Chéri opens Wednesday throughout the Triangle In art as in life, a woman of a certain age, even a very beautiful one, begins to fade into invisibility. In Chéri, Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, The Queen) and his Dangerous Liaisons scenarist, playwright Christopher Hampton, adapt a 1920 Colette novel about a grande horizontale, or courtesan, who […]
Laura Boyes
Posted inFilm & Television
In The Proposal, a brassy Canadian invades Alaska
The Proposal opens Friday throughout the Triangle Sitka, Alaska, may not be quite far enough upcountry for Sarah Palin to see it from her window, but it’s plenty far northand plenty coldall the same. Still, the folksy charms of this village (pop. 8,986) soon warm up frosty Sandra Bullock in The Proposal. This film, mechanically […]
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From Slumdog to Chandni Chowk: Bollywood gets its closeup
My universes collided this week. Shah Rukh Khan, the King of Bollywood, introduced the awards-sweeping Slumdog Millionaire clips at the Golden Globes, and Chandni Chowk to China, the first Bollywood movie to sip the enchanted elixir of Warner Bros’ promotional mojo, released a record 130 prints in the U.S. Akshay Kumar, Chandni Chowk‘s star, was […]
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Breaking the glass screen
2008 was not just the year that Hillary and (oh, Lordy) Sarah tried to shatter the presidential glass ceiling, but at the multiplex, too, the female-centered Sex and the City ($152 million), Mamma Mia! ($143 million), High School Musical 3 ($89 million) and Twilight ($152 million and counting) challenged the box-office big boys. Conventional wisdom […]
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Baz Luhrmann’s historical epic Australia
Australia opens Wednesday throughout the Triangle When Baz Luhrmann directed Moulin Rouge in 2001, critics scoffed. The musical was a dinosaur; no point in trying to wake the dead. With Australia, a sprawling historical romantic melodrama, Luhrmann revives another once-robust genre. Unlike the current marketing trend of splintering audiences into age and gender ghettos, Australia […]
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Paul Newman, 1925-2008
Paul Newman made a lot of movies people love. Hud, The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are films that capitalized on Newman’s cynical attitude, acting chops and earthyyet unearthlybeauty. He was an antihero for an iconoclastic age with a difference: He wasn’t one of those hippie kids […]
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The Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading
Burn After Reading opens Friday throughout the Triangle. Writer directors Joel and Ethan Coen, as The New York Times noted, haven’t sold out, haven’t used their quirky cult successes to smooth their way to a Harry Potter-size paycheck. Burn After Reading hearkens back to Coen classics Oh Brother Where Art Thou and The Big Lebowski, […]
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Why I won’t see the “year’s best movies”
No Country for Old Men, American Gangster, The Assassination of Jesse James, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Eastern Promises, 3:10 to Yuma, Gone Baby Gone: If these are the years “Best” movies, as Samuel Goldwyn once said, “Include me out!” Superb performances by Hollywood’s finest actors? Check. Creative and thoughtful auteurs? Check. Brilliant screenplays? […]
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Om Shanti Om
The King of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan, earns his moniker because he can pack a theater with gleeful patrons like nobody else can. Paired with choreographer-turned-director Farah Khan, who harbors a mad movie love both for the conventions of Hindi cinema and for her charismatic leading man, Om Shanti Om delivers the glitter and glamour, […]
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2 Days in Paris
Perhaps the least romantic movie ever made about the City of Love, 2 Days in Paris charts the disintegrating relationship curve between Marion (Julie Delpy), a testy photographer, and Jack (Adam Goldberg), her neurotic foil. Returning from a not-so-blissful idyll in Venice, the couple stops over in Paris, where Jack is reluctantly immersed in Marion’s […]