Catherine Hardwicke’s feeling for teen angst and female anxiety gave Twilight (the first film of the series based on Stephenie Meyer’s novels) immense potential. But Chris Weitz’s sequel New Moon is full of lost potential. Harwicke’s visual elegance via cinematographer Elliott Davis emphasized the wooded Northwest territory as a natural wonderland where the heroine Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) uneasy puberty emerged. Hardwicke gave Meyer’s fairy/gothic tale an idealized representation of universal adolescent tension. Bella’s attraction to teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) normalized today’s sexual permissiveness—the cultural pressure teens feel to be sexually active—with a concept both shrewd and authentically Bronte-esque. Read more

Hot on the heels of Bored to Death, HBO’s neurotic noir starring Jason Schwartzman as the least likely of private detectives, comes The Missing Person, which gets the mood right, but badly miscalculates when it comes to Michael Shannon’s lead performance as detective John Rosow. Read more

SOMETIMES ALEXANDER SOKUROV,Werner Herzog and Pedro Almodóvar are ingenious, but their newest releases regress. Sokurov’s gorgeous bullcrap in The Sun is the definition of hagiography. He elegizes Emperor Hirohito’s deposition of his own divinity at the end of WWII as a confrontation between rationality and superstition, poetry and politics, tradition and personal expediency. Sokurov’s usual spiritual mysticism dreamily suggests Hirohito possessed a skeptic’s interest in science and historical fact. Read more Read it in print

Liz Taylor was right in her now famous Tweet about Michael Jackson’s This Is It. My Lincoln center program about MJ’s music videos (Keep Moving: Michael Jackson’s Video Art at the Walter Reade Theater, Nov. 22) was planned before This Is It, but it ought to confirm Dame Liz’s enthusiasm. It’s designed to show film enthusiasts who wonder: “What happened to the movie musical?” or “Why wasn’t Michael a film star?” Despite race, class and puritanical obstacles, Jackson advanced the movie-musical genre his own way—working with the best, trusting his instinct and raising the promo film to an art form every time out. Read more

Sandra Bullock brings sanity to the madness currently infecting the movie scene. Her intelligent, affecting new movie The Blind Side uses a double metaphor (alluding to both a football player’s vulnerability and racial color blindness) to dramatize how people can overcome race and class barriers to achieve their fuller humanity. Bullock’s film is upfront about the attitudes mangled and suppressed in media hype for Precious. The past week’s Preciousmania featured outrageous displays of self-righteousness, fake compassion and gullibility—from white journalists wondering if their instant recoil from the gross figure of Precious was proof of prejudice to a black journalist proposing “There’s a Precious inside all of us.” Read more

The 10 women—mothers, porn stars, hookers, bartenders, stewardesses, shrinks—of Sebastian Gutierrez’s interconnecting stories in Women in Trouble may not get into very inventive scrapes considering the title and the cast, but a lucky alchemy of writer and cast turns what could have been an indie bore into something surprisingly uproarious. Snagging the industry’s strongest supporting actresses and then giving them star turns was a canny casting strategy, one that vastly improves Gutierrez’s frequently recycled stories. Read more

The best thing about Fantastic Mr. Fox? Director Wes Anderson liberates commercial animated cinema from the limits of children’s movies. With Henry Selik’s Coraline and Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, this amounts to the most noteworthy film movement of 2009—striking a necessary blow against Pixar’s brainwashing, which has dictated most people’s expectations of what animated movies should be. Read more

FOR ALL THE elaborate apocalyptic imagery in Roland Emmerich’s latest F/X marathon 2012, there’s not a single witty or memorable sight. Not much story either: U.S. geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofore) discovers that the Earth’s crust is shifting due to enormous solar flare eruptions. Neutrinos heat up the Earth’s core “like a microwave,” which gives Emmerich’s CGI team the chance to design various destruction scenarios. It’s a demolition field day—breaking landmarks from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. Read more

The Hand of Fatima fits squarely into the ever-expanding genre of films documenting a director’s journey into his or her familial past. The public recording of what, in theory, is an intensely private experience, these filmmakers must create enough emotional legibility for the outside viewer to connect with their subjective state, while maintaining that intensely personal quality that brings their film the sheen of authenticity. Read more

Despite the many things wrong with Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the acting was superbly on-point. De Palma’s little-known cast got class differences right, even while the film’s rhetorical concept was slanting them into the typical Blue State condescension about working-class grunts. This bias infects the latest Iraq War movie, The Messenger, by writer-director Oren Moverman, who lacks De Palma’s instincts for actorly (human) truth. This story about two veterans (Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson) assigned MOS duty to deliver death notices to the deceased’s NOK (next-of-kin), is so bungled up with fashionable ambivalence about the Iraq War that every single behavioral detail is not just prejudicial but wrong. Read more