The aliens arrived almost thirty years ago, their crippled spacecraft hovering to a halt over Johannesburg, where it remains floating over the city. That defining image hovers over the entirety of District 9 (2009), a savagely whipsmart satire of first contact with an alien species that has been reduced to repressed immigrant population stranded in […]
The zombie comedy was hardly fresh territory when Zombieland (2009) came along (and really, will anyone top Shaun of the Dead?) but it nonetheless does a fine job of mining the humor inherent in the end of the world. Jesse Eisenberg is the loner college geek who finds that his obsessive-compulsive instincts are just what […]
Zach Snyder delivers perhaps the most faithful adaptation of Watchmen (2009, R), the landmark graphic novel by writer Alan Moore (uncredited on screen, as is his tradition) and artist Dave Gibbons, that anyone could hope for. Moore’s story reimagines the history of comic book superheroes in the real world of global politics and complicated (and […]
Before he won the Academy Award for Foreign Language film for A Separation, the first Iranian film to win an Oscar, Asghar Farhadi made About Elly (Iran, 2009), a compelling mix of mystery and social drama. Set over a family seaside vacation with three close-knit couples and their young children, this is a portrait of […]
If Monty Python is the comedy world’s equivalent to The Beatles, then the six-part documentary mini-series Monty Python: Almost the Truth (2009) is their Beatles Anthology, an epic of a documentary featuring new interviews with the five surviving Pythons and as many colleagues and friends as the producers could track down. Each episode focuses on […]
Jack Black and Michael Cera are philosophical cavemen misfits who wander out of their pocket of Eden and into the Holy Lands of Biblical lore in Year One (2009), the History of the World according to Harold Ramis. They are Zed and Oh, ostensibly members of a pre-civilization tribe of hunter/gatherers, but despite the caveman […]
From Paris With Love (2009), starring John Travolta as a cowboy of an American agent and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as an ambitious but untrained low-level agent assigned to assist, is another of Luc Besson’s English language Euro-action films, the contemporary equivalent to the drive-in action movie of decades past. Besson has perfected the formula in […]
Biochemical engineer and corporate whistleblower Mark Whitacre might have been a national hero for his help in exposing international price fixing. Too bad he was also a compulsive liar and an embezzler caught up in delusions of grandeur and secret-agent fantasies. Though based on a true story, The Informant! (2009) is not The Insider but […]
There’s a more complicated explanation for the term, but when you comes right down to it, Pandorum (2009) is just another word for space madness. An engineer (Ben Foster) and a pilot (Dennis Quaid) are roused from prolonged sleep on an interstellar ark to find the ship unmanned and the corridors roaming with mutant cannibals. […]
Nowhere Boy (2009) tells the story of the early life of John Lennon, the man who would put together the Beatles as a teenage boy. What’s marvelous about the film is that it isn’t elevated into some mythological status. There are none of those clichéd lines where someone in the group or some prescient member […]
