A.V. Club Blog

Movies Of The Day:

A Girl Cut In Two (dir. Claude Chabrol) and Mad Detective (dir. Johnnie To)

Both Claude Chabrol and Johnnie To have reached the phase of their careers where they’re cranking out good-to-great movies every year or two, sometimes with minimal ambition, and sometimes with a little more juice. Because both of them are so good at what they do, it’s hard sometimes to distinguish immediately when they’ve delivered one of those mini-masterpieces, as opposed to just another finely made genre exercise. Chabrol’s A Girl Cut In Two is pretty much the latter, but at that, it’s nothing to shrug off. Ludivine Sagnier plays the title character, a TV presenter who develops a crush on grizzled celebrity author François Berléand around the same time... read more

Movie Of The Day:

Lou Reed’s Berlin (dir. Julian Schnabel)

Lou Reed remained fairly prolific in the three decades after he left The Velvet Underground, but his solo albums—outside of maybe Transformer—never exactly set the world afire in the way that V.U.’s body of work did. The Blue Mask, New Sensations and New York are well-liked by many, but even among Reed fans, his solo stuff tends to be fairly divisive, with vocal proponents and opponents of everything from the avant-noise experiment Metal Machine Music to the post-Springsteen mainstream-rock push Coney Island Baby. (The latter being one of my favorites.)

Berlin is especially controversial among... read more

Movies Of The Day:

Across The Universe (dir. Julie Taymor) and I’m Not There (dir. Todd Haynes)

How is it possible for one of the premiere theatrical stylists of our era to make a movie filled with some of the most memorable pop songs ever written, and yet only achieve a few scattered moments of transcendence? After seeing the trailer for Across The Universe months ago, I was prepared for Julie Taymor’s hodgepodge of ‘60s clichés and drippy reinterpretations of Beatles songs. But I was also—going by the 30-second burst of delirious surrealism that ends the... read more

Movie Of The Day: Margot At The Wedding (dir. Noah Baumbach):
It’s going to be a good world to live in if Noah Baumbach can keep knocking out light-yet-intense, short-story-ish films like The Squid And The Whale and Margot At The Wedding every couple of years. Baumbach’s latest doesn’t have the immediacy or emotional impact of Squid, which dropped viewers into the middle of a crumbling academic family and let us fend for ourselves. But Margot works a similar combination of off-handed humor and interesting-but-prickly people—none pricklier than the title character, a strong-willed, socially useless writer played by Nicole Kidman. The movie cleaves to the dynamic between Kidman and her son, a teenage effete who’s having trouble grappling... read more

Movies Of The Day: Redacted (dir. Brian DePalma) and George A. Romero’s Diary Of The Dead (dir. George Romero):

I got to celebrate my 37th birthday by sleeping in an extra 90 minutes, then having a leisurely breakfast and seeing a couple of chance-taking movies by two directors firmly lodged in my pantheon of personal favorites. Both Brian DePalma and George Romero shot their latest projects in HD, on the cheap, and both movies confront contemporary political problems via low-to-the-ground genre storytelling and structural innovation. But neither, alas, is all that good.

The tricky thing about Redacted is that a lot of what’s wrong with it is, I’m... read more

Movie Of The Day: Eastern Promises (dir. David Cronenberg)
The Cronenberg-directed A History Of Violence drew on scattered pulp fiction mainstays like secret identities, super-powers, mob justice and cheerleaders—all in service of a story that considered how useful those fantasies are in the real world. Eastern Promises does much the same, telling a London-set story about an obstetric nurse (played by Naomi Watts) who tries to find the family of an orphaned baby, and winds up crossing the path of a Russian crimelord. Eastern Promises is actually a little more Cronenbergian than AHOV, fully displaying all of his usual obsessions with the human body as a vessel to be used and abused. Throats get slit, fingers chopped... read more

Movie Of The Day: My Kid Could Paint That (dir. Amir Bar-Lev)

A non-critic friend of mine once gave me a good standard for judging documentaries: If reading a description of the movie tells you just as much as watching it will, then maybe it’s not a very good documentary. For about the first 30 minutes, My Kid Could Paint That seems bound to fail that test. Even though director Bar-Lev elaborates on the comically brief biography of 4-year-old abstract art superstar Marla Olmstead with mini-histories of modern art and child prodigies, the relevance of Marla’s rise to success—from a coffeehouse show to NYC galleries—seems at first a little too mapped-out. Just your basic chin-stroker about what the art world fervor over a kid painter... read more

Movie Of The Day: Persepolis (dir. Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud)

Early in this adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s internationally best-selling comic book memoir, Satrapi’s uncle tells the pre-teen Marji the story of his 9-year imprisonment under the orders of the Shah of Iran—not to scare her, but because it’s part of their family history, and he believes things like that shouldn’t be forgotten. Like a lot of people, I was charmed by Satrapi’s comics because of just that sense of specificity. The book series—and now this movie, which animates Satrapi’s illustrations smoothly and even elegantly—describes Satrapi’s girlhood in Iran and beyond, from the Shah’s deposing to the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic state, which prompted her parents to send her to school in Vienna. Throughout, Satrapi makes it clear that this happened to her, and to her family.... read more

Movie Of The Day:

No Country For Old Men (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen): As I was watching this first-rate Coen Brothers’ thriller, the penultimate scene in Fargo kept playing through my head. Frances McDormand’s small-town cop is in a squad car, escorting the last man standing in a crime spree that has left many dead, innocent and guilty alike. “And for what?,” she asks him incredulously. “For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, ya know. Don’t you know that?”

Those sentiments resonate throughout No Country For Old Men, at least among the morally upstanding few, who are left to wonder, as McDormand did, what to make of a world overcome by violence. As Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff points out, he’s the third generation in his...

Well, folks, it’s been a little over ten years since a pretty New York theater kid who reinvented himself as the ultimate West Coast thug solidified his iconic status by dying beautiful and young. Like seemingly everyone with a serious passion for hip hop I love 2Pac. But at the risk of speaking ill of the dead I also feel the need to point out that, with the possible exception of Eminem, 2Pac is the single most overrated rapper in history.

2Pac reigns unchallenged as rap’s preeminent martyr, easily beating friend-turned-rival Notorious B.I.G, an infinitely better rapper and writer but a far less irresistible icon. Like most icons 2Pac’s appeal is inextricably linked to his mutability. 2Pac was everything to everyone. Wildly antithetical groups and demographics could each claim him as their own. To teenage girls he was the fantasy boyfriend whose thug-life exterior hid the sensitive soul of a guy who grooved to the cornball drama of Don McLean’s "Vincent" and filled spiral notebooks full of earnest poetry.

To feminists willing to look past the often virulent misogyny of his lyrics he was... read more