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Mike D'Angelo

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  • Film

    Thursday, July 23, 2009

    Ever since last year’s Venice Film Festival, where Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker had its world premiere, many critics have proclaimed it to be the first genuinely great movie about the war in Iraq.

  • Film

    Thursday, July 16, 2009

    One of the most reliable crowd-pleasers, in multiplexes and arthouses alike, is the tale of the long-suffering conformist who finally cuts loose and embarks upon a series of whimsical adventures.

  • Film

    Thursday, July 9, 2009

    Before the first reel is over, Brüno assaults viewers—and given the country’s collective sensibility, “assault” is really the only possible word—with a Benny Hill-style cavalcade of extreme gay sex acts.

  • Film

    Thursday, June 18, 2009

    Jessica Biel plays Larita, an American race-car driver and divorcée who’s just married into a highly starched English family and must do brittle battle with her new mother-in-law and other snooty relations.

  • Film

    Thursday, June 18, 2009

    Tom Egoyan may be the only filmmaker in the world who would go to the trouble of inventing fictional technology for a movie that couldn’t even remotely be considered science fiction.

  • Film

    Thursday, June 4, 2009

    Y Tu Mamá También's power duo of Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna are back together, this time under the direction of Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón's brother, Carlos.

  • Film

    Thursday, May 14, 2009

    Trashy airport novels frequently make better movies than do works of serious literature, oddly enough. So you’d think that Dan Brown’s atrociously written—and yet compulsively readable—tales would make hugely entertaining Hollywood fluff. Bzzt.

  • Film

    Thursday, April 30, 2009

    Sugar is well-intentioned but a bit of a bore.

  • Film

    Thursday, April 23, 2009

    Movies based on true stories generally like to trumpet their real-world bona fides right at the outset, so that we’ll be properly amazed as the remarkable events unfold.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, April 16, 2009

    From goofy teenage Tony Montana wannabes firing automatic weapons in their underwear, to the murderous muscle necessary to fashion a red carpet gown, nothing is overlooked or sensationalized in Gomorrah.

  • Film

    Thursday, April 9, 2009

    Hollywood comedies don’t generally require keystones, but Observe and Report—a film so stubborn and bizarre that it might more accurately be termed an anti-comedy—goes the extra mile.

  • Film

    Thursday, April 2, 2009

    No doubt the title is intended ironically, but still—pretty much the last word you’d ever use to describe Adventureland would be “adventurous.”

  • Film

    Thursday, March 19, 2009

    Director Cantet observes the teacher-student dynamic with such probing patience that you can’t help but get emotionally involved in the struggle.

  • Film

    Thursday, March 19, 2009

    As movies with no compelling reason to exist go, Che is really quite good.

  • Film

    Thursday, March 19, 2009

    Schoolkids are asked to draw their visions of the future; their efforts are then sealed into a time capsule to be opened 50 years hence.

  • Film

    Thursday, March 5, 2009

    Suicidally depressed after a broken engagement, Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) finds himself torn between the titular beauties, feelin’ like a fool.

  • Film

    Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009

    Waltz With Bashir has accomplished a remarkable film-ghetto hat trick, being simultaneously one of last year’s most acclaimed foreign films, one of its most celebrated documentaries and one of its most notable animated features.

  • Film

    Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009

    Loud, aggressive, desperately ribald and pathetically unfunny, Fired Up lives down to every expectation you might have for a film produced under the aegis of Maxim magazine.

  • Film

    Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009

    Action thrillers are inherently preposterous, of course, but there’s a limit to what we’ll swallow.

  • Film

    Thursday, Feb. 5, 2009

    A bitchy, tough-love self-help tome, He’s Just Not That Into You offers advice so blatantly obvious that the entire book can be condensed into a single sentence: If you have any doubt whatsoever about whether a guy really likes you, he doesn’t.

  • Film

    Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009

    Arriving on U.S. screens nearly a full year after it opened in Europe, Taken, the latest hyperviolent potboiler produced and co-written by slick action ace Luc Besson (the Transporter series), feels even more retrograde and anachronistic than that delay might suggest.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009

    Like most fantasy-adventure stories, Inkheart, adapted from German author Cornelia Funke’s popular series of children’s books, strives to conjure up a long-forgotten world.

  • Film

    Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009

    Revolutionary Road opens with two scenes so beautifully judged—so perfect a précis of a marriage in crisis—that they just about render the rest of the film redundant.

  • Film

    Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009

    Early in Gran Torino, playing what he’s said may well be his final role, Clint Eastwood growls. I mean that quite literally.

  • Reviews

    Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008

    Frost/Nixon is just an entertaining clash of two oversized egos, and that’s fine by me. Just so long as 30 years from now we aren’t obliged to endure the distaff sequel: Couric/Palin.

  • Reviews

    Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008

    At one point, for no good reason, Mendes’ sultry jewel thief photocopies her own ass. That’s this movie in a nutshell.

  • Film

    Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008

    Two Weekly critics discuss the year in films.

  • Reviews

    Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008

    Once upon a time, a movie set amongst priests and nuns and portentously titled Doubt might have concerned a crisis of faith. These days, however, another cause for uncertainty springs immediately to mind.

  • Film

    Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008

    Slumdog Millionaire arrives in local theaters riding a veritable tsunami of audience goodwill, to say nothing of its status as the current frontrunner for Best Picture at next year’s Oscars. People genuinely seem to love it. All I can do, really, is try my best to explain why I did not.

  • Film

    Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008

    The Day the Earth Stood Still, which in 1951 spoke to the nation’s anxiety about the terrible power of nuclear fission, has now gone green.

  • Film

    Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008

    Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant, sticks fast to moldy biopic convention and features Academy Award-winner Sean Penn as doomed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to win elected office.

  • Reviews

    Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

    Six years before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon introduced wuxia (the Chinese chivalry/swordplay genre) to a large American audience, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai set out to create a particularly ambitious and singular example of the form.

  • Reviews

    Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

    Luhrmann has apparently concluded that nothing short of an entire continent can contain his go-large extravagance at this point. Thus, Australia, a three-hour epic that piles aboriginal mysticism on top of romance-novel ardor on top of Western cattle drives on top of WWII bombing campaigns, slathering it all with generous, sticky helpings of Hollywood’s beloved 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz.

  • Film

    Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008

    I feel compelled to issue a Critic General’s Warning: Unremitting bleakness may result in viewer tedium, and futile attempts to follow this film’s maddeningly recursive storyline have been demonstrated to cause painful migraine headaches in laboratory animals.

  • Film

    Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008

    Rachel Getting Married, an emotionally wrenching family melodrama with a uniquely paradoxical tone, at once utopian and despairing, easily ranks among the year’s best films.

  • Film

    Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008

    Any movie that stars both Sarah Brightman and Paris Hilton seems destined for cult status, and the most surprising thing about Repo! The Genetic Opera, adapted for the screen from a popular stage musical, is that it’s receiving a general release rather than heading directly for the midnight circuit.

  • Film

    Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008

    When first you encounter Pauline “Poppy” Cross (Hawkins), the unstoppable life force at the center of Leigh’s aptly titled Happy-Go-Lucky, it’s hard not to flinch and retreat a little, so relentless and overpowering is her good cheer.

  • Film

    Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

    When we initially meet Ernie Davis, who eventually becomes the first African-American to win the Heisman trophy, he’s running like the wind to escape a group of white racist thugs.

  • Film

    Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008

    Body of Lies frequently plays like a geopolitical Sleepless in Seattle, with its two stars repeatedly jawing on the phone across thousands of miles but only rarely meeting in person. Call this one Jittery in Jordan.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

    Arguably the work that landed him the Nobel Prize for Literature, José Saramago’s dystopian novel Blindness, published in 1995, was long considered to be “unfilmable.”

  • Film

    Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008

    You’d be hard-pressed to find a film critic more potentially sympathetic to Religulous, the new documentary in which Bill Maher roams the globe poking nonstop fun at the inherent absurdity, as he sees it, of all religious faith. I am among the converted to whom he is preaching, and I wanted to slap him upside the head.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

    Just what is it about the current war, you have to wonder, that inspires such painfully mediocre movies?

  • Reviews

    Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008

    Entering a theater showing a Spike Lee Joint demands a certain amount of faith and stubborn optimism, in that you never know which Spike showed up on the set this time. Was it the iconoclastic yet disciplined maverick who channeled his righteous anger into such modern classics as Do the Right Thing and 25th Hour? Or was it the overbearing, self-indulgent churl whose well of bitterness poisoned the likes of Girl 6, Bamboozled and She Hate Me?

  • Reviews

    Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008

    Race in America is such an inherently combustible subject that Hollywood rarely goes anywhere near it without using comedy as a skittish safety net. Which is pretty dumb, really, since we’re obviously hungry for movies that dare to acknowledge and explore the many fissures still compromising the country’s melting pot.

  • Film

    Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008

    Whatever barely discernible line may yet remain between the traditional documentary and “reality programming,” American Teen clearly has no use for it.

  • Film

    Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008

    At this point in his career—46 years as a filmmaker, 54 features and shorts—Werner Herzog has done time in so many inhospitable climes, and celebrated so many fellow loner-obsessives, that you can’t help but wonder whether more trenchant observations might emerge if he and his camera were thrust into, I dunno, some giant Midwestern shopping mall.

  • Film

    Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008

    Stoner comedies, as became all too apparent during the brief heyday of Cheech and Chong, tend to suffer from an inherent liability: Their protagonists are too blissfully baked to budge from the couch, much less play an active role in some convoluted three-act narrative.

  • Film

    Thursday, July 17, 2008

    Residents of the actual Brick Lane, a London thoroughfare inhabited mostly by Bangladeshi immigrants, turned out in droves to protest this filmed adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel, complaining that her book portrayed them as insufficiently devout Muslims. Once they finally see the movie, expect them to hit the streets again, this time livid that they come off as so damn boring.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, July 17, 2008

    "Why so serious?” wonders the poster tagline—invoking, ironically enough, the very question that moviegoers will likely be asking as they emerge from the theater. Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s well-regarded reboot of the franchise, was fairly (and appropriately) somber as blockbusters go, but it’s downright frivolous compared to The Dark Knight, which is not even remotely kidding about its titular adjective.

  • Reviews

    Thursday, July 10, 2008

    Filmmakers with a distinctive vision can generally be divided into two camps: those primarily concerned with human behavior and those obsessed with the properties of cinema itself. Towering figures like Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese fit both profiles. But Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro, uniquely, fits neither.