Warlords duke it out in John Woo's spectacular Red Cliff Third-century smackdown Kenneth Burns on Friday 03/05/2010 It's easy to tell which side is virtuous and which side is debased in Red Cliff, John Woo's spectacular war film set in third-century China. The virtuous leaders love music and tea, and they commune with nature. The debased ones desecrate their dead. >MoreThe Damned United: Grudge match Kenneth Burns on Friday 03/05/2010 Newt Gingrich, you'll recall, shut down the federal government because Bill Clinton made him use the back door of the plane. Depending on whom you ask, the stakes aren't quite so high in the marvelous British sports film The Damned United, but like the Gingrich story, this movie likewise warns us that grudges can lead to disaster. >More
Giant cast can't sustain Valentine's Day Unlucky in love Kimberley Jones on Friday 02/12/2010 Three-quarters through Valentine's Day, director Garry Marshall pops in for a seconds-long cameo as a mariachi band player. At the sneak screening, you could feel a little ripple go through the crowd -- sort of a "ha!" coupled with an "aww!" >MoreDear John's war romance is a bore Over there Kimberley Jones on Friday 02/05/2010 I don't mean to argue that all romantic figures in the movies should conform to the same ideal -- variety is the spice of life, after all -- but was the world really begging for a leading man in cropped cargo pants? >More
A frequent flyer finds redemption in Up in the Air Plane truth Scott Renshaw on Thursday 12/24/2009, (1) Recommendation As awards season kicks into high gear, commentators of all stripes are going to talk about Up in the Air in terms of its zeitgeist relevance, its timely attention to economic instability and the corporations that feast on the carrion of the downsized and dispossessed. And in so doing, they will overlook how simply satisfying it is as a piece of filmmaking. >MoreGrownups can't cope in It's Complicated Adult movie Scott Renshaw on Thursday 12/24/2009, (1) Recommendation Nancy Meyers probably wasn't going for irony with the title of her new comedy It's Complicated. If you've followed her career as writer and director over the past 30 years, however, you'd realize that "complicated" isn't exactly the word that best describes her work. >More
Wilmington on DVD: Amelia, The Wolf Man, Love Happens, New York, I Love You Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 02/03/2010 10:00 am Amelia is an old-fashioned, overly romantic movie, but likably so. It's true that director Mira Nair and writers Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan don't spring many surprises while telling us the story of the famed trailblazing aviatrix Amelia Earhart -- an iconic American figure of the '20s and '30s who vanished over the Pacific while on a record-breaking, gender-smashing, 'round-the-world flight. But I'm not sure I wanted them too. >MoreWilmington on DVD: Michael Jackson's This Is It, Bright Star, Paris, Texas, Rossellini Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 01/27/2010 11:17 am Michael Jackson -- looking like a will-o'-the-wisp in military/gangster drag, singing like honey poured through quicksilver, and dancing like a jitterbug angel whirling on the head of a pin -- gets an extraordinary posthumous sendoff in Michael Jackson's This Is It. >More
Wilmington on DVD: Up in the Air, Precious, King Lear, Capitalism: A Love Story, Old Dogs Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 03/10/2010 3:00 pm In Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, George Clooney plays a prime/perfecto Clooney role: Ryan Bingham, a nice-seeming, glamorous-looking guy with a highly paid, very nasty job. >MoreOscars 2010 live blog with Isthmus film critic Kenneth Burns on Sunday 03/07/2010 4:00 pm, (1) Recommendation When you settle in to watch the Academy Awards Sunday night, don't forget your laptop. Kenneth will be blogging along, live, and you're encouraged to log in and share your thoughts and questions here. >MoreWilmington on DVD: Where the Wild Things Are, Ran, Ponyo, 2012 Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 03/03/2010 10:00 am Some children's stories work primarily for...children. Some please both children and adults. But some are mostly for adults -- and that may be the case with Spike Jonze's new movie from Maurice Sendak's famous 1963 picture book Where the Wild Things Are. >MoreWilmington on DVD: Make Way for Tomorrow, The Informant!, George Bernard Shaw Mike Wilmington on Thursday 02/25/2010 10:00 am In 1937, director Leo McCarey, who had spent almost all of his career as an expert maker of comedy movies, decided to direct something entirely different. He wanted to make a classic movie tear-jerker, based on The Years Are So Long, Josephine Lawrence's novel about elderly parents and their neglectful children. The result was Make Way for Tomorrow. >MoreWilmington on DVD: Hunger, Goodfellas, Law Abiding Citizen, Troubled Water Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 02/17/2010 4:00 pm Harshly physical and scarringly violent, Hunger, a stark drama about the 1981 IRA hunger strike at Maze Prison in Belfast and the death by starvation of strike leader Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), is full of ugly brutish deeds done in incongruously beautiful images. >MoreWilmington on DVD: A Serious Man, romantic classics, The Time Traveler's Wife Mike Wilmington on Wednesday 02/10/2010 10:00 am A Serious Man is the Coen brothers' typically dark, typically wry look at a Jewish boyhood (and fatherhood) in the late '60s in suburban Minnesota -- where the youthful Coens grew up, at a time when the brand-new counterculture of the Vietnam riots and the Summer of Love hadn't yet fully penetrated the old Jewish neighborhood culture of bar mitzvahs, Torahs and legends of the Dybbuk. >More
Rock icon Cherie Currie recalls the Runaways at Sundance Film Festival U.S.A. screening Kenneth Burns on Friday 01/29/2010 1:03 pm, (5) Recommendations Cherie Currie is a native of California's San Fernando Valley, where the weather is pleasant all year. For the former lead singer of the 1970s all-girl rock band The Runaways, Wisconsin in January is an adjustment. "How you guys brave the weather, I don't know," a grinning Currie told an audience Thursday night at Sundance Cinemas Madison. >MoreUW Cinematheque spring 2010 season ventures to Brazil, Egypt, Tokyo and Bollywood Dean Robbins on Tuesday 01/19/2010 12:00 pm "We all lose our charms in the end," Marilyn Monroe sings in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, referring to the relentless aging process. Technically speaking, the 1953 movie itself had lost some of its charms, including its brilliant color. But it's been restored, and now Madison audiences can see Monroe's eye-popping gowns the way they originally appeared on the big screen. >More
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