http://www.nypress.com/articles.sec-20-1-films-reviews.html 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.]]> 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.]]> 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.]]> 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.]]> 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.”]]> 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.]]> 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.]]> 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.]]> 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.]]> 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.]]>