The title “A Hijacking” is rather misleading. The titular event is not depicted in the film; writer/director Tobias Lindholm only shows us the lead-up to and aftermath of Somali pirates taking a Danish freighter hostage, rejecting every opportunity to turn the film into the kind of basic action-thriller that the title suggests. Lindholm works toward […]
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For a biopic that tries to sell us on the complexity of its subject’s political theories, Margarethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” is awfully simplistic. Centered around Ms. Arendt’s unconventional “New Yorker” coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial, the film provides a bullet-points version of her work as an intellectual during the late ’50s and early
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With a skeletal narrative and more tepid one-off gags than you can count, “Despicable Me 2” would be indistinguishable from your average Nickelodeon cartoon episode if not for its $76 million budget, A-list voice cast, and hour-and-a-half running time. The first two components of that list are saving graces—at least the images are top-of-the-line and
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Neil Jordan’s “Byzantium,” the filmmaker’s first return to vampires since 1994’s massive Cruise-Pitt success “Interview with the Vampire,” is the best kind of genre film, which is to say the kind of genre film that makes you forget it’s a genre film. Yes, we’ve encountered variations of this story onscreen dozens of times before, but
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Stephen Walker and Sally George’s 2007 documentary “Young @ Heart,” about a chorus of Massachusetts senior citizens who perform pop covers, was so genuinely moving and respectful of its subjects that I suppose it was just a matter of time before a fiction filmmaker hijacked the premise for a manipulative, cloying feature. That’s exactly what
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Alice Winocour’s “Augustine,” which chronicles the pioneering 19th Century French neurologist Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot’s work with the titular patient, a seizing 19-year-old kitchenmaid initially diagnosed of “female hysteria,” is less about medical breakthroughs than it is about pent-up sexual desire. Despite his stoic gaze, Dr. Charcot (Vincent Lindon) is consumed by Augustine’s (Soko’s) sly flirtatiousness
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Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. Last year, this was a highly successful frame, with the surprise breakouts of “Ted” and “Magic Mike.” I’m doubtful we’re in for a repeat, however, because last weekend’s openers, “Monsters University” and “World War Z,”
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Pixar is widely considered the industry leader in computer animated films, but the studio’s immaculate image detail and inventive character design are not what earned them that position. Instead, people love Pixar more for their narrative accomplishments, that they show us things we’ve never seen before (or ever expected to see)—a balloon-powered house flying to
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As I watched Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring,” based on the true story of a quintet of teenagers who robbed the Hollywood Hills homes of the rich and famous by employing the surprisingly unsophisticated method of opening unlocked doors, I wondered whether the film was trying to be a hyperbolic cultural critique a la Harmony
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Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. After two weekends of wildly missing the mark, my accuracy improved last weekend, albeit not to the extent that I wanted it to. I lowballed on both “Man of Steel” and “This is the End,”
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