Metro Pulse

The discovery of sex, like the discovery of one’s religious faith, initially promises a life of joyful communion. Instead, both generally bequeath journeys of unbearable loneliness. Making a mournful plunge for the heart of these twin, paradoxical transcendences is Doubt, directed by John Patrick Shanley in an adaptation of his own four-hander stage play. Full story »

If anything is capable of single-handedly turning that perception upside down—and just in time for Oscar voting—it’s Frank Miller’s new adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, one of the most plodding, joyless, and empty big-budget funny-book movies of recent years. Full story »

From Danny Boyle, one of the liveliest and most worthwhile directors of recent years, comes this modern-day Balzac-ian rags-to-riches tale, a bright and shiny thing of almost no value whatsoever. In Slumdog Millionaire the slums of Paris are now the toxic entrails of a re-industrialized Mumbai, and the deus ex machina of the winning Parisian lottery ticket is an anti-statistical streak through Who Wants to Be a Rupee Millionaire? Full story »

After another string of low-rent indies of widely varying quality, Gus Van Sant brings us Milk, a biopic about the late San Francisco gay activist and politician Harvey Milk, which feels like it might be Van Sant’s Great Work in that it is marked by all of the best elements of his previous films, with none of the excesses or tripe. Full story »

One thing’s for certain: You can’t blame Jonathan Hensleigh or Thomas Jane, the director and star, respectively, of 2004’s The Punisher, the tolerably entertaining predecessor of this alleged reboot. Both men bolted when it became apparent that plans for a sequel were going nowhere fast. And now their version of Punisher—a middling actioner that did a modest box office but scored big in video release—looks like a work of Welles-ian complexity in comparison to Levi Alexander’s beetle-browed clunker. Full story »

There has been a lot of over-the-top, super-hyperbolic praised heaped onto screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. And here’s some more. I believe this movie was made specifically for me at this point in my life. Yes, there’s an implied qualifier there. It’s perhaps not for everyone. If you’re not obsessed with your own failings when put up against your peers, if you’re not constantly waiting for death or expecting to be found out as the fool you know yourself to be, if you’re not so hopelessly, narcissistically self-loathing that you can’t find the energy to see anything beyond the world in your own head—in other words, if you’re not just like Kaufman’s protagonist Caden Cotard, maybe you should skip this one. Full story »

Countless films have dealt with similar subject matter and the attendant moral implications—that hatred and bigotry are parasites that leech the essence of human spirit, that good people must be ever wary of the evil that lives in human hearts. The Nazi regime provides a particularly pointed illustration, irresistible to filmmakers and fabulists alike, of why these truths are eternal. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas dutifully strikes the proper notes, in that respect, and it does so effectively. Full story »

When 2006’s Casino Royale ends, British secret agent James Bond (Daniel Craig) is in agony over the betrayal and suicide of his lover, Vesper. When Quantum of Solace begins, he is still consumed by past events, but his duty to country continues, leading him to an international group of criminals named Quantum, which he finds to have infiltrated the exclusive circle of agents run by his boss, M (Judi Dench). Now Bond is so determined to root out the head of Quantum, he can’t even kill straight. Full story »

When a new Mike Leigh film appears called Happy-Go-Lucky, you’d assume that it’s an ironic title. It’s not, exactly—the phrase provides a perfect description of the movie’s protagonist, Poppy, an effervescent 30-year-old London schoolteacher played with exquisite and delicate intensity by Sally Hawkins—but it does downplay the serious way that Leigh uses her story to examine just what happiness is, and how it works. Full story »

Changeling, the new film produced and directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie, begins and ends in much the same way. The perspective is high above a colorless Los Angeles street in the late 1920s, Model A Fords trundling along it. The music behind is a muted trumpet, playing a sparse and tentative line. In between those bookends are nearly two-and-a-half hours of story, with only a slight improvement in hue. Full story »

Albuquerque’s East High is the best high school in the world because Zac Efron goes there. What’s more, it’s the setting for High School Musical 3. But East High’s favorite basketball champ Troy Bolton (Efron) has a problem: It’s senior year, and he’s questioning his future. All of his friends know exactly what they want, but Troy, not so much. To add suckage to lameness, his beautiful, turning-the-world-on-with-her-smile girlfriend Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens) is going to college a thousand miles away (literally) while he’s expected to stay in town to be a college basketball star at his father’s alma mater. Thing is, when Troy raises his arms to catch a pass, he doesn’t know whether he’s doing it to score the winning basket for the team, or if he’s preparing to make perfectly posed jazz hands. What’s his real passion? Could his coach/dad ever understand? God a’mighty, could Zac Efron be any prettier? Full story »

Right from the get-go, there’s a problem with making a relatively straight movie about George W. Bush, especially without the aid of a few post-presidency buffer-zone years. Never mind the fiasco of a war or the breakdown of Democratic checks and balances that he has left in his wake. He is, and always has been, kind of a joke as a character. The 43rd president, as middle-of-the-road comedians have proven ad nauseum since he took office, is tailor-made for broad slapstick, from the ever-present, vaguely confused look in his eyes to his famous grammatical slip-ups to his phony, over-the-top Texas machismo. How can you make a movie about this man, at this point in history, without slipping into parody or preachiness? Full story »

Imagine a society living in shadow, a place where corruption rules, infrastructure is failing, and cynicism replaces hope in the minds of its citizens. No, we’re not talking about America at the end of the second Bush term here; rather, we’re talking about Ember, the namesake city of the new film from director Gil Kenan. Full story »

Michael Cera desperately needs a way to escape typecasting, or at least to avoid saturation. He doesn’t quite get it in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, an iPod-generation mash-up of the road movie, the romantic teen comedy, and the rock ’n’ roll midnight-show cult classic in which Cera plays essentially the same character he’s always played. Full story »

After two consecutive universally acclaimed, multiple-award-winning films—2002’s City of God and The Constant Gardener from 2005—Fernando Mereilles was perhaps due for a letdown. And his latest movie, Blindness, is certainly a drop-off—less focused, occasionally over-stylized, and, at times, difficult to watch. But it’s far from a failure. Full story »