Feb 04, 2011 Cinema Web Exclusive

Until her Oscar-nominated performance in Black Swan, Natalie Portman has had a scattershot film career since signing on for the Star Wars prequels. A supporting role in Closer earned her a Golden Globe, and Garden State was a minor hit, but how many folks saw Free Zone, Goya's Ghosts, My Blueberry Nights or New York, I Love You? The Other Woman, which has been sitting around without distribution since 2009, ultimately might be lumped in with these films, but it's finally being released at a time when Portman's never been hotter career-wise. More

Feb 04, 2011 Cinema Web Exclusive

Executive-produced by James Cameron, Sanctum is a visually staggering 3D adventure/thriller that, like Avatar and countless effects-driven films before it, demonstrates how dialogue is inconsequential when the universes depicted on screen are treated more carefully than the characters who inhabit them. More

Jan 07, 2011 Cinema Issue #34 - Year End 2010 - Sufjan Stevens

During an early scene in Blue Valentine, Dean (Ryan Gosling) tries to get his young daughter to eat her “yucky” breakfast by placing pinches of instant oatmeal directly on the kitchen table, so they can slurp it up, as Dean says, “like leopards.” Dean’s wife Cindy (Michelle Williams) is hardly amused; she has the look of a woman who’s grown tired of her husband’s juvenility. Viewers know then and there that a bumpy ride is ahead. More

Dec 21, 2010 Cinema

There's a familiarity about Sofia Coppola's Somewhere that's both intoxicating and exhausting. More

Dec 03, 2010 Cinema Web Exclusive

All of Darren Aronofsky’s films stem from singular obsessions. Be it Pi, with math as an apocryphal glimpse into transcendence; Requiem for a Dream, in its junkie’s quixotic self-delusion; or The Wrestler, with the pursuit of fleeting fame for some divine redemption, the protagonists in Aronofsky’s films sacrifice everything for the single-minded pursuit of their objectives. Black Swan is no exception More

Oct 12, 2010 Cinema Issue #33 - Fall 2010 - Interpol

A biopic that chronicles the family life of John Lennon during his troubled teen years, Nowhere Boy arrives in the U.S. on the heels of Kick-Ass, another film starring Aaron Johnson in a lead role. If Johnson was anonymously forgettable in Kick-Ass, he is a revelation here, portraying the young Lennon as a witty-but-unsophisticated, brash-but-insecure young artist. More

Oct 01, 2010 Cinema Web Exclusive

There’s an almost overwhelming inclination to pit one’s appreciation for this remake against the merits of the original Swedish film, Let the Right One In, but the truth is that the two films are so similar that any comparison will simply boil down to a matter of preference. More

Sep 16, 2010 Cinema Web Exclusive

The directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Goes Boating centers around the socially awkward Jack, a limo driver played by Hoffman who seems to suffer from a borderline case of Asperger syndrome, and his courtship with the equally quirky Connie, played by Amy Ryan (The Wire, The Office). More

Sep 16, 2010 Cinema Web Exclusive

In this film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s (The Remains of the Day) celebrated novel, Carey Mulligan plays Kathy, an intuitive but inhibited English boarding school girl who has grown up alongside her two closest friends, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley). On a fateful afternoon, the children learn the shared secret to their purpose at the school, and this complicates a love struggle among the three friends as they mature. More