With its fine cast, Get Low is strange perfection Funeral for the living Marc Savlov on Thursday 08/26/2010 You need only see Get Low for absolute proof that there remain at least three reasons -- Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray -- to switch off your home theater and get out into a real one. Set in Depression-era backwoods Tennessee, Get Low begins and ends with a crotchety, shotgun-wielding misanthrope by the name of Felix Bush, who has erected a "No Damn Trespassers" sign on the edge of his forest-shrouded property. >MoreRestrepo documents grueling warfare in Afghanistan The most dangerous place on earth Marjorie Baumgarten on Thursday 08/26/2010 Restrepo is an example of photojournalism at its finest. The film chronicles the grueling 15-month deployment in Afghanistan of about a dozen U.S. soldiers of the Second Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade. >More
REVIEWS
Jennifer Aniston is a genre unto herself in The Switch Aniston as Aniston Marc Savlov on Thursday 08/19/2010 Hollywood's biological clock must be ticking something fierce. The Switch is the third artificial-insemination romantic comedy of the summer thus far, after The Back-up Plan and The Kids are All Right. Based on a short story by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides, The Switch is amiable fluff that takes its time learning how to walk, talk and act like the kid-centric romantic comedy that it is. >MoreEat Pray Love mimics its heroine's identity crisis Who am I? Kimberley Jones on Thursday 08/12/2010, (1) Like When the script for Eat Pray Love landed in Richard Jenkins' inbox, one can imagine he must have twinkled at the pages-long monologue his character delivers in the film's midsection. >More
Will Ferrell is back in his comfort zone with The Other Guys Return of the big boob Marjorie Baumgarten on Thursday 08/05/2010, (1) Like Reeling himself back in from the career crash-zone territory of Land of the Lost, Will Ferrell returns to more familiar stomping grounds with The Other Guys, his fourth comedy pairing with director Adam McKay (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers). Again, Ferrell plays a big boob, although his Det. Allen Gamble in The Other Guys is not as clueless or as extreme a doofus as his characters in these previous movies. >MoreThe Kids Are All Right tells a too-familiar story about gay marriage Two mommies Scott Renshaw on Thursday 07/22/2010 "You're an interloper," says Nic (Annette Bening) to Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the recently discovered sperm donor for the two teenage children she shares with her partner Jules (Julianne Moore) in The Kids Are All Right. It's an interesting choice of words -- "interloper" -- but a surprising one coming from filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko. In fact, she's inordinately fond of the concept. >More
Wilmington on DVD: Clash of the Titans, The Secret of the Grain, Yasujiro Ozu, The Art of the Steal, Repo Men, Fanboys Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 07/28/2010 10:00 am The Kraken, Medusa, Pegasus and the lobster monsters are smashing successes in director Louis Leterrier's lavish remake of Clash of the Titans -- the 1981 Ray Harryhausen mythological epic. But the people and the gods could use a little more work. That's a typical story for a big-studio fantasy blockbuster: great CGI, great effects and action, but obvious characters spouting, in this case, predictable mytho-gibberish. >MoreWilmington on DVD: Vincere, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Ride with the Devil, Elvis, Cop Out, The Losers, The Runaways Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 07/21/2010 10:00 am Marco Bellocchio's Vincere is grandly ambitious and often stunningly beautiful: a lushly visualized and brilliantly stylish operatic bio-drama about an edgy, difficult subject: the unlikely tragedy of Benito Mussolini‘s spurned lover/maybe wife Ida Dalzer, his neglected, rejected son, Benito Albino Mussolini, and the brutal Il Duce‘s barbarous neglect and mistreatment of them both. >More
UW Cinematheque screens Kurosawa, Errol Morris, and more in fall 2010 program Dean Robbins on Wednesday 09/01/2010 4:00 pm The fall 2010 schedule at UW Cinematheque is full of hooks. 2010 is the 100th anniversary of Akira Kurosawa's birth, so what better occasion for a series? >MoreWilmington on DVD: Me & Orson Welles, Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Harry Brown, Marmaduke on Wednesday 09/01/2010 10:00 am In Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater takes on a highly ambitious subject that really, really appeals to me -- a portrayal of the astonishing youthful theatrical triumphs of the 22-year-old Welles, his adroit and urbane (and long-suffering) producer John Houseman, and of their ingenious, experimental 1937 Mercury Theater production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. >MoreWilmington on DVD: Ajami, Black Orpheus, Hamlet, The Back-up Plan, The Square Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 08/25/2010 10:00 am Ajami, Israel's nominee for the 2009 foreign-language film Oscar is an engrossing realistic thriller with convincing characters and a real background: the mixed Jewish, Arab-Muslim and Arab-Christian communities of Ajami, a neighborhood of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. >MoreWilmington on DVD: The City of Your Final Destination, Chicago, Sacha Guitry on Wednesday 08/18/2010 10:00 am In The City of Your Final Destination -- maybe the last of the lovably old-fashioned, classically constructed, deeply literate and beautifully wrought Merchant Ivory films, in the string that began back in 1963 with The Householder -- we are in Uruguay, in a very-lived-in and sunnily attractive hacienda, a place called Ocho Rios. >MoreWilmington on DVD: Date Night, James and the Giant Peach, Kim Novak, The Joneses Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 08/11/2010 10:00 am Steve Carell and Tina Fey make a great movie comedy couple in Date Night -- even though they're handicapped by the movie's often trivial formula script. Playing a nice suburban hubby-and-wife accidentally set loose in a wild and crazy urban underworld, they’re loose and sharp and totally in command. >MoreWilmington on DVD: Sweetgrass, A Prophet, The Ghost Writer, Buster Keaton, Kick-Ass Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 08/04/2010 10:00 am In Sweetgrass, we see the last summer pasturing of the vast sheep herd that once belonged to the Allested ranch in Big Timber, Montana -- thousands of sheep blanketing the mountain slopes and valleys, ranging freely over the green grass and past the rushing rivers and under the high blue sky, surging like some white snowy river itself, with that entire tumbling, rippling, slowly moving mass of animal life itself cared for and guided by just two lone sheepmen in cowboy hats on horseback, with their alert and tireless sheepdogs loping alongside. >More
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