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The plot concerns the parallel romantic tribulations of Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson), two employees of a Chicago microbrewery whose respective relationships are the main obstacle to the inevitable consummation of their flirtatious (but mostly irritating) friendship. Kate’s insistence on staying out late to choke down pints with her exclusively male co-workers contrasts with the more intellectual, homebody lifestyle of her fortyish boyfriend, Chris (Ron Livingston, still a reliable source of droll masculine world-weariness)....

Long before Stephenie Meyer’s fundamentally conservative young-adult fantasy franchise, there existed fellow Mormon Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga. A short story that has evolved into a series of 16 (soon to be 17) books, Ender’s Game (the original 1985 novel) is by turns bullied-nerd wish fulfillment, Objectivist wet dream, and a replay of the Christ story. Streamlining the plot-heavy trajectory of the novel, the fundamental message remains: whatever happens, it’s never the protagonist’s fault....

Eyimofe (Arie & Chuko Esiri, 2021). Courtesy of Janus Films Brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri’s debut feature, set in their native Lagos, tells parallel stories of the continually thwarted efforts of two industrious individuals intent on crossing over to Europe and starting anew. The film opens with the acquisition of a coveted passport by Mofe (Jude Akuwudike). A middle-aged man and an indefatigable dreamer, Mofe works by day as an electrician in a ramshackle factory and by night as a security guard, to provide support for his adult sister and her two young sons and to save for his impending move to Spain....

Much has been made about Xavier Dolan’s age. I Killed My Mother, written when he was 17 and shot two years later, demonstrates the kind of phenomenal precociousness that publicists adore, and the film’s success at Cannes—an eight-minute standing ovation and three Directors’ Fortnight awards—only confirms the debut director’s movie-made mythos. As Dolan has explained, however, the pressure to complete the film before he was 20 was due less to ambition than the instinct to keep alive the rush of adolescent angst that inspired the project....

Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney made his name helming critical and insightful exposés and large-scale takedowns of the institutions and establishments that govern modern life. The first big splash came with the enlightening Bush-era exposé Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (05), an adaptation of the book chronicling the collapse of the notorious corporation and the subsequent criminal trials of its head honchos. Taxi to the Dark Side (07) was another milestone that took an investigative look at the murder of an Afghan taxi driver at the hands of American soldiers before broadening into an evaluation of the United States’ political stance on and cultural obsession with torture....

Summer Hours is an extremely French film that seems to have been made in direct reaction to Boarding Gate, its predecessor. After having gone completely international, Olivier Assayas has taken advantage of a commission by the Musée d’Orsay (an exemplary museum of 19th-century art) to explore territory that’s close to home. Boarding Gate (07) was his version of Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel, with an American actor (Michael Madsen), an Italian star (Asia Argento), Hong Kong, and Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: arty deterritorialization pushed to the extreme....

But it's not Nineties nostalgia that makes 13 years seem more like 25: Seth MacFarlane's media empire (Family Guy, American Dad!, The Cleveland Show) has continuously expanded without ever evolving. In some ways, his subjugation of story to gags is impressive; in other ways, it's just lazy. MacFarlane's eerily perfect formula (hot wife plus dumb guy plus sassy talking baby plus sassy talking animal) doesn't really engender emotional attachment, because it's not supposed to....

Like the neorealist classics that have inspired them, Emanuele Crialese’s films tend to mix gritty immersion with folkloric intimations. Terraferma, the Italian director’s fourth feature, opens at the bottom of the ocean, the camera looking up at the undulating surface as a fishing ship releases its nets. A complete reversal occurs with the film’s final image, an aerial shot looking down at the same boat from what could be described as a bird’s-eye view, or possibly something more heavenly....

The Seventies in all their horror-film glory, with special reverence paid to The Exorcist, are back (again). Better yet, what scared people in polyester is still perfectly scary now. Cherry-picking some of the best tropes from a golden era, director of The Conjuring James Wan, with screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes, combines the ambiance of horror’s leisure-suit heyday with the more recent brand of well-timed what’s-that-in-the-mirror scares. Carolyn and Roger Perron (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston) have just moved into a remote Rhode Island home with their brood of five daughters....

The year is 2006 and rockets are falling on Haifa. But that doesn’t stop Arik’s elderly father from dragging him to a lawyer who delivers the news that a shady figure from their past, Yankele Bride, has died. Flashback to 1968 (where the rest of the film takes place), when Arik (Tuval Shafir) was a young, mischievous teen, spending his days hanging out with pals or checking out books by Dashiell Hammett from his librarian friend Meir (Dror Keren)....

For the uninitiated, Stephen Chbosky’s novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, published by MTV Books in 1999, wholeheartedly engages in the teenage impulse towards pretentiousness. Routinely compared to Catcher in the Rye, the book has as its central theme the struggle to understand the terrible things that inevitably happen to those we love and to ourselves. The narrative unfolds through a series of letters written by “Charlie,” addressed to you, the reader, and details his alternately painful and joyous high school freshman year....

With each new film, Terrence Malick has pared away a little more of what we could once expect from his cinema and intensified whatever remained. Characters have been assigned less and less personality and motivation; plots have given way to fables, fables to premises, and premises to ideas; conversations have been phased out and half-whispered voiceovers phased in; narrative continuity has been strained, then broken. At the same time, human movement has grown increasingly abstract and dancelike; tiny gestures have been given more and more weight; classical and choral music have become almost ubiquitous....

In the second installment of his “Game Changers” series in FILM COMMENT, Paul Schrader concluded his history of the close-up with an anecdote illustrating how Hollywood is currently addressing changing consumer habits: “Directors who work in television tell me producers come on set and say: ‘How are you going to see them on an iPhone? You’ve gotta come in close.’” Besides this rather grim aesthetic mandate, the shift toward small-screen viewing is also evidenced in how scripts for film and television are being written, in a trend that can be broadly described as “writing for the Internet....

Jordan Peele defines his Oscar-winning film, Get Out, as a “social thriller,” and the first of five genre films he plans to make, telling Business Insider, “I’ve been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons....

Given that Seigner has been married to Polanski for 25 years and Amalric could easily pass for the director’s younger brother, one can’t help wondering if the sexual dynamic that develops on the screen, and is indeed the film’s raison d’être, might have something to do with daily life chez Polanski. Since the film is fiction, and therefore evidence of nothing outside itself, one feels guilty for even allowing the thought to cross one’s mind....

This holiday season, Ryan Gosling carries not one but two movies that chronicle the slow, painful disintegration of a marriage. At the outset each coupling seems straight out of the storybooks, yet one ends in complete emotional breakdown and the other in probable murder. Both films are hard to endure yet impossible to shake, just as dysfunctional relationships often are. All Good Things is Andrew Jarecki’s fiction-film debut, but it’s not entirely a departure from his 2003 documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, since it’s openly, if loosely, based on real-life (mostly disturbed) individuals....

With its story of a mother and son consumed in different ways by a dreadful loss, Jennifer Kent’s focused debut feature excels at what you might call grief horror. The Babadook picks up seven years after Amelia (Essie Davis) loses her husband to a car accident on the way to the hospital to give birth to her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Amelia has trouble putting on a good face with her friends and at her job as a nurse at a home for the elderly, especially once Samuel begins to speak of defending her from some horrible bogeyman....

For his third feature, Corneliu Porumboiu turns that Romanian long-take gaze on his own profession. Shot with a fixed camera and a steadfast single viewpoint for each scene, this long-winded, minimalist film dwells on scenes of a director (Bogdan Dumitrache) dissecting blocking and character motivation with an actress (Diana Avramut) with whom he’s having an affair. Just what is real and spontaneous anyway? And will the film they’re discussing look like this one?...