Boy

The story of a Maori family dealing with the aftermath of the mother’s death and the father’s long imprisonment, Boy pulls off an elegant balancing act, diving into its characters’ emotions while maintaining a joyful lightness of spirit.

There’s no pathologizing of poverty in this lovely film, which is told from the point of view of its title character (James Rolleston). The oldest of the family’s two sons, Boy is a bright, imaginative 11-year-old who loves his life and idealizes his absent father, spinning tales of comic-book glory about him for his brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu). So when Dad (played by writer-director Taika Waititi) comes home from prison while the grandma who’s raising the boys is away for a few days, Boy is as thrilled as we (and Rocky) are wary, treating his dad like a star fallen to earth in his own backyard. Read more

Act of Valor

All movies play either into or against our beliefs about how the world works to some degree. That’s why things can heat up so fast when we talk about them: When we insist that Tree of Life is a pretentious bore or Bridesmaids was robbed of a Best Picture Oscar nod, chances are what’s really riling us is a conviction that Hollywood is dominated by an out-of-touch elite, or that it has no room for women who don’t fit the hot-girlfriend mold.

Certain genres, like romantic comedies and fish-out-of-water buddy movies, don’t hit any hot buttons in most of us, which is probably why they work so well as escapism. But war movies hit us where we live and die, dredging up clannish feelings about our politics, identities, and national security. That’s why they can work so well as propaganda—but only for people whose values are aligned with whatever point of view they’re selling. Read more

Let the Bullets Fly

The circle may have finally closed on Tarantino-ization with this Chinese film, which seems to borrow as generously from QT as he borrowed from Hong Kong masters.

A gorgeously filmed chow fun western set about 100 years ago in southern China, in “the age of warlords,” as the opening titles put it, Let the Bullets Fly keeps tossing us curve balls, from its comic train robbery opening to its wry coda of an ending. Read more

Whether you’re a hard-core fan of short films or you just want to see as many nominees as possible before entering the office Oscar pool, there’s a lot to enjoy in this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts.

The strongest category is the documentaries, a parade of pain packaged with strong messages of hope and perseverance, so you don’t feel as if you’ve suffered for nothing. Read more

Safe House

If the trailer for Safe House has you thinking you’ve seen it all before, you’d be right. But if you like a solidly made thriller with lots of fighting, that shouldn’t keep you from enjoying this one.

The déjà vu starts with the premise, which is part Training Day and part Haywire. As he did in Training Day, Denzel Washington plays an ethically compromised veteran of a law enforcement agency (this time around, the CIA) who schools a naïve recruit (Ryan Reynolds) on how things really work. And, as in Haywire and countless other spy-versus-spy movies, Denzel and Reynolds’s characters are agents on the run who must fight for their lives as they figure out who is trying to kill them and who—if anyone—they can trust.

Shot largely with that grainy, high-contrast, desaturated look that signals gritty reality in so many pictures these days, Safe House doesn’t do anything new, but it goes through its paces with style. Read more

Cirkus Columbia

If you admired the intent behind Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey but wished you could have seen it done with Eastern European indirection rather than big-footed American sensationalism, you’ll want to check out Cirkus Columbia.

As he did in No Man’s Land, writer-director Danis Tanovic sets this modest but not insubstantial film in his homeland of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early ‘90s. Tanovic adapted the script from a novel of the same name, which addresses the turmoil that ripped the former Yugoslavia apart by focusing on one broken family. Read more

The Secret World of Arietty

No wonder anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki had wanted to make a film about the Borrowers for pretty much his whole career, until he finally co-wrote this one a couple years ago. Mary Norton’s children’s books are a perfect match for Miyazaki’s adult-friendly children’s movies, with their strong female lead, their inventive take on living light on Mother Earth (what are Borrowers if not the ultimate recyclers?), and their deep respect for a child’s sensibilities.

But something softened that life force in The Secret World of Arietty, which feels as if it were made by Disney rather than just released by the mouse house here in the U.S.
Read more

Albert Nobbs

As numbingly inert as its title character, Albert Nobbs is a triumphant actor’s exercise that never quite succeeds as a movie.

That may be partly because its star, Glenn Close, is a co-writer and co-producer, having worked for years to get the movie made after playing the part onstage in 1982. But it probably has even more to do with director Rodrigo García (Mother and Child), whose films often feel a bit hollow and contrived despite featuring great performances by great actresses. Read more

The Dish and the Spoon

The light is beautiful, the backgrounds artfully softened, and the actors charming, but The Dish and the Spoon starts to flatline just a few minutes in.

We start out in a car with Rose (Greta Gerwig), sniffling her way through the Lincoln Tunnel in a winter coat and pjs. Greta makes Rose easy to relate to as she rolls past seedy strip malls, scarfing down doughnuts and beer. Then she picks up a soulful teenager (Olly Alexander) and her story quickly devolves into a series of scenes that feel like acting exercises. Read more

The Grey

The Grey is one of those macho-adventure-gone-terribly-wrong movies that aims to give you a vicarious scare, shaking you out of your over-civilized stupor and awakening you to the need to live life to the fullest and then die like a man, unafraid and unburdened by regret.

It opens with promise as John Ottway (Liam Neeson), hired by an oil company to kill the wolves that would otherwise kill the oilfield workers, stops a wolf in its tracks with one expertly fired bullet and then helps it die, laying a compassionate hand on the animal’s flank as it breathes its last ragged breaths. The terse authority of Neeson’s manly voiceover and the wolf that doesn’t so much as snarl when Ottway strokes it make it clear that we’re in mythic/fairy tale territory, and it’s a solemn, contemplative region I’d have been glad to commit to if director-cowriter Joe Carnahan had just done the same. Read more