Public Enemies

Directed by Michael Mann, 2009

Simultaneously a tough guy and a sap, a realist and a romantic, director Michael Mann has for decades now been making movies about what it means to be a man. He chooses to tell these stories in familiar settings, setting his fairly measured character studies in the kind of testosterone-soaked milieu that has been favored by a century of manly filmmakers. Mann has made movies about cops and robbers. There's one about a cab driver and an assassin, one about a whistleblower and another about a great athlete. He's even made a supernatural horror movie set among Nazis. But he keeps returning to the subject of heroes and villains, about the role-playing that takes place when good guys go head-to-head with bad guys, and about what happens when the line between antagonist and protagonist gets blurred.

… [full review]

Tony Manero

Directed by Pablo Larrain, 2008

Surely one of the more repellent creations to inhabit arthouse screens this year, Raúl Peralta is a glowering brute of a man. Unemployed and undistracted in Pinochet's Chile, he's one of those desperate characters the movies are drawn to, nursing big, illusory dreams about turning his life around through a stonefaced, stiff impersonation of Tony Manero, the working-class Brooklyn dancer played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. … [read more]

The Hurt Locker

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 2008

The Hurt Locker opens in medias res, depicting a trio of soldiers working on the streets of Iraq. The movie doesn't stop to explain what they're up to or put their actions in context. The audience is left to infer the circumstance, but it's not hard to imagine the scenario. Judging from the cutting and the jumpy handheld camera style, we're looking at a tense situation. That robot rolling around by remote control, poking at a pile of refuse, is probably looking for a bomb. And when the robot breaks down and one of the men starts suiting up like Sigourney Weaver in the last scene of Alien, it's a sure bet he's about to play a game of red-wire/black-wire with a scary chunk of explosives. … [read more]

Surveillance

Directed by Jennifer Lynch, 2007

Either it runs in the family or Jennifer is one hell of a mimic, because there's an unmistakably Lynchian undercurrent to much of the goings-on in Surveillance, which lends some juice to a somewhat pulpy yet dry and familiar... … [read more]

Passengers

Directed by Rodrigo Garcia, 2008 BLU-RAY

Even if you haven't read the jacket promo copy, you'll suspect Passengers is up to some kind of supernatural wish-fulfillment from its first few minutes, as a slumbering Anne Hathaway is awakened on a rainy night by a phone call from a colleague who tells her something terrible has happened requiring her presence at a nearby hospital. It's not just that Hathaway plays Dr. Claire Summers, a therapist charged with helping a group of plane-crash survivors cope with their near-death experiences and the accompanying trauma—it's that the chilly, insistently otherworldly production design strongly implies something strange (but comforting, very comforting) is going on, too. … [read more]

True Blood: The Complete First Season

Directed by Alan Ball, et al, 2008 BLU-RAY

There's something refreshing about "True Blood", a show that approaches the idea of loving the undead with healthy helpings of humour, viscera, eroticism, and subtext. The tongue-in-cheek storytelling and routinely bloody tableaux aren't especially remarkable, but "True Blood" is pretty packed with sex, even by HBO's standards. Over the course of "True Blood"'s first 12 episodes, we learn that Bon Temps, Louisiana, and environs are home to not just a handsome Civil War vampire but also a plucky telepathic waitress and a shapechanging bartender, as well as assorted "fangbangers" (humans with a thing for screwing vampires) and addicts in thrall to V juice, the street term underscoring the intoxicating, potency-enhancing effects vampires' blood has on humans. … [read more]

Riptide

Directed by Edmund Goulding, 1934

It's less than 10 minutes into Riptide, and already Norma Shearer is decked out in insect-woman garb, adjusting the fit of the skimpy costume and complaining that part of it must surely be missing. Mary, the easygoing city girl Shearer plays, never makes it to the masquerade ball scheduled out on Long Island. Instead, she falls easily in lust with a lonely New York swell named Lord Philip Rexford (Herbert Marshall), equally ridiculous in an unrecognizable bug costume that fits him like a suit of chain mail might, if chain mail came with bug eyes a pair of antennae. … [read more]

Drag Me to Hell

Directed by Sam Raimi, 2009

Like Stuart Gordon's Stuck, which used homelessness and careerism as twin springboards for a horror film about the down job market, Raimi's Drag Me to Hell manages to capitalize on the miserable housing market to make the first scary movie about the mortgage crisis. … [read more]

Up

Directed by Pete Docter, 2009

A movie like Up makes deeply felt, richly imagined, and downright populist storytelling look like the natural order of narrative film. It's not that this material is especially rarefied — there's a grumpy old man and an earnest (but awkward) boy scout and a flying house that may as well be lifted directly out of Miyazaki — but rather that the rest of Hollywood seems to be working from the fundamentally flawed premise that the only thing kids want to see on screen are lowest-common-denominator shenanigans involving talking animals, fart jokes, and very broad comedy. … [read more]

The Girlfriend Experience

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2009

Ostensibly a jazzy, nonlinear short story about the emotional life of a high-end Manhattan hooker, this latest entry in The Steven Soderbergh Eclecticism Project is less a sexy confection than a sly satire on capitalism. Or, more specifically, a satire on capitalists during a recession. … [read more]

Summer Hours

Directed by Olivier Assayas, 2008

Summer Hours is what's generally referred to as a "small" film, but for Olivier Assayas, it represents a comfortable return to form after several self-conscious attempts at rethinking and reinventing the boundaries of his work. … [read more]

Star Trek

Directed by J.J. Abrams, 2009

If you ever longed to see the Trek-ian likes of Kirk, Spock, Sulu, "Bones" McCoy, and Uhuru as fine young things studying together at Starfleet Academy, this is your chance. … [read more]

Revanche

Directed by Götz Spielmann, 2008

Revanche begins, puzzlingly enough, as a tale of two cities. To the policeman Robert (Andreas Lust), the town of Gföhl is his workplace, the environment he's charged with protecting. And to Alex (Johannes Krisch), newly released from prison, Vienna is a sleazy and dangerous environment where lovely young foreigners like his Ukrainian lover, Tamara (Irina Potapenko), are drafted into the sex trade by greasy bosses. … [read more]

DVD/BLU-RAY

The Sign of the Cross

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille, 1932

Despite insistently dull depictions of the monotonous lives of the true believers, what DeMille's really into is the hedonistic habits of the Roman upper classes. The result is a film whose generous helpings of sex and violence are overwhelmed by its general air of condescension and phony piety. … [read more]

I've Loved You So Long

Directed by Philippe Claudel, 2008 BLU-RAY

Even in stillness and silence, Kristin Scott Thomas manages to exude a great sadness; and sadness is what I've Loved You So Long is all about .... But if there's a lot to look at along the way, the film holds few genuine surprises. … [read more]

Blue Streak

Directed by Les Mayfield, 1999 BLU-RAY

This is a rags-to-riches story where the riches are the power and privilege conferred on a working-class black man by the presence of a badge. … [read more]

Video

Audio Commentary: They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)

A look at scenes from John Carpenter's satirical alien-invasion movie They Live, released four days before the 1988 presidential elections and relevant to this day. … [read more]

Halloween Horror Montage

Every year, I see those Chuck Workman clip compilations on the Oscars broadcast and I think, "Gee, that looks like a fun job." Also every year, I wish I had started thinking about Halloween early enough to do something special for my Web site. … [read more]

Audio Commentary: The Blues Brothers

A look at the shopping-mall car chase from The Blues Brothers, including some of the recent history of the Dixie Square Shopping Mall.... … [read more]