Film Review

In 2009, the "Star Trek" franchise was put in the hands of J.J. Abrams ("Lost," "Mission Impossible 3"), who confessed to never having been much of a Trekkie. This, of course, sent the dyed-in-the-wool Trekkies into a tizzy, but it turned out to be exactly what was needed. Abrams managed to pull off one of the trickiest reboots imaginable: The original cast had played their characters on TV and film for 25 years; and no one else had attempted those roles for 43 years. It's too soon to judge whether Abrams' new "Star Trek Into Darkness" is a little better or a little worse, but it's definitely in the same league.

Having already won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and several of the most important critics' awards, Michael Haneke's “Amour” has scored an unexpected five Oscar nominations. It's unusual for the usually ghettoized European art films to score anything beyond the Foreign Language category, plus maybe one or two nominations in the general categories. The Oscars belong to Hollywood; and (not surprisingly) Hollywood tends to like the same sorts of movies that Hollywood makes. You'd have to go back more than a decade, to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” to find a wholly non-English film to be nominated for Best Picture, and the number of such nominees before can be counted on two hands (with a few digits left over)

According to screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (who also wrote the original novel, as well as “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), his inspiration for “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” was seeing a bookstore display for the “Twilight” books cheek and jowl with a table of volumes about Lincoln. Lincoln ... vampires .... vampires ... Lincoln .... hmmm.... Yeah, it's an amusing idea, but that's really all it is. The entire joke is conveyed in the title; anything more is superfluous.

Though the work of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has been criticized on many grounds, it's doubtful that a lack of subtlety is among them. From "The Killing" (1956) through "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), his work was brilliant, but from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) on, it was not only brilliant but also complex and ambiguous in ways that almost demand analysis. Rodney Ascher's "Room 237" focuses in on one Kubrick film, "The Shining" (1980), which in recent years has surpassed "2001" as the center of Kubrick analysis.

"Stoker" is utterly fascinating -- about what we'd expect from the American debut of Korean director Park Chan-wook, whose 2003 "Oldboy" was one of the most extraordinary films of the millennium so far. Even those who found the subject and gore of “Oldboy” objectionable had to give Park credit for its style. The same judgment applies to both “Lady Vengeance” and “Thirst,” his two subsequent films to be released in the U.S. At the same time, “Stoker” is utterly confounding and arguably ridiculous.

It's hard to resist Los Angeles-based films noir -- "Chinatown," "Kiss Me Deadly," "The Big Sleep" being only a few of the best -- but "Gangster Squad" is a bit more resistible than most. Director Ruben Fleischer and screenwriter Will Beall have morphed Paul Lieberman's nonfiction book of the same name into something a good deal more fictional. It's 1949. Gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) is trying to enlarge his California turf all the way to the Midwest, and a gang war against rival Jack Dragna, who is tightly aligned with the east coast mob, is already underway.

“Wanderlust,” the new project from Judd Apatow and associates, starts as though it were ripped from today's (or at least this decade's) headlines. Yuppie couple George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) buy a tiny, fabulously expensive Manhattan “micro-loft.” George suddenly is downsized out of his job; HBO passes on Linda's depressing documentary about penguins with testicular cancer; and the housing bubble bursts. Suddenly they owe more than the apartment is worth. They head off for Atlanta to crash with George's unbelievably obnoxious brother (Ken Marino)

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, so it's not surprising that they have an indigenous film industry and, in fact, have had one since 1926. But you wouldn't know it around here. As far as I can determine, no Indonesian production prior to “The Raid: Redemption” has ever received a real American release, let alone from a prestigious art house distributor like Sony Classics. Calling a film (or anything else) a “first” is an invitation to contradiction, so I welcome your corrections.

"Life of Pi," like the recent "Cloud Atlas," is adapted from a novel widely considered to be unfilmable. While in "Cloud Atlas" the issue was the book's multistory structure, in "Life of Pi" the problem is of a technical nature - the two main characters are a teenager and a fearsome Bengal tiger who share a lifeboat in the middle of nowhere for 227 days. How do you film that convincingly without running through a lot of teenagers? Way back when, such a challenge would have been met with clever cutting, rear projection, and/or a really well-trained animal - none of which would pass muster by today's high-tech standards.

Halloween understandably spurs the release of new horror films every year, and 2012 is no exception. Two weeks ago, we were treated to the mercifully brief run of "V/H/S," an anthology of interchangeable stories organized around "found footage" that would have been better left unfound. Last week was "Sinister," which was a step up, but basically recycled a bunch of creaky plot ideas so overused that they now qualify as conventions: family arrives at new house, kids start acting spooky, objects start moving on their own, and each casual closing of a door triggers a noise so loud that the characters - and, of course, the audience - are physiologically forced to jump.

In 2009, the "Star Trek" franchise was put in the hands of J.J. Abrams ("Lost," "Mission Impossible 3"), who confessed to never having been much of a Trekkie. This, of course, sent the dyed-in-the-wool Trekkies into a tizzy, but it turned out to be exactly what was needed. Abrams managed to pull off one of the trickiest reboots imaginable: The original cast had played their characters on TV and film for 25 years; and no one else had attempted those roles for 43 years. It's too soon to judge whether Abrams' new "Star Trek Into Darkness" is a little better or a little worse, but it's definitely in the same league.

"The Iceman" - directed by Ariel Vroman from a script he cowrote with Morgan Land - is based on the life of Richard Kuklinski, a hired killer who is believed to have murdered more people than any number of serial killers. In a 1992 HBO special with the same title, Kuklinski, when asked for a specific figure, says, "I don't know. Over a hundred, I think. " In this fictionalized version - which wisely tampers with facts and dates - we meet Kuklinski (Michael Shannon) as he woos and wins Deborah Pellicotti (Winona Ryder)

"Magical realism" is one of those descriptive terms that gets thrown around promiscuously: Its scope and characteristics shift significantly depending on who is doing the describing. Still, it's hard to imagine anyone denying that Salman Rushdie's second novel, "Midnight's Children," belongs firmly in that realm. Deepa Mehta's new film version of the book is as close to an "authorized" adaptation as possible, with Rushdie serving as screenwriter, producer and narrator. In a manner that inevitably reminds us of Ang Lee's "Life of Pi" (and, for the few who have seen it, the criminally obscure 1989 "Queen of Hearts")

Road pictures come, off the shelf, with an automatic story arc: the characters must get from point A to point B, not just geographically but thematically. More often than not, they end up at a different point B than they had intended or hoped for. The genre is available in three major flavors: person or persons on the run from pursuers (cops, gangsters, or both); unlikely heroes desperately trying to deliver something (like the rare vaccine for a pandemic); romantic comedy odd couple thrown together by chance, then learning how to get along.

Terrence Malick became a critics' darling, a hot young director to watch, with his first two features, "Badlands" (1973) and "Days of Heaven" (1978). Then he disappeared for 20 years. By the time he returned with "The Thin Red Line," he had become, not surprisingly, a cinema legend. His 2011 "Tree of Life" was the best of four "recent" (i.e., within the last 15 years) efforts. A slightly disguised memoir of his youth, that film was almost a memory-driven time machine, making suburban Texas in the '50s so real, so tangible, that the viewer had the remarkable sensation of being there.

Shane Carruth made an impressive debut in 2004 with "Primer," which cost $7,000 and is surely the most complexly structured time-travel film ever made. For that matter, it may be one of the most complexly structured films ever made, period. Carruth seemed to have fallen off the map shortly thereafter. Now, after nine years, his second feature, "Upstream Color," opens this week. There is no real protagonist here. Carruth opts for multiple points of view; sometimes the transitions are so sudden and the durations so short that the movie suggests an "objective" point of view.

Though the work of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has been criticized on many grounds, it's doubtful that a lack of subtlety is among them. From "The Killing" (1956) through "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), his work was brilliant, but from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) on, it was not only brilliant but also complex and ambiguous in ways that almost demand analysis. Rodney Ascher's "Room 237" focuses in on one Kubrick film, "The Shining" (1980), which in recent years has surpassed "2001" as the center of Kubrick analysis.

To summarize the economics behind "G.I. Joe: Retaliation": the 2009 "G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra" made enough moolah ($150 million domestic, $150 million elsewhere) to justify - nay, demand - a sequel. As for the aesthetics of the film, "G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra" made enough moolah to justify - nay, demand - a sequel. Really. There are very few moments here where the filmmakers seem to have thought about anything else. You expect your basic action blockbuster to follow a rigid, demographically driven template, but with surprising frequency, the pieces superimposed upon that template include funny dialogue, distinctive characters, ingenious action concepts, or all three.

"Admission" is a nice movie. You have no idea how depressing it is for a critic to drag out what may be the blandest word in the English language. But it fits. "Admission" is a bowl of oatmeal - instant oatmeal - with nothing added; not sugar, not fruit, maybe a tiny bit of butter. Don't get me wrong: I like oatmeal, even plain. Neither it nor “Admission” is awful, but I can't imagine it getting anyone genuinely stoked. Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton.

In how many ways is "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" a horrible miscalculation? Pretty much all of them. Yes, it has a couple dozen chuckles and maybe a few true laughs, but that's not enough to sustain this written-by-numbers piece of Hollywood "product. " Given the level of talent involved, this is especially disappointing. Director Don Scardino is fresh off of “30 Rock.” Steve Carell can do (almost) no wrong in my book. Steve Buscemi is one of the greatest characters since the fall of the studio system.