New Releases

Joel and Ethan Coen make films that, love 'em or hate 'em, everyone loves to talk about. There's no question, Coen films are a polarizing force. They number among my favorite of all time (The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?), my guilty pleasures (Fargo, A Serious Man), and some of my least favored (Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men) ... yet every one of these is an object of both critical acclaim and derision.

The Coens' latest film is True Grit, opening in theaters today. This retelling of the 1969 movie and the 1968 Charles Portis novel stands out as one that will be almost universally loved. Almost the entirety of the die-hard film-loving audience with which I attended Butt-Numb-a-Thon 12 chose it as their favorite selection. Westerns aren't my first love in film, but I will list the Coen brothers' True Grit among the best ever made.

True Grit hooks the audience from the very first scene with 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) holding her own in business dealings with men four times her age. The dialogue is electric, intense and in a perfectly convincing period dialect. The closest thing I've seen to this magic was the scene where Tom Hanks met Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2007's Charlie Wilson's War.

Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have made quite a large body of movies together. Little Fockers, the latest entry in the Meet the Parents series is, well, it's another of them. The 2000 movie Meet the Parents was a fun, if not high-brow, examination of the tribulations when in-laws meet for the first time. Meet the Fockers, in 2004, continued with the established formula of "Jack doesn't trust Greg, Jack spies on Greg, Jack takes things out of context, Step 3 PROFIT." But at least it added Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand as Greg's wonderfully zany, new-age sex-therapist title-card parents. This latest entry in the series throws any pretense out the window that the movieis about anything other than the love story between Stiller's Greg Focker and Robert De Niro's Jack Byrnes.

Except for the family name, it would have been more descriptive to call this entry in the series "Little Afterthoughts." The Focker children serve only as the vehicle for getting Stiller and De Niro to fight, like a set of parents embroiled in divorce proceedings. Little Samantha Focker (Daisy Tahan) is drawn to and takes on the personality of her grandpa Jack while Henry Focker (Colin Baiocchi) is hinted to have a genetic "double dose of Focker."

Twenty-eight years ago, before most of the world had heard of the Internet, before most people even had touch-tone phones, Disney inspired an entire generation of would-be computer hackers with the glorious adventure TRON. Now the studio is back with TRON: Legacy, a successor that will surely be a crowd pleaser. This modern update is faithful to the spirit of the original, but lacking in original story elements that will leave some viwers wanting more.

The story revisits Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and ENCOM about 28 years after the first movie. After defeating the evil MCP and returning to the real world, Flynn's success with his TRON game has led to ENCOM becoming a virtual Microsoft and Flynn running it as the leading shareholder. Then he mysteriously disappears, leaving his juvenile son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) all alone for 20 years, until one night a mysterious message draws him into the world of his father's creation.

I've never thought of myself as a sports-movie fan, but I'm realizing that I truly am a sucker for boxing movies. I don't watch real-life boxing matches, I'm not a fan of the sport other than that I've been known to like the workouts, but show me a movie where a man is jumping rope or a woman is working the heavy bag and you have my attention. The Fighter, directed by David O. Russell (Three Kings) and based on real-life personalities, is no exception.

The Fighter is about two brothers, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), either of whom  could be described by the film's title. Dicky is an ex-fighter who had his moment in the spotlight years before, allegedly knocking out Sugar Ray Leonard. Dicky is supposed to be training his little brother so Micky's boxing career can take off, but he has what is eventually revealed as a serious drug problem and Micky is left to struggle on his own. The fights that Dicky and the brothers' mom Alice (Melissa Leo) are setting up for Micky do nothing to help him, either.

Eventually Micky is left to decide whether to continue with his mother as his business manager and his brother as his trainer, or find another way to try to make it as a boxer and face the wrath of his very large, very close family. He's also trying to cultivate a romance with local bartender Charlene (Amy Adams), whom his sisters and mom can't stand.

The notorious con artist Steven Russell has been both amazingly corrupt and amazingly clever. An expert at fraud and embezzlement, he masterminded many astonishing scams and escaped from prison several times. Known for his high IQ and impersonation skills, he outwitted corporate executives, bank officials, and law enforcement alike, conning his way into high-level jobs as easily as he conned his way out of prison cells.

Given Russell's notoriety and anti-hero fame, as detailed in the book by Houston journalist Steve McVicker, a movie about his life is almost inevitable. His criminal escapades and charming rogue persona are perfect fodder for a cinematic treatment. That film is I Love You Phillip Morris, a tragicomic romp written and directed by Bad Santa writers John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. While entertaining, the movie isn't quite as smart or clever as its subject.

Opening on Friday in Austin, I Love You Phillip Morris is really two stories: one chronicling Russell's life of deception and the other exploring his relationship with the titular Morris, a lover whom Russell met in a Texas jail. (The title may be misleading, as the film has no connection to the tobacco company with the same name.) I Love You Phillip Morris is ambitious in scope, equal parts true-crime caper film, love story and commentary about homophobia.

Academy award winner writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others) takes the helm of the suspenseful drama The Tourist as it sails through from a cafe in Paris to the canals of Venice. Joined by seasoned writers Christopher McQuarrie (Valkyrie, The Usual Suspects) and Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park, Vanity Fair),  Donnersmarck would at first glance appear to be making an homage to Stanley Donen's classic espionage thriller Charade, which starred Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. However, The Tourist is actually a remake of French writer/director Jerome Salle's 2005 crime thriller Anthony Zimmer, which starred French film star Sophie Marceau.

The Tourist centers around Frank (Johnny Depp), a math teacher from Wisconsin who is traveling through Europe. What appears to be a chance encounter on a train with a mysterious beautiful woman is actually no mistake. Elise (Angelina Jolie) deliberately picks him out to throw police off the trail of her lover and embezzler Alexander Pierce, who stole over two billion dollars from his mobster boss Reginald Shaw (Steven Berkoff). Since both Pierce and Shaw are British citizens, the British authorities want the taxes from the money. To complicate matters, no one but Elise knows what Pierce looks like and he is rumoured to have had millions of dollars worth of plastic surgery to alter his physical appearance.

Don't be surprised if Darren Aronofsky's latest film, Black Swan, makes you want to see a ballet. From the first shot to the last, Black Swan is an allegorical performance piece wrapped up in a psychological thriller.

The twisted sister of Aronofsky's previous film The Wrestler, Black Swan centers on an emotionally fragile ballerina at a precarious cusp in her career, when her company is about to cast an ambitious re-imagining of Swan Lake. Obsessed with perfection, Nina (Natalie Portman) auditions for the coveted lead at the risk of her delicate psyche.

Like the roles she's rehearsing on stage, Nina is trapped by powerful forces beyond her control. Demanding artistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) forces Nina out of her comfort zone, while her mother (Barbara Hershey) is passive-aggressively protective. Rival dancer Lily (Mila Kunis) is always around to remind Nina of what she is not, and just how insecure her position is.

Earlier this week I had a flashback to my childhood Christmases -- the sound of springs creaking on an unseen attic door as it opened evoked a sense of excitement and anxiety. As a child, I imagined it was Santa Claus coming down from the attic because we did not have a real fireplace. As I grew older I realized that my parents hid our presents up there. It was a bit unnerving and overwhelming to think that Santa knew if whether I was bad or good, and could enter our house at will.

In the movie Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, opening at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar tomorrow just in time for the holidays, Finnish writer and director Jalmari Helander reminds us of the not-so-jovial myths behind the mystic icon of Father Christmas. Helander first introduced his take on the origin and life history of Santa Claus in the short darkly humorous films Rare Exports Inc. (2003) and The Official Rare Exports Inc. Safety Instructions 2005 (2005), which went viral on the internet. Find out where to watch these award-winning short films after the jump.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale begins a couple of weeks before Christmas with a secretive dig in the depths of the Korvantunturi Mountains, located on the border between Russia and Finland. An American businessman with a multinational corporation delivers specific safety instructions to the site supervisor, as it is revealed that the "mountain" in which they are digging is actually the ancient tomb of Santa Claus. Two young boys, Juuso (Ilmari Järvenpää) and Pietari (Onni Tommila), misbehave by sneaking in through the border fence to investigate the dig. Pietari researches the story of Father Christmas, and is disturbed by what he finds.

Everyone should be familiar with the basic story of Rapunzel from Grimm's Fairy Tales. Variations of the tale have been told for a thousand years. Tangled's take is true to Disney form, with some of the darker elements glossed over or removed -- Rapunzel, for instance, isn't traded to the witch by her parents and doesn't get pregnant out of wedlock. In this version, Rapunzel (voiced by a very mature-sounding Mandy Moore) rather than the tragic waif depicted in fairy tales is a strong, adventurous free spirit who wants nothing more than to see the world.

Sheltered and trapped by the lying, over-protective Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy), she is doomed to live forever in her tower until the thief Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi) stumbles into the grove where the tower is hidden. When she sees the chance to escape with a guide, and see the world, she jumps at the opportunity. As Disney villians go, Mother Gothel is intriguing as she pursues the pair. Described as a witch, she is never seen actually using any powers and is never herself threatening. She cleverly employs a pair of thugs to do her dirty work and proves to be the most powerfully manipulative Disney bad guy we've ever seen. In fact, given the situation in which she is introduced, Gothel could be a sympathetic character except that we quickly see how vain, self-absorbed and ultimately evil she is. Still, some in the audience may find it easy to identify with her as she's no Cruella de Ville.

In a very telling scene early in 127 Hours, Aron Ralston (James Franco) is biking at breakneck speed through the Utah desert when he takes a nasty tumble and slams into a spindly, scratchy bush. Unfazed and eternally cocky, he shakes off his pain and is back on his bike almost as quickly as he fell, as if to prove he's more than a match for any trouble that comes his way in the wilderness.

Of course, anyone familiar with the true story that inspired 127 Hours knows that this cockiness nearly led to Ralston's untimely demise. Another reckless, nasty fall left him stuck for five days in a deep crevasse with his arm pinned by a boulder. Unable to call for help, he had to rely on his wits and a handful of mountaineering equipment for survival. Because Ralston's story garnered so much publicity, it isn't really a spoiler to reveal that he ultimately freed himself. But the specifics of how he did so are central to 127 Hours, so I won't go into much further detail, except to warn the squeamish that some scenes are, well, not for the squeamish.

The narrowly focused 127 Hours is a definite departure for director Danny Boyle, who is known for revered ensemble pieces like Trainspotting and whose most recent success was the complex and sweeping Slumdog Millionaire. Early in 127 Hours, Ralston helps two lost hikers -- of course, they're conveniently attractive young women -- find their way, and they join him for a few hours of flirting and swimming in a hidden, crystal-clear pool. But the rest of the film is essentially a one-character story that, aside from flashbacks and dream sequences, takes place almost entirely in the claustrophobic crevasse where Ralston contemplates his fate.