Pedro Almodóvar has never been afraid of playing with timelines, and his ability to articulate how the past holds sway over the present infuses his work with a noir-like sensibility. Broken Embraces not only continues this exploration of guilt, and how it weighs on relationships, but also feels more personal than many of his other works.

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Based on the remarkable true story of Michael Oher, as chronicled by Michael Lewis in his nonfiction book of the same name, John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side offers an overly familiar formula delivered with a commendably restrained amount of melodrama.

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With Defamation, award-winning documentarian Yoav Shamir abandons the straightforward style of his powerful Checkpoint for something more freewheeling and personal. The filmmaker’s wryly amusing persona is front and center in Defamation, and he’s disarmingly coy enough that the documentary’s power sneaks up on you. Anti-Semitism is, of course, especially fraught subject matter, but after a few forays to find evidence of it on the streets of New York City, we come to discover that Shamir’s subject matter isn’t the phenomenon itself so much as anti-Semitism’s use as a way to rally uncritical support for the state of Israel.
 

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Is it possible to write a raving two-star review? With this bewildering chimera of a movie, Werner Herzog has proven that he is incapable of making a boring film. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans succeeds brilliantly as failure, as Herzog and the terrifically inept Nicolas Cage manipulate the conventions of the police genre for their own personal amusement, foregoing the standard tedium of inflated narrative tension and score-driven suspense in favor of moments of delirious dissonance and peculiar humor.

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The trick to crafting a good children’s movie is to create a film that captures the imagination of young viewers while simultaneously transporting parents back to that time in their lives when anything seemed possible. When filmmakers strike that perfect balance, it’s like they’re bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood by eliminating the skepticism and cynicism of grown-ups, and gently teaching young ones a little bit about how the world really works. It’s obvious that the filmmakers behind Planet 51 worked diligently to create a film that speaks to audiences of all ages, but while the concept of a human space explorer landing on an extraterrestrial world resembling our own 1950s society is ripe with possibilities, their choice to go the conventional route results in a film that’s technically accomplished, yet aggressively generic.

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Comedy has always been about cruelty to some extent — after all, the pratfall, the pie in the face, and the insult are three of the oldest and most reliable laugh-getters of all time, and they all involve robbing someone of their dignity for the amusement of others. But the notion of the prank as entertainment doesn’t have quite the same history; while funny stories that involved tricks played on others have been common enough through the history of literature, theater, and filmmaking, it wasn’t until Allen Funt created the TV series Candid Camera for the fledgling ABC network in 1948 that someone struck upon the idea of tricking someone into making a fool of themselves purely for the purposes of getting a laugh. Since then, the prank as folk art form has been firmly established. Ashton Kutcher dressed up Candid Camera in a trucker hat and an ironic ’70s rock band T-shirt, called it Punk’d, and made it a hit all over again.

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The Messenger isn’t your typical war movie. No battle scenes bring bullets to the screen, no drill sergeants belittle new recruits, and no soldiers die valiantly in defense of their country. At least not onscreen. Instead, the directorial debut of I’m Not There screenwriter Oren Moverman focuses on two soldiers, Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) and Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), in their endeavors as casualty notification officers. Though they’re thousands of miles away from the action in Iraq and Afghanistan, the men have a mission that is just as threatening to their psyches as they inform next of kin of their relatives’ deaths on the other side of the world. We recently participated in a roundtable interview with Foster and Moverman to discuss their work on the film.

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In the mid-’60s, the BBC more or less refused to play rock & roll over the airwaves, and since they controlled all of British radio at the time, that meant the teenagers and hip adults couldn’t hear tracks by such soon-to-be-legendary bands as the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Kinks. In response, a number of enterprising businesspeople anchored boats just a few miles off the British coast, and broadcast the banned music 24 hours a day back to the mainland. These became known as “pirate radio” stations, and such a colorful piece of history would seem to provide a wealth of rich material for a British writer and director as talented as Richard Curtis.

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