Jane Campion has made a career out of making films that are richly textured and visually luscious. Whether it be a dysfunctional melodrama (Sweetie), a rather askew coming of age tale (An Angel at My Table), a damning portrayal of love and desire (The Piano), an elaborate acerbic drama of ill manners (Portrait of a Lady), an intensely drawn character study (Holy Smoke), a sexually taut thriller (In the Cut) or a poetic lovelorn tragedy (Bright Star), Campion’s auteuristic signature is a deeply arousing delectability in both visual style and content. With her deep dark colour palette and concupiscence of character, Campion paints the most rapturous of motion picture artworks and then thrusts them upon the decreasingly unsuspecting public as if they were just another love story, albeit twisted and usually quite tragic, for her fans and critics to contemplate. Yet instead of mere contemplation we are handed the most complex quasi-romantic visualizations. Even the filmmaker’s lesser works (and even Campion’s lesser works are still better than many a director’s best) are so rife with passion and eroticism, one feels they must devour her films before her films devour them.
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If you want to bear witness to a few moments of perfect cinema, watch the first couple minutes of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are.  Here we’re introduced to the indefatigable young Max as he builds a snow fort in his neighbor’s yard.  He’s packed the snow tight into an igloo and slides in and out of the opening he has made without a care in the world.  The icy tones of the image, the crackling of the snow, Max’s breathless panting, the smile on his face; this is childhood, and a moment perfectly suited as an opener to the long-awaited adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book.
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A modernized telling of the early stages of humanity adept with modern language, fart jokes, the ingestion of fecal matter, and  a multitude of offenses in regard to religion and history, Year One was something a grand comic genius like say, Mel Brooks (History of the World Part I) could have pulled off.
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If nothing else, Jay DiPietro’s non-linear love story Peter and Vandy (taglined as “a love story told out of order” as if you may not notice the shifting timeline) is an interesting, if not wholly original, experiment in filmmaking. Unfortunately, as it made its debut within 24 hours of Marc Webb’s equally non-linear (500) Days of Summer (at this year’s Sundance Film Festival), many tossed this movie off as a low rent copy of Webb’s film. Of course, such a thing is not the case. DiPietro adapted his own play, from 2002, into this film, so if anything, his was the first out of the proverbial gate. This little nugget of truth doesn’t change the fact that Peter and Vandy is pretty much a low-rent something-or-other – though it is still probably somewhat superior to the aforementioned (500) Days.
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Let me be frank: Kirby Dick’s documentary Outrage is completely unwatchable. Agonizingly, tortorously unwatchable. It’s an hour and half of cheap, ugly, digital photography and some of the least interesting interviews and most ear-gratingly awful music ever conducted. It’s a boring, self-congratulating, almost-never-ending mess. I have never been less entertained in my life, and I have never been so amused by playing with my wedding ring. (Eventually I lost control of it and it went flying across the theater; when it did, I found that looking for it on my hands and knees was much more entertaining than the film.) I can’t think of a single reason to see it, and I can’t think of a single person — friend or foe — that I would recommend it to.
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The Brothers Bloom is a whopper of a tale. It follows the typical con-man falls for the con plot, but The Brothers Bloom is far from typical. It’s fantastical, farfetched, and riveting. Writer/director Rian Johnson, who brought us the neo-noir film Brick (2005) is back in action, and clearly having a hell of a time.

The story follows the lives of con-men Stephen (Ruffalo) and Bloom (Brody) from their early days when they were kids to the height of their deceptive prowess. After their latest escapade Bloom decides that this isn’t the life for him. Years later, Stephen shows up with one last con for the duo to pull off.

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Let’s start at the beginning. There are only a handful of possible sports movies. To simplify even further, a sports movie can only end one of two ways: either they win the Big Game (Rocky II) or they lose it (Rocky). Add to that that no one will want to root for the reigning champion, and you’ll find that all sports movies have to be underdog stories. Add to that that the characters have to progress, and you’ll see that all sports movies have to be coming-of-age stories. So we’re narrowing down the possibilities pretty fast here, right? Yes, all sports movies are basically the same. So the question is: is that really such a bad thing?
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Every time I watch a new Michael Moore film, I inevitably ask myself – just who the hell is this guy making movies for? He acts as if he is a voice of change – showing us the moral and political indignities perpetrated against the American people by the despotic, elected (and sometimes not elected) leaders of our country. Yet, for anyone who is even the most modestly informed, not much the director spouts into his booming megaphone is any real revelation. Anyone and everyone who reads even the occasional newspaper or catches the occasional passing TV tuned to CNN or MSNBC (something other than the maniacally manipulative Fox News, that is) should know at least the basic ins and outs of what is going on in and around Washington and Wall Street. Nope, Moore does not make his films for these people.
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There’s the usual seasonal calling for gore, off-colored humor, a cynical yet appreciative point of view, and as well, the ubiquitous cameo by a well-known, well-liked actor.
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Before we delve into the review portion of the evening, there are three things one must first know about Away We Go. First off, Maya Rudolph is charming and funny – a first-rate comedienne. Secondly, John Krasinski is wry and whimsical – bringing his quiet brand of humanity to the role. And third, and most importantly, Away We Go is none of these things – and even less. It’s a shame really, but it’s the truth. While Rudolph and Krasinski seem near perfect for the movie – and for each other, their chemistry a palpable, breathing entity all its own – the film which surrounds them is nothing more than a shameful, cloying, pandering work of optimistically jaded, pseudo-cinematic falderal. And that is my being generous.
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So, like, there are these Satanists, right? And they think this girl is, like, a virgin and stuff — but she’s like, totally not, okay? But then they sacrifice her anyway, so then she has, like, a demon dwelling in her reanimated body, which totally blows, and then she has to eat people to stay alive, which blows even more, am I right? Like, duh.
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Perhaps it’s my nostalgic, somewhat romantic idealizing of the 1970’s of my childhood. Perhaps it’s the simple, but quite head-tilting fact that I actually grew up in an amusement park (stop tilting your head, it’s true – my family worked the park and I had free reign to ride anything I wanted to). Whatever the case, I rather enjoyed this film about college bound kids working at a run-down amusement park in late seventies suburban Pittsburgh. In fact I liked it quite a bit more than I ever expected to. Director Greg Mottola’s previous film (his only previous film actually) was the Judd Apatow-produced Superbad, a lowbrow bro-com replete with the obnoxia more oft than not associated with the Apatow cinematic universe. I was not impressed, to say the least, and though I wasn’t completely put off by the film, its lack of artistic merit gave me woes of anxiety when walking into the screening for the boldly titled (but ironically so, I suppose) Adventureland. Well, those anxious woes were steadily alleviated throughout this smartly written and romantically wry little film. Boy, was my face red.
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Rupert and Kristin Isaacson had an idyllic romance.  According to Rupert, when he first saw Kristin he knew she would one day be his wife.  He took special measures to ensure this would happen when he asked her to marry him on their first meeting.  They married and settled in Texas, Rupert working in journalism and human rights, Kristin teaching psychology.  When their son Rowan was born 2002, everything had seemingly fallen into place for them as a family.

It all fell shockingly apart when Rowan was diagnosed with autism in 2004 and The Horse Boy is their story; a beautiful picture of a family’s love for their ailing son, a love that manifests itself in an unconventional journey across the world to heal the little boy’s raging autism.
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If you look closely at The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh’s new based-on-a-true-story comedy, you just might find a scene that doesn’t have a bust of Abraham Lincoln in it.

Might.
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Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs began in 1982 as a children’s picture book that told a simple tale about a town where it rained food. It was a dreamy bedtime story — whimsical and childlike at its core, but its realistic, minimally-colored drawing style showed that it had been filtered through the mind of a somewhat world-weary adult. The new film from Sony Animation Studios is almost the exact opposite: its visuals are cartoonish, slapstick-filled, and candy-colored, but at its heart lie some very sobering, adult themes. What began as a misty fairytale has been re-imagined into a disarmingly dark parody of science fiction and disaster movies — albeit one with wall-to-wall laughs and some of the most imaginative visuals this side of WALL-E. It borrows a few scenes and plot points from the book, but otherwise makes no attempt to remain entirely true to its themes — and is all the more stunning for it.
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Mike Judge can’t seem to get any respect. Office Space eventually found its audience on DVD (after flopping hard in theaters), but his follow-up, Idiocracy (which, by the way, was brilliant – go see it now) barely even received a theatrical release before being shoveled into Blockbusters everywhere. He’s had a bit more luck on TV, with the long-running Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill series, but — seriously — do you know anyone who will admit to watching either one of them? (His latest, The Goode Family, aired on ABC this summer, and was both his most “mainstream”-oriented and also his best; not surprisingly, ABC cancelled it as soon as it was out of the gate.) With an all-star cast and no serious competition at the box-office, his latest film — Extract – is in an ideal position to change this; unfortunately, it’s just not very good.
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“I make movies for the planet Earth”
-Quentin Tarantino

We’ve all heard of writer/director Quentin Tarantino, from his early days working as a video store clerk to his successful independent feature, Reservoir Dogs. Highly controversial in his presentation of violence, language, and race, he has developed a rare fanbase over the years that draws from everyday moviegoers to hardened cineastes. Tarantino’s blend of pulp, dialogue, and homage to other films are his defining characteristics.

Inglorious Basterds, easily one of his most accessible films to date, is set during World War II in “Nazi-occupied France”. The titular heroes are a group of Jewish-American soliders led by Aldo “The Apache Raine (Brad Pitt). Raine gets his nick-name from his habit of scalping Nazis. The Basterds are charged with the duty of reaking havoc among  the German ranks, which they do with glee.

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Ponyo, the latest anime feature film from academy award winning writer/director Hayao Miyazaki, is a heart-warming tale of childhood and love set in a peculiar tragic landscape.

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Alexis Bledel seems determined to become the female Michael Cera. If you don’t know what I mean, consider the similarities: both are young actors that play the same character over and over again; both established their character on television comedies that were vaguely ahead of their time; and most importantly, there’s no real difference between their respective personas. You know the persona I’m talking about: the overly earnest smart kid who’s far too much of a doormat for his/her good. Cera played the character fist in Arrested Development, and has kept doing it in Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Year One; Bledel did it with Gilmore Girls, then The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, and — yes — even Sin City; now she does the same thing in Post Grad.

The problem with the character in question is that he/she is simply a straight man (or straight woman, I guess) — the lone sane character whose job it is to react to a crazy world — and a straight man is only as funny as the action around him (or her). Imagine if Zeppo Marx had tried to embark on a solo career, and you’ll see the potential for problems here.
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It’s a cliché, and it’s obvious, and any hack film professor could tell you this, but I guess it has to be said: the alien movies we create are always products of their time. Or, at least, the good ones are. The space aliens on the screen are always stand-ins for terrestrial aliens — whatever sort might haunt our dreams at the moment.
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