Capital New York

'A Separation': An Iranian culture clash disguised as a tragic, epic domestic drama

The events in Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, seem both chaotic and inevitable, unfolding like a slow-motion disaster. 

Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) are a separated Iranian couple with an 11-year-old daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). Simin has been making plans to move abroad, and Nader, who takes care of his Alzheimer's-stricken father, does not want to go. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Carnage': A triumph for Polanski, and the funniest movie about hopelessness you'll ever see

A privileged existence leads to guilt, and guilt leads to savage behavior.

That is the obvious message in Roman Polanski's Carnage (an adaptation of Yasmina Reza's hit Broadway play God of Carnage), in which two sets of upscale New York parents get together to discuss a brawl between their sons on the schoolyard. Over the course of the next 80 minutes, what should have been a cordial conversation between concerned parents descends into outright anarchy. Ugliness and pettiness is laid bare, and there is no hope for humanity. And, oh yeah, it's hilarious from beginning to end. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'The Turin Horse': A tale of animal and human deprivation, and an invitation to feel Nietzsche's pain

Screening some of the most highly anticipated films of the season, along with special programs and series focusing on directors and avant-garde work, the 49th New York Film Festival starts on September 30 and runs to October 16. Take a look at the schedule and purchase tickets here.

In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche apparently witnessed the beating of a horse on the streets of Turin. He threw his arms around the horse's neck, sobbing, and then lost consciousness. He then had a mental breakdown from which he never recovered, and never wrote again. That's the story, anyway. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Melancholia': Lars von Trier makes a despairing gesture, and this time he has a point

Screening some of the most highly anticipated films of the season, along with special programs and series focusing on directors and avant-garde work, the 49th New York Film Festival starts on September 30 and runs to October 16. Take a look at the schedule and purchase tickets here.

The opening of Lars von Trier's Melancholia is magnificent, reminiscent of a high-concept couture spread in Vogue Italia, with excruciating slo-mo and a parade of surrealistic tableaux, all to the bombastic accompaniment of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde." There is an intensifying burn as the film builds to its apocalyptic second half, a powerful and dreamy statement of the inevitability of disintegration and destruction, as seen through the deadened-by-sorrow eyes of Kirsten Dunst as Justine, whose wedding sparks a cloud of despair in her so deep that she cannot be reached. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Moneyball,' Brad Pitt, and the romantic side of baseball nerddom

It's hard not to be romantic about baseball. —Billy Beane, general manager, Oakland A's

Billy Beane is speaking about himself in Moneyball when he says that, but he could also be talking about the fans. Baseball isn't just baseball, we've been told a million times. It's a connection to childhood memories, it's the pure joy of a night at the ballpark, it's the best of America (as James Earl Jones reminds us in his baseball monologue in Field of Dreams), and on and on and on. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

Welcome to the Unsilly Season! Some important new movies that aren't self-serious Oscar-bait

Now that the summer season, with its obligatory superhero-infested-C.G.I.–3-D-overwhelmed blockbuster juggernaut has passed, it’s time for fall, when things start to get very serious. It’s the pre-Oscar season, and while many Oscar-bait films are dreary, self-serious projects, there are quite a few movies coming out this fall that I, for one, can’t wait to see. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'Contagion': A gruesomely timed portrait of airborne infection and urban panic

Two people in Hazmat suits stand over a mass grave in a vacant lot in Minneapolis. There is snow on the ground. The city has run out of body bags, so the bodies lie wrapped in blankets and the odd sheet of plastic. The bodies are piled on top of each other in a heap.

Seen from overhead, with one truck meandering along the empty city street at the edge of the vacant lot, the only sign of life is those two remaining figures, looking down into the mass grave. The scope of the death is incomprehensible, to us in the audience, and to the two guys in the Hazmat suits, and the scene unfolds in a bleak silence. Scenes like this are what make Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion a true thriller. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

Woody's second act: 'Midnight in Paris' may not be 'Annie Hall,' but people keep paying good money to see it

Woody Allen makes, on average, a movie a year. Given such an output, not every movie is going to be a masterpiece, and Allen seems fine with that. There is certainly something to be said for Stanley Kubrick’s or Terrence Malick’s pace, the directors who develop projects for sometimes decades, but Allen has always been up to something different. He has his hits, he has his misses (Cassandra’s Dream, anyone?), and he keeps on working. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

Regular old vampires: 'Fright Night' retreats from 'Twilight' and Pattinsonism, but not in a good way

The Twilight juggernaut, while popular amongst tween girls for obvious, hormonally induced reasons, has done much to defang the bloodsucker myth, to the detriment of the genre. Vampire tales are considerably less chilling when the vampire in question is engaged in a drawn-out renunciation of his own proclivities.

If nothing else, Craig Gillespie’s Fright Night, a 3-D remake of the well-loved 1985 film, does much to rehabilitate the vampire to its rightful position in the cultural imagination. More

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By Sheila O'Malley

'The Help': A movie about a white woman who told the story of the suffering of black women

“But we ain’t doing civil rights here,” protests Aibileen, an African-American maid in Tate Taylor’s The Help, based on the New York Times bestseller of the same name by Kathryn Stockett.

The “here” Aibileen refers to is the project initiated by “Skeeter”, a white lady (played by Emma Stone), to tell the stories of the domestic help from the maids’ perspective and publish them in book form. More

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By Sheila O'Malley