From the moment her name and the subject of her next film were announced, you knew Meryl Streep’s performance as Margaret Thatcher had Oscar written all over it. And true to form, the Academy might as well emboss her name on the statuette now.
That “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme” returns to the big screen this weekend, now in 3-D. But “Beauty and the Beast,” the greatest animated film ever made and one of the screen’s great musicals, hardly needs this sort of sprucing up.
“Joyful Noise,” sort of a “Glee”-meets-gospel music choral competition musical, makes a pleasant enough racket. A cheerful crowd-pleaser that rarely breaks formula, it’s the big screen equivalent of a sloppy smooch from your over-affectionate aunt over the holidays.
When stage-bound plays become cinematic, expanding them to the broader canvas that film allows is often the order of the day. But not with Roman Polanski and not with “Carnage.”
The camera in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” often peeks through windows or glides slowly toward characters. It’s as if it is spying on them, which, of course, is what we’re doing, too.
Dramas dominated 2011 movie releases, including a husband struggling with his dying wife and a woman who disguises herself so she can work in a man’s world. It also was a year of amazing animation, first-rate finales and soaring sci-fi. Here are the best of the year at the movies:
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is more than 21/2 hours long, yet it seems remarkably compact.
Michelle Williams doesn’t so much impersonate Marilyn Monroe as suggest her in the entertaining new bio-drama “My Week With Marilyn.” She doesn’t have Monroe’s overripe figure, Kewpie doll cheeks, or “C’mere and kiss me” lips. There’s va-va without the voom.
“We Bought a Zoo” is a holiday movie worth rooting for. Directed by the cinema’s last great romantic, Cameron Crowe, it features cute tykes, adorable animals, young romance, a grownup grieving for a lost love, plus the comically crotchety Thomas Haden Church.
Eye-contact is how it begins:A shared glance on the subway, maybe followed by a smile but always cranked up from a glance to a penetrating stare.
You get the feeling that Steve Spielberg had a whole lot of fun making “The Adventures of Tintin.”
It’s about the gadgets. And the stunts. “Mission: Impossible” movies have always been about the gadgets. And the stunts. But “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” the fourth picture in the series, is about nothing but the gadgets. And the stunts.
Hollywood has commandeered Sweden’s big literary export, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” without compromising the story’s Scandinavian roots or its top-of-the-world, Seasonal Affective Disorder sense of barrenness, even hopelessness.
For much of cinema’s history, movies have had the good sense to keep Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty off camera, an unseen menace made more menacing by his absence.
When it’s done right, as it is in “Young Adult,” there is something absolutely mesmerizing about watching a train wreck unfold on screen. When the wreck in question is a narcissistic beauty played to scheming, sour, downward-spiraling perfection by Charlize Theron, cringing is definitely called for, but so is laughter.
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