The Informant!

Steven Soderbergh’s soft comedy

Whistle-blowers are often heroes in Hollywood movies, transcending the usual disdain for turncoats and snitches because of the righteousness of their cause. But what if the whistle-blower turns out to be a crook, and nuts to boot? That’s the ambiguity at the heart of The Informant! Loosely adapted by the prolific...

The September Issue

R.J. Cutler captures real-life Anna Wintour

In the satire The Devil Wears Prada, the fictionalized version of Vogue’s long-reigning editor is depicted as an acid-edged queen of cruelty. In the documentary The September Issue, the real-life Anna Wintour is displayed in a softer light. Here, the Vogue powerhouse is a setter of high standards for herself and those around her. Wintour isn’t warm, fuzzy or accessible...

Pavel Medvedev’s Striking Contrasts Come to UWM

Short documentaries depict life after U.S.S.R.

At first, the wind is the only sound in a frozen landscape edged by a horizon of snow-covered trees. Suddenly comes the soft insistence of running reindeer, herded across the screen from left to right by men in a sled of jangling bells. It’s the oddly haunting opening of Vacation inNovember, one of four short documentaries in a program called “After History: The Films of Pavel Medvedev,” 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 17, at the UW-Milwaukee Union Theatre...

Extract

Ben Affleck enhances Mike Judge’s newest comedy

To all appearances, Joel is a successful entrepreneur whose American dream of developing his own line of food flavor extracts has come true. But at home, Joel (Jason Bateman) is a frustrated man. Once his wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), dons her sweat pants, usually at 8 p.m. sharp, the door of sexual opportunity slams shut. In fact, they haven’t had sex for months, partly because of his crushing workload at the...

Milwaukee Short Film Festival

Great movies in small doses

If you ask Milwaukee residents about film around town, many people will point you in the direction of the nearest multiplex playing the latest Hollywood offering. But, fact is, there are many fans and producers of progressive cinema in the city. Skeptics need only look to the Milwaukee Short Film Festival (MFSS), now on the brink of its 11th year...

Taking Woodstock

Demetri Martin, Eugene Levy star in nostalgic trip

Since music was the ostensible reason for Woodstock, a Woodstock movie minus the music might seem an empty endeavor. Fact is, many of the half-million who flocked to the festival 40 years ago heard little and saw less of the all-star lineup. Traffic into the festival site had congealed. Sightlines and sound were dubious, and many participants probably caught little more than the wafting snippets of sound heard in Ang Lee's film...

Soul Power

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte captures the power of music

James Brown spun around in a testifying frenzy of cold sweat, executing splits and turns with gymnastic precision as his rhythm section dug an impossibly hard, percussive groove and his horn section, fanning out across the stage like a swing orchestra, punctuated the music with staccato blasts. Soul Brother No. 1 was in excellent form that night in 1974 when he headlined a bill in the country then called Zaire (and since restored to its previous name, Congo). Brown was on a...

Adam

Hugh Dancy, Rose Byrne play star-crossed couple

The leafy brownstone-lined streets of Manhattan, and the electric gleam of the skyline over Central Park at night, have long been the perfect setting for cinematic romance. Ada­m, a story of star-crossed young lovers playing out against this idyllic background, delivers the usual plot with a twist or two. For starters, the protagonist, Adam (Hugh Dancy), has Asperger syndrome, a form of autism that makes understanding the feelings of others, and their socially...

Paper Heart

Charlyne Yi, Michael Cera and that mystical emotion

When Charlyne Yi, a geeky girl in thick glasses and boyish clothes, thrusts a microphone at shoppers in a mall, asking if they've ever been in love, most give her wide berth. Soon enough, her indie film on the vagaries of love, Paper Heart, finds another, more effective way to answer her pressing question. Paper Heart is a movie about...

Julie & Julia

Cooking with Meryl Streep

After World War II the apogee of American cooking was the tuna fish casserole topped with crumpled potato chips. Julia Child changed that. Her Mastering the Art of FrenchCooking was to the kitchen what the Kinsey Reports were to the bedroom-a seminal book that broadened the spectrum of expectations. Addressed to "the servantless American cook...

Funny People

Adam Sandler’s Unhappy Humorist

The inner adult trapped inside Adam Sandler, struggling to be understood as serious or at least sympathetic, has surfaced before in movies as varied as Punch-Drunk Love and The Wedding Singer. In Funny People, Sandler plays George Simmons, a version of himself contemplating the seriousness of his own demise...

Departures

Oscar-winning film depicts mourning in Japan

Death spares no land, and the living respond differently from culture to culture. In Departures, the Japanese way of mourning is depicted through a protagonist, Daigo, who stumbles into his country's counterpart of America's funeral industry.Before the film opened anywhere in the United States, Departures earned a footnote in the annals of Oscar history by winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, beating the unforgettable Israeli animated feature...

Director Kathryn Bigelow On The Hurt Locker

The U.S. occupation of Iraq has inspired a panoply of cinematic depictions. Despite their topicality, these films have ended up being box office duds. The Hurt Locker, which focuses on a bomb disposal unit in Baghdad, has been greeted by a chorus of critical plaudits...

(500) Days of Summer

Love and fate in Manhattan

The Smiths were a band offering cold comfort to the lovelorn, and a relationship begun out of shared admiration for Morrissey's morose reflections on emotional failure is surely born under the sign of doom. And "relationship," that weasel word meaning everything or nothing at all, is the best description for what transpires between Tom and Summer in (500) Days of Summer. Brought together during an elevator ride by a Smiths song, the 20-somethings work in a greeting card company, producing...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Hogwarts students face a new dark age

In the second-to-last novel in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter cycle, the young wizard has begun his sixth year at Hogwarts and is feeling the sap of being a teenager in his limbs. There is turnover in the faculty and Harry's nemesis, Draco Malfoy, is back for another term. Meanwhile, Lord Voldemort and his minions grow bolder by the day, striking against muggles and magicians alike, determined to plunge the world into a new dark...

Food, Inc.

Robert Kenner exposes a toxic chain of consumption

Philip K. Dick, an author of unsettling science fiction, wrote of fearsome systems behind the placid surfaces of our world and mechanisms of control as invisible as ghosts. But even Dick, who died in 1982, never imagined the horror of agribusiness and its hidden influence across the globe. Since the '70s, the food we've been eating isn't the same as before, deceptively similar appearances aside, and the consequences are dire.

Public Enemies

Johnny Depp stars as bank robber John Dillinger

Outlaws are beloved by law-abiding citizens in most every land, even by people who would be scared stiff to meet one. To define terms: An outlaw is no mere criminal. Serial killers, spouse beaters and investment brokers don't make the grade. An outlaw shimmers with reckless romanticism, and a spark of goodness must illuminate his legend. The archetypal outlaw among English speakers, Robin Hood, robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. John Dillinger spent the money he stole on himself, but according...

Moon

Duncan Jones’ science-fiction mix

Duncan Jones, the son of a rock star who once claimed to be a space alien, has chosen the science-fiction genre for Moon, his debut film. Surprised? His dad, David Bowie, must have taken the lad to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick fans will recognize the video-screen messages between an astronaut and his earthbound family, and the soothing voice of the spaceman's computer companion. The Bowies also must have sat through the enigmatic Russian film Solaris, a story of madness and the uncanny on a remote...

Whatever Works

Larry David Works Well; Woody Allen scores with Pygmalion tale

The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious farce, Whatever Works, and as any reader of People magazine knows, the fantasy worked for him in real life, too. But Allen has enough wit to undermine his own proposition by movie's end. Celebrity gossip hounds may wonder what the story's twisting plot says about the director's marriage to his younger...

Away We Go

Krasinski, Rudolph hit the road to find home

Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty), perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30-somethings lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski)...

Cheri

Pfeiffer stars in Frears’ beautifully rendered film

During the era known as the Belle Époque, the Beautiful Age, the corsets of Victorianism loosened. A caste of courtesans, elevated above the more proletarian prostitutes, traded sexual companionship with aristocrats and magnates for lives of bejeweled glamour. Such was the milieu of Colette's 1920 novel Cheri, which reflected on an era already lost to war and upheaval...

Night Train

Glover, Zahn, Sobieski headline murder-mystery

The myth of Pandora's box gets a makeover in Night Train. So do the film noir classics The Maltese Falcon and Kiss Me Deadly, with their murderous pursuit of priceless, mysterious objects. And the cinematic references don't end there. The electric lights aboard Night Train's doomed midnight express flicker and crackle ominously, as in any good David Lynch film, as the uncanny is about to manifest itself. And the climax...

Easy Virtue

Jessica Biel vs. England’s aristocracy

Veronica's smile fades to a thin frown as her eyes meet her new daughter-in-law, Larita. As mistress of the manor in 1920s England, Veronica (Kristin Scott Thomas) had expected her son John (Ben Barnes) to marry someone suitable to his aristocratic station. Instead, he returned from a whirlwind tour of France with an American bride who races in the Grand Prix-and wins. Larita (Jessica Biel) is brash...

The Taking of Pelham 123

Denzel Washington, John Travolta race against time

Trains have long been the setting for crime stories and thrillers. They are ideal as confined spaces in motion, roomy enough for greater interplay between passengers than the coach cabin of a jetliner. As claustrophobic enclosures making their transit through a dark underworld, subway trains are better still. Oddly, subway movies are relatively scarce, even if renditions...

The Girlfriend Experience

Soderbergh's latest more interesting than entertaining

Nowadays, Steven Soderbergh is the hardest-working man in Hollywood. Since 2000, he has directed a dozen films and all 10 episodes of HBO's "K Street." His movies can be grouped, roughly, under three headings. First, there are his glossy blockbusters, the Ocean's series; then, art house efforts such as Solaris and Che; finally, his indie digressions, shot quickly, with digital cameras, in the shadow...