Greenberg opens Friday in select theaters (see times below) Our rating: Noah Baumbach, director and co-writer of Greenberg, employs an anti-naturalist, hyper-literate approach to filmmaking. His insightful, funny movies are all-too-knowing, prickly run-on sentences. Whether the dialogue and situations are believable in Baumbach’s films has never been the point: Baumbach’s world has always been such […]
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
Marco Bellocchio’s tale of young Mussolini’s lover
Vincere Opens Friday in select theaters (showtimes and locations below) The latest film from veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio is a collage of expressionistic flashes and newsreel footage pasted within the borders of a plodding historical drama. Called Vincere, it begins by telling the story of a young Benito Mussolini’s rise to power but quickly […]
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Masterful, subtle French drama 35 Shots of Rum
35 Shots of Rum Opens Friday at the Chelsea Theater The inviting, lovely new film by French master Claire Denis traces the relationships among four inhabitants of a high-rise apartment building on the outskirts of Paris: Lionel (Alex Descas); his 20-something daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop); Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue); and Noé (Grégoire Colin). With an unhurried […]
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North Face struggles to surmount historical Nazi backdrop
North Face opens Friday in select theaters (see times below) Our rating: North Face is a German mountain-climbing drama based on a true story about two best friends, Toni (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas (Florian Lukas). The year is 1936, and these two want to scale the Eiger, a peak of the Swiss Alps that no […]
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Polanski’s Ghost Writer is a finely tuned thriller
Ghost Writer opens Friday in select theaters Roman Polanski’s Ghost Writer is a snappy thriller about a writer-for-hire (Ewan McGregor) from London sent to a small out-of-season resort town in the northeastern U.S. to revise the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan). While McGregor’s character is the one credited as The Ghost, […]
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Almodóvar in peak form with Broken Embraces
Broken Embraces opens Friday in select theaters There is a moment right around the midpoint of Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces in which the plot seems about to take a sudden, sharp curve that will throw the primary conflict binding together every thread of the narrative into disarray. At this moment, Almodóvar’s deceptively light touch has […]
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Movie vices
The 2000s offered plenty of opportunities to declare the death of film, or at least the end of moviegoing. Why not forgo the hassle of a packed theater and rising ticket prices in favor of watching movies at home? Or on your phone? 1. The answer, in two words, is Miami Vice (2006), Michael Mann’s […]
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Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant isn’t a remake; it’s a freak-out and masterpiece of anti-cinema
Bad Lieutenant: Port of CallNew Orleans opens Friday in select theaters Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a jagged thrill ride, a mock policier, an unapologetic freak-out and self-aware masterpiece of anti-cinema. Having never seen Abel Ferrara’s more concisely named 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, I have to rely on reports that […]
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Avatar packs a groundbreaking visual wallop, but the story is old-school cheese
Avatar opens Friday throughout the Triangle The most likable thing about James Cameron’s Avatar is the performance of supporting player Giovanni Ribisi, although Michelle Rodriguez, sexy-macho with her aviator shades always halfway down her nose, is a close second. The enjoyable thing about Ribisi is that he has such a hard time taking the proceedings […]
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Wes Anderson’s stop-motion masterpiece, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Fantastic Mr. Fox opens Wednesday throughout the Triangle Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson has always given his protagonists qualities he himself possesses as a director. From Max’s love for restaging classic movie scenes in Rushmore to Francis’ obsessive need to control everything in The Darjeeling Limited, the subject of Anderson’s movies has always been, […]