The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared★★★ ½ Opening Friday Droll, daffy and entirely enjoyable, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a Swedish comedy whose screwy rhythms extend well beyond its title. Based on Jonas Jonasson’s best-selling comic novel, the film was a gigantic hit in Europe […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inFilm & Television
Thomas Vinterberg takes on Thomas Hardy’s Victorian melodrama Far from the Madding Crowd
Far From the Madding Crowd Opening Friday How do you solve a problem like Bathsheba? That’s the conundrum for director Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration) and his leading lady, Carey Mulligan, in Far from the Madding Crowd, a handsome pastoral romance based on the book by Thomas Hardy. Mulligan plays Bathsheba Everdene, an independent young woman […]
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Movie review: High-school glory days loom over Jack Black and James Marsden in The D Train
The D Train★★ ½ Now playingThe D Train is a comedy that doesn’t really work, but at least it doesn’t work in interesting ways. It’s unpredictable and it takes a lot of risks, some of which pay off. Jack Black headlines as Dan Landsman, a schlubby and insecure Pittsburgh suburbanite whose remaining self-esteem rests on […]
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The Queue: Unconditional love and Oedipal wrecks in Mommy
Adolescence is a trauma we all have to navigate. If we’re lucky, it’s a relatively brief storm on the waters of life. But for Steve Després, the violent and mentally ill teenager in Mommy, adolescence has become a lethal affair. He has a raging hurricane in his head that never lets up. The latest from […]
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Movie review: Superhero blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron assimilates the A.I. sci-fi craze
Avengers: Age of Ultron★★★★Opening Friday Part of the fun of following movies—especially science-fiction movies—is seeing how they reflect our current cultural anxieties. Stories about artificial intelligence go way back, through Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey all the way to Metropolis. Recent entries such as Ex Machina and Her have updated the genre with […]
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The Queue: Comics talk shop in Kevin Pollak’s Misery Loves Comedy
What is it that’s so compelling about listening to comedians talk about comedy? I’m not sure I know, but I’m hooked. I’ve been listening to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast religiously for years, and have recently been working my way though the archives of Jerry Seinfeld’s high-rent riff on the premise, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. […]
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Documentary Lambert & Stamp tells The Who’s story by way of two backstage Svengalis
LAMBERT & STAMP Opening Friday A case can be made that, of the three big British Invasion bands, The Who were the most interesting because they were the most fucked up. The Beatles were cute and the Stones were sexy, but The Who were a gang of working-class street kids from England’s violent Mod scene. […]
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New documentary Merchants of Doubt exposes the art of spin
MERCHANTS OF DOUBT Opening Friday I’ve come to accept that pretty much everyone on television is lying to me. The advertisers, of course. Certainly the “reality” shows. And a good percentage of network news. The depressing extent of the dilemma is exposed in Merchants of Doubt. Based on the 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and […]
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The Queue: Can’t make Full Frame? Check out these five great docs on Netflix
If you’re heading out to this weekend’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, be sure to check out the INDY‘s alarmingly large preview. But if you can’t make it to the fest, you can still see some great documentaries from your couch via Netflix’s streaming service, a great place to find both well-known and […]
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Movie review: Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is really a trial of Israel’s rabbinical courts
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem★★★★ Now playing Under contemporary Israeli law, both marriage and divorce are controlled by rabbinical courts. There is no tradition of civil law when it comes to getting hitched or unhitched. A woman can only be divorced if she is officially presented with a religious document—called a “gett,” or “get”—by […]
