http://www.nypress.com/articles.sec-20-1-films-reviews.html 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.]]> SHAME ON TYLER PERRY and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious. After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches. They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious’ con job—even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade.]]> GEORGE CLOONEY MEET Dusan Makavejev: Hollywood clown to Yugoslavian art-movie satirist. Clooney’s dismal new comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats makes it essential to re-learn what good political satire means.There’s no richer example than Makavejev’s films, and three of them are now packaged in Criterion’s DVD box set, Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical.]]> Add Robert Zemeckis to the list of filmmakers exposed by Michael Jackson's This is It. The empathetic star-power in that beautiful concert film should have inspired a brilliant remake of A Christmas Carol. Instead, Zemeckis made his pact with technology. Every shot is a gimmick in Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. Strange that Charles Dickens' great, imperishable tale about change-of-heart should be adapted by a filmmaker who has renounced brilliant satire (I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, Back to the Future) in order to sentimentalize and distort human beings (starting with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? then famously with Forest Gump).]]> Almost 10 years before Vincent Price’s definitive performance as the ghoulish rapper in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Price had already riffed on his career as a veteran Hollywood survivor in 1973’s Theater of Blood (playing this week with Scream of Terror as part of Film Forum’s Halloween double bill). Price rode out the transition from major studio contract leading player in A-list films like Laura (1944) to a star of André de Toth’s atypical thriller House of Wax (1953), which tracked him from icon status through American International’s low-budget grand guignols. Jackson intuited how Price—St. Louis, Missouri’s most urbane export—turned scary into camp.]]> Fans will cheer Michael Jackson’s This Is It. Haters will sneer (as expected). But Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and other first-class filmmakers who failed to transition Jackson onto the big screen during his pop-idol years ought to weep at the missed opportunities that This Is It makes apparent.]]> “Pulp Fiction with soul,” was what Boston-born, indie-hack-that-could Troy Duffy’s first screenplay, The Boondock Saints, was crassly dubbed by Hollywood insiders. Duffy, more memorable for the story of his rise and meteoric fall from prominence, is not really interested in the kind of misappropriated nostalgia from which Quentin Tarantino has made a career. Like its predecessor, which found a huge cult following on DVD, Boondock Saints II: All Saint’s Days is much more proud of its pseudo-religious self-righteousness and strained pub humor. This time, however, Duffy offers his small but devoted fanbase an equally meaningless sheen of progressivism.]]> Among the American Eccentric directors—those filmmakers who came of age in the Star Wars generation—Jared Hess is the most offbeat. That may explain why Hess, director of 2004’s Napoleon Dynamite, has come up with the first American Eccentrics sci-fi movie—Gentlemen Broncos. Fellow Eccentric David Gordon Green, who got a head start with 2000’s George Washington, regularly speaks of eventually making a sci-fi film, but Hess beat him to it. Treading that thin line between empathy and pity that also distinguished Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, Hess deals with the oddball aspirations frequently felt by teenage loners who escape into the fantasy worlds of sci-fi. Gentlemen Broncos directly expresses that weirdness through 17-year-old Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), who longs to turn his isolation and idiosyncrasies into popular art.]]> HOLLYWOOD PUBLICITY HAS popularly established 1939 as the great signpost of the studio system’s output (the year of Gone with the Wind,Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach and at least a dozen other memorable movies). But films of the ’39 classical era are rivaled by a year in the modernist era: 1962. It marked the highpoint of international, art-film exhibition as well as the beginning of the end of the old Hollywood system, all culminating in extraordinary but—up until now—overlooked riches.]]> HISTORY SHOULD RECORD Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier as cinema’s biggest hoaxster.Von Trier’s never made a good film—Zentropa, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville (most of them part of his “Dogme” movement) were shams perpetrated on the culturally absent-minded—yet von Trier has bamboozled critics and festival organizers into repeatedly showcasing his hoodwinks. Von Trier’s new film Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, is his latest manipulative salvo. The quasi-religious title is misleading provocation; Antichrist is really anti-cinema.]]> ASKED TO WRITE “500 words about what motherhood means to me,” Uma Thurman as Eliza, West Village hausfrau and former hipster, spins her stroller wheels. So writer-director Katherine Dieckmann puts that essay on film as Motherhood. This unusually personal movie is also a rare, heterosexual story from Christine Vachon’s Killer Films production company. Even rarer: It’s a life-affirming Killer Film. Dieckmann details a young Manhattan mother-oftwo’s juggling act—thwarted ambition, ambidextrous care-and-loving of children, husband and friends.The movie is also, in part, a documentary of city life in white, middle-class New York without apology nor the smugness of last year’s Noise.]]> The fact that Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur—a searing and unsentimental account of the author’s messy emotional and mental breakdown following the success of On the Road—has inspired so bald-faced a piece of hagiography as Curt Worden’s One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur is a choice irony. There’s nothing inherently bad about the documentary about the real-life events that eventually culminated in the classic; it’s just that there’s little revelatory in it either. If you go in thinking that Jack Kerouac was a troubled guy but one hell of a writer, that’s about all you’ll take out as well.]]> There’s something unsettling about a comedy set in the Downtown art world that makes you side with the defender of insane art. But whether by design or casting, that’s exactly what happens in the hilarious (Untitled) when Marley Shelton’s gallery owner starts explaining the genius behind an artist’s show consisting of thumbtacks and Post-It notes.]]> A FREEZE-FRAME of lonely suburban kid Max dressed in wolf pajamas and scampering wildly, boyishly indoors with his puppy announces Spike Jonze’s innovation in Where the Wild Things Are. It’s a snapshot of youth in extremis—the unruly innocence that movies usually hide in saccharine artifice. Jonze, master of lo-fi surrealism, captures youth’s anarchic, destructive undercurrent in that single image. It makes his feature-length vision of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s picture book immediately distinctive as the most daring kid’s-movie adaptation since Altman’s still-avant-garde Popeye from 1980.]]> UNIMAGINATIVE EFFORT—THE kind of effort that actor-producerwriter Michael Jai White and writerdirector Scott Sanders put into Black Dynamite—shows the lack of thought that sometimes goes into the hard work of moviemaking. Some films are clearly the wrong thing to do and Black Dynamite—a spoof of ’70s Blaxploitation movies—contributes nothing to the world.White and Sanders waste their own, supposedly artistic, ambitions by ruthlessly ignoring any personal or social issues of life in the new millennium, yet flashing back to an era about which they are uninformed as well as uninspired.]]> WORSE THAN A remake, New York, I Love You is a dreadful imitation of the terrific 2007 film Paris, Je t’aime, where over a dozen directors shot short-stories in Paris. More than a billet doux to the city itself, the shorts also conveyed distinctive aspects of international human experience. Each short was inspired, most of them were superbly executed and memorably performed—Juliette Binoche’s Isabel Coixet segment and Margo Martindale in Alexander Payne’s segment remain as vivid as the best recent feature-length films (and Wes Craven’s entry was easily the best filmmaking of his career).]]> With an appealingly unappealing lead performance from Michelle Monaghan at its center, you want to like Trucker. You really do. But writer-director James Mottern makes it awfully hard with his washed-out, predictable aesthetic.]]> If photographers can mythologize events, buildings and locations with a stunning composition or lighting design, it's become the duty of so many documentarians to mythologize their subjects with the correct talking heads and editing of material to tout their subjects as godheads. That's nearly the case with Eric Bricker's documentary about Julius Shulman, the commercial photographer responsible for many of the iconic photographs of Modern architecture that even most lay people remember from magazine spreads.At times the film teeters on becoming a real estate agent's dream advertising tool, but luckily Shulman is such an interesting character in the influence he wielded in Modern architecture's ability to flourish in America that all the gushy conversations with architects and academics actually seem merited.]]> Adventures of Power has all the elements of those sneering indie quirkfests that feign sympathy for its outsider characters but really just wants to document their loserdom with smug detachment. Gangly, eccentrically-dressed hero? Check. Weirdly fetishized lower-middle-class milieu? Yep. Stern but caring blue-collar parent? You betcha. And to top it off, it’s a movie about air-drum players! Strike up the 1980s-era synthesizers, sit back and let the deluded antics begin!]]> Rather than a straightforward biography of Englishman Michael Peterson, aka Charles Bronson, a petty thug who in 1974 began his 34-year prison sentence and became infamous as Britain's most violent inmate, Refn sensationalizes Peterson's pathetic life story in a series of set pieces.]]>