Last year’s debacle over “The Tonight Show” didn’t quite reach Shakespearean proportions, but you sure couldn’t tell it at the time. When Jay Leno left the hallowed television franchise for a stab at prime time, NBC gave the coveted late-night slot to Conan O’Brien, who had been patiently waiting in the latelate-night wings. Things did […]
Phil Bacharach
Posted inArts & Culture
The Tree of Life
The latest work from notoriously deliberative writer/director Terrence Malick (“The New World”) is, by turns, ambitious and audacious, bold and bewildering. Not many pictures are so adventurous, pretentious and/or flatout ballsy — take your pick — as to interrupt its principal story to reveal the origin of the cosmos, but “Tree” does just that. It […]
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Cedar Rapids
So when a comedy comes along like “Cedar Rapids,” in which the apple-cheeked innocent is a nerdy man and the big, bad world takes the form of an insurance agents’ convention, it’s not likely to break new ground. But that’s all right. The story’s familiar contrivances and clichés actually feel kind of cozy in “Cedar […]
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Meek’s Cutoff
In “Meek’s Cutoff,” director Kelly Reichardt painstakingly reveals the hardscrabble existence of a few pioneers — lost and bereft of water — as they spiral from desperation to panic. It’s a compelling narrative with flashes of enigmatic majesty, but those moments are snuffed out by an unrelentingly glacial pace. Screening Thursday through Sunday at the […]
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American Teen
With its unforgiving caste system, peer pressures and never-ending crises, high school could reduce even the most hard-bitten survivalist into a knock-kneed mess. Regardless of your own high school experience, chances are a lot of memories will come flooding back with “American Teen,” a remarkable 2008 documentary that chronicles four teens navigating their senior year. […]
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A Film Unfinished
“A Film Unfinished,” screening Friday and Saturday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, starkly illustrates both the duplicity and unflinching honesty of cinema. The harrowing documentary has a more urgent purpose, however, as it details the evil of the Holocaust. At its center is an unfinished work of Nazi propaganda chronicling life in […]
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Rio
There are songs, double entendres and the seemingly requisite 3-D effects to ensure ticket prices eat up a small fortune. It is utterly forgettable. Jesse Eisenberg (“The Social Network”) is the voice of Blu, a macaw who is poached shortly after birth in the jungle and winds up in small-town Minnesota. As the pet of […]
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Win Win
The characters in those films created their own families. His newest work, “Win Win,” manages to take a nuclear family and still convert it into something different and deeper. Paul Giamatti (“Barney’s Version”) plays Mike Flaherty, a New Jersey attorney with a struggling practice and mounting debt. When he finds himself with an opportunity to […]
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The King’s Speech
Real-life story of an embattled hero overcoming a handicap? Check. About the British monarchy? Check. Customarily great British actors being customarily great and, um, British? Check. Still, “Speech” also has another trick up its sleeve: It is excellent — a rare work of Oscar-bait as satisfying as it purports to be. And it is anchored […]
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Hanna
That last problem is the chief one facing the title character of “Hanna,” a sleek thriller opening Friday, buoyed by smart performances and a director eager to prove his action chops. As the story opens, Hanna (Saorise Ronan, “The Lovely Bones”) and her father, an ex-CIA agent named Erik (Eric Bana, “The Time Traveler’s Wife”), […]