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
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...
Bright Star
Bright Star is Jane Campion's dramatization of the love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (aside from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress.) But the effect is exhilarating and deeply pleasurable...
Telluride Film Festival Picks
Love at first sight can be as dangerous as it is exciting, and the sme goes for love at first screening. I fell hard and heedlessly for a film called An Education, which happened to be the first of 14 films I managed to see in the course of three movie-besotted days at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend...
(Joe also reviews A Prophet, The Last Station, Bright Star and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.)
Funny People; Flame and Citron
The people in Judd Apatow's Funny People are painfully unfunny, and remarkable off-putting...
In Flame & Citron, two melancholy Danes share center stage in the movie, but neither one of them is Hamlet...
(500) Days of Summer; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
In the preface of (500) Days of Summer, a narrator says, "You should know right up front this is not a love story..."
I wrote a mixed revue in the Wall Street Journal for the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince...
Bruno; Soul Power
Well, here's the bad news: Brüno is no Borat. Here's the worse news: Brüno crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously awful to genuinely awful...
Period pieces can be marvelous or musty, depending on the period, as well as the piece. Soul Power is marvelous, and no wonder -- among the performers in this concert film are James Brown, B.B> King, Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba and Celia Cruz, all at the peak of their powers...
Public Enemies
Michael Mann's Public Enemies never lacks for interest, or interesting info. Back in the 1930's, for instance, the FBI was simply called the Bureau of Investigation before being formally federalized...
Program Details
Host
Film Reviews presented by Joe Morgenstern, the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic of the Wall Street Journal.
Schedule
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Tapes & Transcripts
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