Film Reviews
Film Reviews
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic of The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern reviews films weekly in the paper and on KCRW; he airs his current musings on the film industry in a biweekly column for the paper as well. He has worked for The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and his freelance writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Playboy, GQ and the Columbia Journalism Review. He has also written for television; his scripts include "The Boy In the Plastic Bubble" and several episodes of "Law & Order." Joe is a founding member of the National Society of Film Critics and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.
Photo credit: Marc Goldstein
RECENT SHOWS
Extraordinary Measures; Creation
Extraordinary Measures requires extraordinary tolerance for bathos, bombast and plain old unpleasantness. It’s a fictionalized – and sadly trivialized – adaptation of a non-fiction book, The Cure, which was written by my Wall Street Journal colleague Geeta Anand...
Creation is a fancier botch, blissed out on its own cleverness. Paul Bettany is Charles Darwin, struggling to finish The Origin of the Species while he grieves the loss of his beloved daughter Annie, who died at the age of ten.
The Last Station
The Last Station is Michael Hoffman's evocation of the last years of writer Leo Tolstoy. It's a "seduction that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, countess Sofya come to life in a match pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren."
Youth in Revolt; Daybreakers
Youth in Revolt is an endearing coming-of-age comedy that stars Michael Cera. In one way, only, but in a significant way, Cera reminds me of Billie Holiday, who achieved subtle marvels within a severely limited vocal range...
The German filmmaker brothers Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig have come up with a new twist on vampires in an English-language movie called Daybreakers. The year is 2019, and vampires have taken over the world...
Avatar
James Camerion's Avatar takes place on a planet called Pandora, where American corporations and their military mercenaries have set up bases to mine a surpassingly precious mineral called unobtanium. The vein of awe mined by the movie is nothing short of unbelievium...
Invictus; The Lovely Bones
Until now, America's curiosity about rugby has been on a par with its knowledge, but this could change with the advent of Invictus... Clint Eastwood's new movie is an inspirational game played by Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, and Matt Damon as the captain of a South African rugby team...
Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones was adapted from Alice Sebold's widely admired novel. The movie, like the book, is party set in an Inbetween that occupies an ethereal space between heaven and earth; it's the vantage point from which the young heroine watches over her family after her death at the hands of a monstrous pervert...
Up in the Air
The best of Up in the Air -- meaning most of it -- is right up there with the fresh and sophisticated comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age…
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans; Red Cliff
This year's prize for clumsiest title goes to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. I wanted to get that out of the way so I could talk about a defining moment in the movie, set in post-Katrina New Orleans -- it's when Nicholas Cage's rogue cop pulls up to a seedy building to make an arrest...
Red Cliff, set in China in the twilight of the Han Dynasty, lends new meaning to the notion of Baby on Board when a fearless swordsman plunges into battle with an infant strapped on his back...
2012; Pirate Radio
2012 is Roland Emmerich's latest assault on planet Earth and its moviegoers, and it isn't the end of the world: it only feels that way...
Pirate Radio follows the form -- when it chooses to follow any form -- of a cat-and-mouse game between the British government, circa 1966, and a crew of deejays beaming round-the-clock rock and roll from a decrepit tanker anchored in the North Sea just outside Britain's territorial waters...
A Christmas Carol; Precious
To put it bluntly, and Scroogely, Disney's 3-D animated version of A Christmas Carol is a calamity...
In a shockingly beautiful new film called Precious, one of the most telling moments comes toward the end, and it's hardly more than a throwaway -- the heroine glances at a mirror and sees herself...
This Is It; Cirque du Soleil
After all the media madness about Michael Jackson over all the years and decades, it comes as bittersweet news that he lives vividly in This Is It...
I've checked out two Cirques recently, a movie called Cirque du Freaks and the Cirque du Soleil, which is back in town and playing under a big blue-and-yellow tent next to the Santa Monica Pier...
Where the Wild Things Are
The movie version of Where the Wild Things Are honors the book in every imaginable way...and in ways no one could have imagined until Spike Jonze and his crew came long...
An Education
This week brings a thrilling new film called An Education. It's a tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom, and it's thrilling for all sorts of reasons...
The Invention of Lying; Zombieland
Nobody doesn't like Ricky Gervais, and his new comedy soars for a while on the wings of a clever premise: it's set in a world where everyone tells the truth. In the spirit of that world, I cannot tell a lie: The Invention of Lying...
Zombieland teems with wild-eyed chewers and spewers. They're only lurid wallpaper, though, in an improbably delicious comedy about a quartet of human survivors crossing an America that's been taken over by ravenous hordes...
Capitalism: A Love Story; Coco Before Chanel
Michael Moore starts Capitalism: A Love Story with a sequence of secuirty-camera videos showing holdups in progress, and ends it by showing himself, like some vigilante version of the environmental artist Christo, stringing great lengths of yellow crime-scene tape around banks and brokerage houses in Lower Manhattan...
Clothes may make the man, but the woman makes the clothes in Coco before Chanel, Anne Fontaine's smart and sumptuous French-language account of the legendary designer during her early years when she, like her couture, was still ascending from basse to haute...
Program Details
Host
Film Reviews presented by Joe Morgenstern, the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic of the Wall Street Journal.
Tapes & Transcripts
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