Frederick Wiseman's La Danse observes a French dance company Leaps of imagination Kenneth Burns on Friday 03/12/2010 We have a new Frederick Wiseman film in La Danse, which documents the work of the Ballet de l'Opera de Paris, the dance company whose history goes back to the 17th century. >MoreShe's Out of My League finds romance for a dude in ugly clothes A man in uniform Kenneth Burns on Friday 03/12/2010 She's Out of My League is a middling raunchy comedy, but it has a few things to recommend it. One is that it is fairly artful with its raunch, which is to say that even the smuttiest parts, including a prolonged sequence about premature ejaculation, are generally in the service of character and story. >More
Tolstoy stops at The Last Station Russian sage Kenneth Burns on Friday 02/26/2010 When I saw the trailer for the Leo Tolstoy picture The Last Station, I felt a pang of sadness for Christopher Plummer, still trying to get out from under The Sound of Music after all these years. The new film stars, we're told in great big letters, Academy Award® winner Helen Mirren, Academy Award® nominee Paul Giamatti and... Christopher Plummer. >MoreScorsese delivers solid frights in Shutter Island Horror hospital Michael Wilmington on Friday 02/19/2010 Shutter Island is a good genre horror movie and a terrific Scorsese picture as well: a beautifully crafted film with a brilliant cast and production values that, while not skimping on blood and guts, don't try to shock you with gore so much as play with your head, upset your conception of reality. >More
Guy Ritchie updates Sherlock Holmes for action audiences Detective and brawler Marc Savlov on Thursday 12/31/2009, (1) Comment, (2) Likes When Edgar Allan Poe invented the literary detective genre in 1841, little did he know that C. Auguste Dupin, his clever little Parisian "ratiocinator," would lead directly to the creation of Arthur Conan Doyle's "consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes some 46 years later. >MoreA frequent flyer finds redemption in Up in the Air Plane truth Scott Renshaw on Thursday 12/24/2009, (1) Like 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. >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) Like 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) Likes 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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