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Movie Capsules: Now showing
Inception (PG-13, 148 min.) This metaphysical heist film is motivated by a challenge as great as that facing its dream-burgling heroes: The movie is writer-director Christopher Nolan's attempt to crack the Great Film vault -- to produce a distinctive, grandiose artistic masterpiece and commercial blockbuster that will demonstrate the director of "The Dark Knight" doesn't need superheroes to mesmerize the mass audience with a state-of-the-art fantasy.
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Film Review: 'Coco Chanel' is dull arthouse amour
The ampersand in the title of "Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky" represents erotic as well as grammatical conjunction, but 52 minutes pass before the two modernist geniuses first make sweet music together, and then they literally make sweet music together -- Igor gives Coco a piano lesson. Director Jan Kounen makes viewers wait another little while before the tickling of the ivories gives way to what the British call slap-and-tickle.
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Maker of silent movies hopes to generate talk about visual storytelling
Many people today won't even watch movies that aren't in color. So how would they react to a film that lacks an even earlier and more crucial innovation, sound? Tupelo filmmaker Rex Curry Harsin hopes they'll laugh -- and cheer, and maybe even shed a tear -- when he debuts his movies on July 31 at the Bartlett Performing Arts and Conference Center. His movies are throwbacks to the era of visual storytelling by such genius writer-director-actors as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
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Film Review: Stunning 'I Am Love' is a feast for the senses
I'm calling "I Am Love" the best movie of the year to date; a companion viewer called it "repulsive," in condemnation of the behavior of the lead character played by Tilda Swinton. Does one opinion invalidate the other? Or can we both be right? "I Am Love" is complex enough to invite such questions, and rich enough -- like many great adult works of art, of which there are too few at the movies -- to resist answers.
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Movie Capsules: Now showing
Dolphins and Whales: Tribes of the Ocean: A new adventure from Jean-Michel Cousteau, narrated by Daryl Hannah. IMAX film runs through March 4, 2011. Tickets $8, $7.25 senior citizens, $6.25 children ages 3-12; children under 3 free.
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Film Review: Jolie action film is a movie worth its 'Salt'
In one of the few moments in "Salt" in which Angelia Jolie stops for breath, the seasoned action-movie Fury removes a pair of contact lenses and a row of false teeth, and then dyes her blond hair black. This "disguise" enables the fugitive CIA agent played by Jolie to emerge from hiding, as if the star's celebrated cheekbones, Chester Gouldian jaw and pneumatic lips weren't utterly distinctive and distractingly striking.
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Memphis sets scene for music flick
"Losers Take All," a film set in Memphis about a fictional, 1980s indie punk-pop band, will begin filming here Aug. 16. The film, budgeted at $1.5 million, will feature Kyle Gallner of this year's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" remake and will be directed by Alex Steyermark of "Prey for Rock & Roll," and "One Last Thing."
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Mel Gibson story fuels online wars among celebrity gossip sites
LOS ANGELES — David Perel’s celebrity news and gossip Web site, RadarOnline.com, was so overrun with Internet traffic Friday morning that it temporarily crashed. “It was the longest 20 minutes of my life. The tech people were telling me not to pull my own Mel Gibson,” joked Perel, the site’s executive vice president, referring He was, of course, referring to Gibson’s angry language in a series of audio tapes released by Radar.
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Film Review: Brain power ignites action in 'Inception'
A metaphysical heist film in which a handpicked team of crackerjack conspirators attempt to burgle a dreamer's unconscious the way the ensembles of "Ocean's Eleven" or "Mission: Impossible" break into a bank safe or museum gallery, "Inception" is motivated by a challenge as great as that facing its heroes.
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Movie Capsules: Now showing
The Shaft (Not rated, 98 min.) Director Zhang Chi's "Global Lens" feature tells three linked stories of marriage, scandal and labor, set in a poor mining town in Western China. 7 p.m. Thursday, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Tickets: $6, or free for Indie Memphis members. Visit brooksmuseum.org or indiememphis.com.
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Film Review: 'Winter's Bone' presents raw slice of Ozark realism
Part murder mystery, part coming-of-age drama, "Winter's Bone" transports moviegoers to a real place most of us haven't seen before: the darkling woods of the Missouri Ozarks, where clannish mountainfolk stew squirrels and cook methamphetamine with sometimes-equal gusto. Adapted by director Debra Granik and co-scripter Anne Rosellini from a novel by Daniel Woodrell, the film burrows bone-deep into the mysterious lives of its wary characters.
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Film Review: 'Micmacs' an oddball mishmash of a movie
Influenced by the loosey-goosey reality of cartoons (a clip from a 1955 Tex Avery short is instructive) and silent comedy, "Micmacs" is a colorful three-ring circus of a movie, as one might expect from a production with a cast that includes a human cannonball and a comely contortionist ("I'm a sensitive soul in a flexible body," she proclaims).
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Film Review: Action-packed 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' might cast spell on kids
The walking mops from the classic Mickey Mouse episode of 1940's "Fantasia" make a cameo appearance in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," the latest built-to-please product from the Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer assembly line that previously delivered the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "National Treasure" series. The mops don't waste much time before hitting star Jay Baruchel in the nether regions.
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Actress Longoria, Kenyan Maathai and civil rights leader Cotton win Freedom Awards
Actress Eva Longoria Parker of "Desperate Housewives" fame has been named a recipient of this year's Freedom Awards along with a Nobel Peace Prize winner from Kenya and an American civil rights activist. The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., announced the winners today and said the awards will be bestowed in a ceremony Oct. 6. It's the first year women will receive all three awards since the museum began honoring leaders in civil and human rights in 1991.
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Film Review: 'Joan Rivers' leaves the analysis up to you
The entirely entertaining documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work" — the title is a punning reference to the disfiguring "work" she has had done to her face — is as revealing and inevitably incomplete as one might expect from a film about an insecure, self-absorbed celebrity wit who exposes herself onstage with sometimes shocking intimacy yet hides behind a surgical Kabuki mask.
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Film Review: Weirdness works in sympathetic 'Cyrus'
Since at least the heyday of Jerome 'Curly' Howard of the Three Stooges, filmmakers -- like professional wrestlers -- have recognized that there's something unsettling about the sight of big men in institutional, close-cropped haircuts.
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Film Review: 'Despicable Me' doesn't add up to much
"When we got adopted by a bald guy, I thought this would be more like 'Annie,'" wise-cracks an adorable moppet in "Despicable Me," a clever but inconsequential computer-animated 3D tale about a follically challenged super-villain whose heart (if not his patented freeze-gun) is melted by the big eyes of the little orphan girls who stare up at him and dream, "Daddy."
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