My favorite movie character of the year is Ellie Fredericksen. Ellie doesn’t get much screen time in Up. She’s seen as a little girl, playing pretend in an old house, talking about the world and all its potential wonders with … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number One
Jason Reitman’s third feature as a writer-director is perfectly positioned to tap into the dismal zeitgeist of economic hardship and jobs that are vanishing as fast as double scotches in a hotel bar. George Clooney doesn’t just play a businessman who spends most of his life jetting from city to city, entirely untethered from a settled life. He’s a hired hit man, taking up temporary residence in the conference rooms of failing firms to tell a morose parade of professionals that they are are loosing their livelihoods. It’s a bleakly comic reflection of the most downbeat pages of today’s newspaper. … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Two
It’s no mystery why filmmakers are drawn to stories about heists and con artists. The grifters that populate these stories employ a similar artistry to directors and screenwriters and everyone else who collaborates on cinematic offerings, building fictions compelling enough … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Three
There was a time when Joel and Ethan Coen were known (and, in some quarters, loathed) for the gymnastics they regularly took their camera through on the way to a finished feature, sending it racing down a bar with a … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Four
War is hell. And in the first years of the twenty-first century, it’s a particular type of hell that would have eluded Dante on the most fertilely creative day. It is entirely unpredictable with rules of engagement that shift as … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Five
It is England in the early nineteen-sixties, a buttoned-down time and place. A girl is standing in the rain after an orchestra rehearsal when a man pulls up in his car and offers her a ride, smiling as he feigns … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Six
I’ve seen lots of movies made for kids, but I haven’t seen that many that are really about being a kid. Movies recast children as precocious dispensers of unlikely wisdom or junior wisecrackers, their youthful sass punched til its a … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Seven
It’s a tricky matter, using esteemed literary figures, real or imagined, as central characters in films. There is an overwhelming urge to make sure that every utterance from their mouth lives up to the lofty standards of their reputation, that … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Eight
Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. is a convincing call to action, a well-argued op-ed, an act of urgent revelation. Like most documentaries in the era shaped by Michael Moore, it begins with its treatise and conclusions fully formed and fills in … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Nine
We buy our tickets in an era in which remakes have given way to reboots, as good an indicator as any as to the degree to which major studios have planed away any remaining aspirations towards art in their respective business models. Instead creative efforts are tagged with the same term used to describe the latest outpost of a nationwide food chain, and possess a level of quality akin to mass-produced burgers. To find something operating well within that framework that also manages to be fresh, inventive, witty, smart and wildly entertaining is plainly stunning. Director J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Ten
Coffee for Two 