The A.V. Club - Review

Film: Review:The Box

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:19:00 -0600

The dilemma is simple: A couple has 24 hours to choose whether to press a button and consequently kill someone they do not know in exchange for $1 million. The movie, however, is anything but simple. The opening stretch of Richard Kelly’s third feature (after Donnie Darko and Southland Tales) faithfully keeps the beats of Richard Matheson’s story “Button, Button” by way of its previous adaptation for the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone, which gave Matheson’s tale a different final twist. The film keeps going long after exhausting the logic of the original tale, almost as ...

Film: Review:Precious

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:05:00 -0600

Precious features plenty of off-putting images and attitudes, beginning with the movie’s straight-out-of-Rush-Limbaugh’s-nightmares vision of lazy welfare queens, and ending with the way the film seems to wallow in inner-city misery. It isn’t enough that director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (working from a controversial bestseller by Sapphire) present teenager Gabourey Sidibe as morbidly obese and functionally illiterate; she’s also a victim of sexual and physical abuse, with a mentally retarded daughter, another child on the way, and a serious health crisis looming. Not even Douglas Sirk or Lars von Trier would heap so much ...

Film: Review:The Men Who Stare At Goats

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:04:00 -0600

A gag early in the eccentric military comedy The Men Who Stare At Goats neatly summarizes what the movie’s about. George Clooney, playing one of a secret cadre of American super-soldiers, is driving into Iraq with hapless reporter Ewan McGregor by his side, and is attempting to demonstrate his ability to disperse clouds with his mind. Clooney successfully clears the sky, but while his eyes are off the road, he crashes into a boulder. The Men Who Stare At Goats effectively satirizes the blinkered arrogance of military types and New Agers, showing Clooney and his colleagues—played by Kevin ...

Film: Review:A Christmas Carol

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:03:00 -0600

A digital Scrooge scowls through a digital London in Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol, a new attempt to warm up Charles Dickens’ holiday chestnut using state-of-the-art technology. But the results feel like the product of a microwave instead of an open fire. A skilled director long infatuated with technological breakthroughs, Zemeckis here makes his third excursion into the animation-meets-live-action world of performance capture. Zemeckis has described the process as offering the “best of both worlds,” but in A Christmas Carol, it feels neither here nor there, never multiplying the warmth of human performances by the artistic freedoms of animation. It ...

Film: Review:The Fourth Kind

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:02:00 -0600

When considering the spooky questions raised by the science-fiction/horror docu-fiction The Fourth Kind, it’s helpful to remember Occam’s Razor, the logical principle that rejects unnecessarily complex theories when trying to arrive at an explanation for a phenomenon. Take the case of Dr. Abigail Tyler, a Nome, Alaska psychologist played by Milla Jovovich in the dramatized sequences, and appearing as “herself” (if she exists at all, which she almost certainly doesn’t) in documentary-ish segments. A disproportionate number of people in her city have disappeared under odd circumstances over the past 40 years, and under hypnosis, several of ...

Film: Review:Collapse

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:01:00 -0600

The current documentary landscape is chockfull of doom-laden scenarios of every stripe: If global warming (An Inconvenient Truth) doesn’t get you, then maybe genetically engineered Frankenfoods (Food, Inc.), will. Or contaminated water (Flow). Or crushing personal (Maxed Out) and national (I.O.U.S.A.) debt. But few apocalyptic visions are as comprehensive and frighteningly assured as the one offered by Michael Ruppert, the subject of Chris Smith’s mesmerizing new documentary Collapse. A former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, Ruppert has chased big stories for his self-published newsletter, From The Wilderness, on everything from CIA involvement ...

Film: Review:La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0600

Frederick Wiseman is an American institution, albeit an invisible one. Every few years, he adds to his formidable body of documentary work, slipping, apparently unnoticed, into environments ranging from hospital wards to housing projects, and returning with unblemished portraits of life within. Wiseman’s latest subject is the Paris Opera Ballet, whose roots go back more than 400 years. As is characteristic of his method, Wiseman minimizes his presence, both on- and offscreen. There are no interviews, no captions, and few contextual clues as to which of the seven ballets featured in various stages of rehearsal is being performed at ...

Books: Review:Anne Rice: Angel Time