By Armond White The affecting if imperfect Les Miserables was cruelly mocked because its essentially Christian story of forgiveness and redemption was out of sync with modern movie nihilism. It takes a cult figure like Terrence Malick to challenge this intolerance in his boldly Christian new film To the Wonder. …
By Armond White We are fortunate to be spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful: emphatic about race grievance and loaded with numerous Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has fashioned 42, a superbly watchable tale, from Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of professional baseball …
By Armond White Guys all wanted to sex Rosario Dawson after The 25th Hour where she dressed in schoolgirl drag as the ultimate stroke book fantasy. Dawson is always cast for sultry provocation–sometimes movingly as Channing Tatum’s girl who got away in Ten Years and now outrageously in Trance, Danny …
By Armond White Blancanieves is the most hilariously misunderstood movie since people took Haneke’s Amour to be a sweet love story. Is this peculiarity as simple as illiteracy or is it another case of cinematically illiterate critics who don’t know how to read what they see on screen? Spanish director …
By Armond White Derek Cianfrance must be a pimp to get a project like The Place Beyond Pines green-lighted. Its less than compelling story about a criminal (Ryan Gosling) and a police offer (Bradley Cooper) whose lives cross (a newspaper headline identifies them as “Moto-Bandit and Hero Cop”) is dragged …
By Armond White P.J. Hogan, Australia’s most appealing yet least heralded filmmaker, returns to prominence with Mental, a kind of musical screwball comedy about social misfits that at first seems perfectly designed for the era of “It Gets Better” nostrums. But Hogan is bolder than the politically correct pandering of …
By Armond White Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends …
By Armond White At first Michel Gondry’s The We and the I is charming and then it’s scary. It starts with a delightfully, deliberately crude F/X of a boom box style city bus traversing the rough streets of The Bronx–a toy-like transformation that gets smashed into realism: An actual city …
By Armond White Poor Tina Fey is still doing her Sarah Palin impersonation in Admission, the new comedy where she is supposed to portray Portia Nathan, a Princeton University admissions officer who discovers the sensitivity she has misplaced due to careerism. Admitting her lifelong failings, get it? Problem is, Fey’s …
By Armond White Did Simone DeBeauvoir have a bubbly personality?” Ginger (Elle Fanning) asks her BFF. And Rosa (Alice Englert), without a care about DeBeauvoir’s philosophical stature, reasons that the cluelessly academic titan “Hasn’t read Girl. These two 1960s British teenagers, fans of pop magazines like Girl, new music and …
By Armond White As Su Friedrich’s Gut Renovation (now playing at Film Forum) made the filmmaker’s case against the politics of economic and neighborhood change, I envisioned an ideal double-bill: Gut Renovation should ideally be seen alongside John Boorman’s 1990 masterpiece Where the Heart Is. Not sure if Friedrich knows …
By Armond White In God is the Bigger Elvis, about former movie actress Dolores Hart who gave up her Hollywood career opposite such glamorous stars as Elvis Presley, Montgomery Clift, Stephen Boyd and is now Mother Prioress at the Regina Laudis Benedictine abbey in Bethleham, Conn., director Rebecca Cammisa touches …
By Armond White The question of whether computer animation has killed or enhanced the “magic” of cinema demands other questions, like: How many more times can we tolerate digitally enhanced characters leaping into the air with their spear or knife drawn to descend superhero-like on an opponent? How many zooming …
By Armond White As we witness the death of cinephilia, movies like Stoker pop up to remind us how deeply we’ve buried originality, inspiration and sincerity. In Stoker’s story of a teenage girl’s erotic and murderous awakening, India (Mia Wasikowska) endures her father’s funeral by rejecting her grieving mother (Nicole …
