Eugene Weekly

Nebraska’s black-and-white cinematography, all wide skies and one-story main streets, is a signpost, an indicator that Alexander Payne wants you to think old. Think old movies; think old men; think old-school values. But start with old men. We meet Woody Grant (Bruce Dern, with a frizz of white hair and a loping stagger of a walk) making his way onto the highway. After the Billings cops pick him up, Woody explains to his son David (Will Forte) that he was en route to Nebraska to claim a million-dollar prize. Continue reading →

Can we talk about Jared Leto for a while? There’s a reason the internet likes to joke about Generation Catalano, referring to those neither-Gen X-nor-Millenial folks who identify with My So-Called Life, the excellent, short-lived TV show whose stars are now stars again. Claire Danes, now all angles and coolness, is on Homeland, while Leto, who played her crush, Jordan Catalano, is mostly a rock star. Every so often he turns up in a movie. Continue reading →

Stephen Frears’ Philomena hardly marks the first time Steve Coogan has played an ordinary fellow, but it feels like a definitive forward step in a peculiar and interesting career. To some, he’ll never stop being the British TV character Alan Partridge; to me, he’s always the guy from the under-seen Tristram Shandy, who pops up in brilliant cameos in all sorts of places (including Hot Fuzz).  Continue reading →

If Gary Ross’s Hunger Games was a solid piece of entertainment with a sort of finger-wagging moral streak (Look how bad this is! This society is sooooo corrupt!), Francis Lawrence’s Catching Fire is its older sibling, an honest-to-goodness movie (as opposed to just an adaptation) with a nasty dark side and a sullen but fierce heart. Continue reading →

In Kill Your Darlings, Daniel Radcliffe, with a mop of tousled hair half swallowing his face, plays the young Allen Ginsberg, when the now-renowned poet was but an innocent Columbia freshman. You can stop thinking of Radcliffe as Harry Potter now; since that series ended, he’s made a career of heading off in the opposite direction, and his role in John Krokidas’ directorial debut might be the final step on the road to being taken seriously. Continue reading →

Three forces drive How I Live Now: Meg Rosoff, on whose award-winning young adult novel the film is based; Saoirse Ronan, who has managed to make watchable everything she’s been in, even Hanna; and Kevin Macdonald, whose track record as a director is spotty at best. Continue reading →

If every story about the new Saudi Arabian film Wadjda begins with the same pieces of information, the reason is simple: It would be downright unfair to leave the backstory out. This film was the first feature shot in a country that, as every interview with the director, Haifaa al-Mansour, will tell you, doesn’t have cinema. Strict rules for female behavior required the movie’s director to, at times, sit in a van and speak to her actors via walkie-talkie. Continue reading →