“We Need to Talk About Kevin” considers the dark question of where monsters come from. The movie is arctic in its emotional tone, with a carefully reined-in pace; and while it nods lightly in the direction of the old nature-versus-nurture debate, it settles firmly on the side of nature, demonstrating that sometimes evil just is.

The monster at issue is a boy named Kevin, the son of Eva Khatchdourian (Tilda Swinton) and her prosperous husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly). Prior to their marriage, Eva was a well-known travel writer, and she turns out to be ill-suited for stay-at-home domesticity. As a baby, Kevin cries and screams without letup, subsiding only when Franklin takes the child into his arms. Eva is exasperated, and when Franklin decides to move the little family out of the city in which they live and into a big house in a bland suburb, her heart sinks.

By the time he’s six, Kevin (played by the precociously unsettling Jasper Newell) has become a figure of brooding hostility, slyly destructive and impervious to his mother’s attempts to bond with him (although he’s sweet and winning with Franklin). Moving into his teens—and now played to scary perfection by Ezra Miller—the boy is revealed as a pure sociopath, a malevolent presence with shifting serpent eyes under a thatch of midnight-black hair. Appalled by her nightmare child, and frustrated by Franklin’s refusal to acknowledge his bent nature (they need to talk about Kevin, but they never really do), Eva crumples into a despondent haze of wine and pills.

Read the full review at Reason.com

Director Wes Anderson puts a stamp on his films unlike any other director. Sometimes all you need to see is a single frame, or just an appearance by Bill Murray, to know it’s a movie from the man who gave us “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

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“Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson’s first live-action film since the disappointing “The Darjeeling Limite,” five years ago, gathers a typically eclectic cast to tell a story that, well, it’s pretty hard to suss it all out.

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The Academy Awards for 2008 have been handed out, and the “popular kids” have Oscars on their mantles, but the dirty little secret about winning awards is that you’ve gotta campaign for them. Thousands of dollars were spent by the distributors and filmmakers behind Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight), Milk (Focus Features), The Reader (Weinstein) and other assorted winners and nominees, but not all performances received that sort of big money backing.

I am an unabashed lover of the acting craft. I see virtually every movie, large and small, that passes through the US marketplace, and, taking nothing away from Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, Penelope Cruz and Heath Ledger, not all of 2008’s best performances have been recognized. I’m not going to be obvious here. Clint Eastwood was snubbed for Gran Torino, but he received lots of acclaim for the role including being named Best Actor by the National Board of Review. My goal is to highlight 10 performances from last year that have received virtually no acclaim in the US. Many of these roles can be found in hardly-seen, under-appreciated movies that came and went without much notice. Each and every one of these movies deserve a spot in your Netflix (or Blockbuster) cue. (more…)

Tyler Perry’s decidedly un-Oscar Madea Goes to Jail (Lionsgate) is the box office story of Oscar weekend selling a massive $14.65M in opening day tickets with a possible $38M in sales expected for the weekend. But what about the Best Picture nominees, the supposed cool kids on the box office block?

Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) is the odds-on Best Picture winner, and it expanded to about 600 additional playdates this weekend for a total screen count of 2,224. The other four contenders for Hollywood’s biggest prize, however, are on a combined 2,508 screens. That means that they are essentially done with their theatrical engagements in the US (barring a truly shocking upset). Even if you wanted to see the other four nominees, you might have trouble finding them at your local multiplex – especially if you live outside a major city.
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