There’s no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini’s movie-about-moviemaking urtext 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a 12-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction—smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle of a…

Six decades after unleashing persistent NAACP bugaboo Song of the South (1946), and two after firmly suppressing it, that peculiar cultural institution known as the Walt Disney Co. has made a symbolic reparation by creating its first black princess—and plunking her down in the middle of Jim Crow-era Louisiana! A…

Given his preference for static, symmetrical, scrupulously color-coordinated and art-directed compositions, it’s less surprising that Wes Anderson has gotten around to directing an animated feature than that it took him this long to do it. Likewise, if Anderson—a nostalgia merchant whose ostensibly contemporary films always seem to be unfolding in…

In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a 4-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is also the father of her own…

The title is a double entendre in An Education, the film version of British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir about the crash course she received in the “university of life” while studying for her A-levels in early-1960s suburban London. So, too, is Danish director Lone Scherfig’s movie something of a deceptively…

Early in Shane Acker’s computer-animated debut feature 9, a diminutive anthropomorphic whatsit with wooden hands, copper fingers and the titular numeral emblazoned on his chest awakens to the lifeless body of his human creator and sets forth into a decimated industrial landscape—all twisted metal and smokestacks—that calls to mind London…

In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside-down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The…

The aliens have been with us for 20 years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…

After devoting his first two films as director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular, Sandler-esque movie star diagnosed with a rare…

Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…

Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S…

“They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…

Director Kirby Dick doesn’t actually stick his camera under any Capitol Hill bathroom stalls in the new documentary Outrage, but his goal is more or less the same: to catch conservative, family-values politicians with their pants down. Armed with a chorus of incriminating voices from across the alternative press and…

Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’ solipsistic, terminally-apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational,…

At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine and Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing and…

The face of Mike Tyson stares out from the screen like a sentry—intent, sober, watchful. The camera sits close, the framing is tight, and as we lock eyes with the former heavyweight champ who could shatter an opponent’s confidence with little more than a glance, he seems to look past…

Lymelife There’s nothing new under the suburban sun (save for infectious ticks) in Derick Martini’s Lymelife, whose weighty allegorical title and fastidious 1970s accoutrements aim to do for beer-and-pretzels Long Island what Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm did for tony, key-party Connecticut. Dad (Alec Baldwin) is shtupping the secretary (Cynthia…

Writing about A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, the 2006 debut film by director Dito Montiel, I likened it to the sort of crude but fascinating object one might find in an exhibition of naif art. Adapted by Montiel—a former hardcore punk musician—from his autobiographical novel about his teenage delinquency…

This much is for sure about the makers of the new Zac Efron picture 17 Again: They know their audience. Scientifically engineered for maximum shriek-and-squeal value among Efron’s legion of distaff tween fans (and no small number of lonelyheart cougars and gay men), the movie opens on His Zackness’ sweaty,…