Jennifer Lawrence delivers a gruff, star-making performance as the heroine of the Daniel Woodrell adaptation Winter’s Bone (Lionsgate). Lawrence plays a teenage girl deep in the heart of the meth-ravaged Ozarks who has to find her father, or what remains of him, to save her family home. Debra Granik directs with an understated, slow-creeping style that lets the film work both as a back-woods noir and as a grimly heroic coming-of-age story. It’s one of the best films of the year, so if you missed it the first time around, don’t miss it now…
In 30-minute bites, the hit HBO series Sex And The City could at least be defended as a tart piece of lifestyle porn, full of fashion, dirty talk, and the resonant bonds of four stylish, liberated Manhattan singles on the go. Then Sex And The City: The Movie came along and added overweening melodrama and bloat where it wasn’t needed. Now, the widely reviled sequel, Sex And The City 2 (Warner Bros.), dips sharply into the grotesquely excessive. In the case for the series’ unexamined privilege and cultural obliviousness, a vacation to Abu Dhabi could be submitted as Exhibits A-Z…
The second adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s popular Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire (Music Box) is a significant drop-off from the impressively dark, claustrophobic thriller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and feels somehow both crowded with information and mostly perfunctory. This time out, the mystery being tackled by Michael Nyqvist’s muckraking journalist and Noomi Rapace’s gothy hacker is less personal, and it draws in too many underdeveloped outsiders…
Think Oliver Stone’s narrative features are insufferable, heavy-handed, and intellectually lightweight? Then you’re sure to hate South Of The Border (Cinema Libre), a backslapping documentary tour of leftist-run countries in Central and South America that discovers everything is just awesome. Because there’s no way someone like Hugo Chavez could put on a show for an easily duped American director, right?
Who is Harry Nilsson? Who, indeed: Here’s a hitmaker responsible for widely known singles like “One,” “Coconut,” and smash covers of “Without You” and “Everybody’s Talkin’,” yet his story is rarely told. John Scheinfeld’s documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) suffers from conventionality—and a heck of an unwieldy title—but it’s valuable simply for calling attention to the life and work of a great musician whose songs have far eclipsed his name.