality. We get to watch British acting dynamo
Daniel Day-Lewis be Italian as Guido Contini, a genius director of
the swinging Sixties (ciao, Federico Fellini) struggling to put the
movie in his head up on the screen. That movie concerns the women
in his life — mother (Sophia Loren), wife (Marion Cotillard),
muse (Nicole Kidman), mistress (Penélope Cruz), reporter
(Kate Hudson), colleague (Judi Dench) and whore (Fergie). With an
indisputably gifted actor playing ringmaster to such feminine life
force, what's not to like? You could argue that Nine, a
1982 Broadway hit spun off from Fellini's own 1963 psychodrama,
8 1/2, and revived in 2003, was...
Rating:
3 Stars