I Am Not Your Negro★★★ ½ Now playing In Raoul Peck’s new documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin stands before a Cambridge University audience and goes about dismantling white liberal sentiment as embodied by one of the decade’s liberal heroes. Robert F. Kennedy had said in a public address that he thought it […]
Nathan Gelgud
Bio: N.C. State graduate Nathan Gelgud lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and writes about film. He also does film-inspired illustrations.Twitter: http://twitter.com/gelgud
Posted inFilm & Television
Self-aware winks in Grand Budapest Hotel
Grand Budapest Hotel Opens Friday “His world had vanished long before he ever entered it,” says the narrator of Grand Budapest Hotel. He’s talking about the movie’s main character, a verbose and fastidious concierge (Ralph Fiennes) named Gustave H, but he might just as easily be talking about Wes Anderson, the movie’s director. Anderson tells […]
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Nebraska is maddeningly dead-on
Nebraska opens Friday Somewhere in the first half of Nebraska, a stalled-out road movie directed by Alexander Payne, a father and son stop on a near-empty street in a tiny town and get out of the car. They’re not lost; they have arrived at one of their destinations, somewhere between Billings, Mont., and Lincoln, Neb. […]
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A James Gandolfini turn in Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said
Enough Said opens Friday Nicole Holofcener’s organic, low-key approach to characterization has made her one of the few writer-directors whose primary concern really seems to be the people populating her stories rather than any contrived conflict between them. In addition to writing and directing a series of personal films (Walking and Talking, Please Give) featuring […]
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Woody Allen’s stunning Blue Jasmine
Blue Jasmine Opens Friday Every Woody Allen movie contains at least one moment that is better than anything you’ll find in any other movie you’ll see that year. It’s usually a stellar snippet of surprising camera work that shows Allen at the top of his game, crystallizing ideas with assured visual vocabulary and panache. This […]
Posted inCulture
It’s a sweaty, chaotic ride to The Place Beyond the Pines
Photo by Atsushi NishijimaHere he is now, entertain us The Place Beyond the PinesNow playing Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines is a tattered melodrama that reaches fevered pitches out of nowhere and ambles with confidence through its baggy plot. It’s a sweaty ride, shifting in and out of rapid speeds that come in […]
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Here’s to you, Jackie Robinson: A flawed take on a baseball great in 42
42Opens Friday (see times below) “You’re medicine, Jack!” growls Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in writer-director Brian Helgeland’s 42. He’s talking, of course, to Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman), the Negro League player whom he’s hired to play in the big leagues, breaking baseball’s color barrier. In this version of the […]
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The wild girls of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers
Spring Breakers opens Friday (see times below) Our rating: Faith, Brit, Candy and Cotty like playing with guns. They make guns with their fingers, pretending to shoot themselves in the head during boring class lectures. They drink from a squirt gun filled with whiskey, and they “shotgun” marijuana smoke into each other’s mouths at parties. […]
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Endless vacation: Good Day to Die Hard knows why you bought your ticket
Photo by Frank Masi/ Twentieth Century FoxA good day to whatever… A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD* * * starsOpens today (see times below) Supercop John McClane wants everybody to know he’s on vacation. So when he gets hit by a car or shot at by a helicopter or finds himself running from the fire […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Three-hour opener to Hobbit trilogy
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens Friday (see times below) Our rating: There’s a sneeze in the first hour of The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey that has no plot ramifications. No one on screen responds to it. It’s essentially meaningless. But director Peter Jackson keeps the camera where it is, lingering for a few humorous […]