Nathan Gelgud

A Serious Man opens Friday The Coen Brothers don’t care what I think of their latest movie. Nor, judging from their annoying but pleasantly perplexing comedy, do they care what anyone thinks about it. A Serious Man takes place almost exclusively in 1967 in the Jewish community of a small town in Minnesota that the […]

From the first scenes of protagonist Max starting a snowball fight, Spike Jonze’s spotty but exciting Where the Wild Things Are spends a lot of time crashing and bashing, and that’s when it is marvelous. Tellingly, the best scenes are mostly dialogue-free. But the script gets in the way much too often, throwing off what […]

The Boys are Back opens Friday in select theaters The Boys are Back is a tearjerker about the travails of Joe Warr (Clive Owen), a father raising two boys and trying to maintain a career after losing his wife, Katy, to cancer. Joe spends most of Boys are Back trying to hold himself together without […]

Bright Star opens Friday in select theaters It’s clear from the density of technique and nuanced imagery in her new film that Jane Campion is one of the finest directors in the world. Campion’s first feature film since 2003’s smart, underrated thriller In the Cut is the story of the love affair between poet John […]

Cold Souls opens Friday in select theaters Writer-director Sophie Barthes has said in interviews that a dream about Woody Allen was the inspiration for her debut film, and Cold Soulsa limp comedy hung on an unfunny running joke about a chickpeasuffers greatly compared with a hilarious and inventive movie like Sleeper, with which it has […]

Paper Heart opens Friday in select theaters Comedian and musician Charlyne Yi is not sure whether she’s capable of love. To find out if it exists, she’s teamed up with her friend, director Nicholas Jasenovec, to make the intentionally slight hybrid film Paper Heart. The result is partly a mockumentary in which actor Michael Cera […]

(500) Days of Summer opens Friday in select theaters (500) Days of Summer is a twee romantic comedy about Tom, a young greeting card writer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who falls hard for Summer, the boss’s fancy-free new assistant (Zooey Deschanel). I have a soft spot for meet-cute movies, and while I tried to fall for director […]

Funny People opens Friday throughout the Triangle In Funny People, writer-director Judd Apatow creeps from the backstage rooms of Los Angeles comedy clubs up to the suburban setting of Marin County, beginning with a story about comedians and winding up with a conventional, semimoralistic tale about the sanctity of family. Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, […]

Brüno Opens Friday throughout the Triangle In Brüno, director Larry Charles and writer-star Sacha Baron Cohen set out to lampoon celebrity and homophobia. Through a series of outlandish pranks they point out that … well, I’m not sure that they point out much of anything. Baron Cohen’s Brüno is a fictional creation that he and […]

Whatever Works opens Friday in select theaters The amount of people for whom the phrase “Woody Allen’s new comedy” sparks feelings of delight and anticipation has dwindled considerably in the last 15 years. And, while I can certainly understand why fewer people love Hollywood Ending than Bananas, I count myself among the diminishing number who […]