By Steve Murray | Oct 28, 2010
One of modern literature’s oddest couples reunites -- well, sort of -- one last time in “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” Starting exactly where “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” the second part of the film trilogy based on the late Stieg Larsson’s books, left off, “Nest” sees punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) airlifted to the hospital with a bullet in her brain. After surgery, she’s locked down in her room by police, charged with the attempted murder of her father. Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist, middle photo), crusading journalist and her sometime lover, is left ...
By Steve Murray | Oct 22, 2010
Director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Peter Morgan both step out of their cinematic comfort zones to stretch new muscles in “Hereafter.” But their film about death, grief and the afterlife comes to the multiplex lacking a pulse itself.
Morgan, best known for his realpolitik scripts (“The Queen,” “Frost/Nixon”), here experiments with the multinational, multi-plot-strand model finessed by the Mexican team of Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga (“Amores Perros,” “Babel”). It’s not a good fit for the Brit. And though Eastwood has shown flexibility and range in his movies, while still succeeding best with action and juicy roles for actors, “Hereafter’s" ...
By Steve Murray | Oct 14, 2010
Thanks to movies, we’ll always have Paris. Not the Hollywood back-lot version brought to us by “Casablanca,” but the true city, captured in jazzy, post-war recovery of the late 1950s in films like “The Red Balloon,” “Elevator to the Gallows” and that breath of fresh air, “Breathless.” Restored this year by Studio Canal, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 experiment is largely seen as the movie that represented the French New Wave. But it stands apart from other films of the movement, a distinct, weird, lovely beast.
To be fair, Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” (1958) was one of the first surges of ...
By Steve Murray | Oct 8, 2010
Like the Tower of Babel, which serves as a central metaphor, “Metropolis,” from 1927, stands above other silent films like some otherworldly pinnacle, half-remembered but never fully understood in our cultural subconscious. That’s probably because it’s a wild, wacky movie that purports to look into the future, but is deeply grounded in ancient imagery from folklore and the Bible. And, until now, it could be seen only in brutally truncated form. Not any more.
Originally running 153 minutes, Fritz Lang’s silent classic was chopped down to a barely coherent 90 minutes shortly after its initial release. (In a way, the jerky shifts ...
By Steve Murray | Oct 3, 2010
Is real-life Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg really a relationship-challenged, wardrobe-challenged, ethics-challenged genius-jerk? Well, if he isn’t, “The Social Network” wouldn’t be nearly as fascinating a movie. Based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires,” whose writer never managed to interview Zuckerberg himself, “The Social Network” is structured around not just the story of the creation of the Web phenomenon, but the legal transcripts of the various people who later sued the newly minted billionaire for cutting them out of their share of the Facebook pie.
Jesse Eisenberg (in a scary-snarky, very accomplished performance) plays Mark as a brilliant but socially stunted Harvard ...
By Steve Murray | Oct 2, 2010
Nothing can replace your first love -- and that holds true for movies, too. Even though writer-director Matt Reeves’ “Let Me In” is almost startlingly intelligent and mature for an American remake, it can’t stand as a true substitute for Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s “Let the Right One In” (2008).
That said, from the moment news leaked of plans to remake the strange, stunning original, it seemed almost certain that -- to use a vampire metaphor -- it would really, really suck. Hollywood doesn’t have a good track record for re-vamping foreign films for the subtitle-challenged. For every decent example (Gore ...
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