David Edelstein on the cast of J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek Into Darkness:

The movie doesn’t hold up to post-viewing scrutiny — which matters if you want to see it again. But I found it so much fun to see its variations on an old theme that I found myself having a good time. I surrendered to the bombardment. The new cast is still disconcerting. By the end of the original Trek, the actors were a collection of paunches and hairpieces; these guys are so trim and tender-skinned, they’re like the Baby Looney Tunes.

David Edelstein on Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby:

It’s hard for a director like Luhrmann to capture the notion of longing to be somewhere you can’t be. He’s not that spiritual. Leonardo DiCaprio embodies that longing, though. The performance is broad — and he’s more tan and healthy than I imagine the character being. But that works here. His Gatsby is still glowing with youthful dreams; he feigns an upper-class accent in the sincere conviction he can rise in society. It’s easy to believe he thinks that with his new wealth he can vanquish time.

Image via NPR

David Edelstein on the surprisingly good time that is Iron Man 3:

Iron Man 3 conquers the curse of the 3 in a novel way: It pretty much takes Iron Man out of the equation. He’s in there, obviously — people would tear down the theater if he weren’t. But Robert Downey, Jr.’s billionaire industrialist Tony Stark doesn’t spend much time in that computer-generated Iron Man suit, which means fewer cut-ins of Downey’s little head inside reacting to battles that we know — no matter how much we want to believe — have no human component whatsoever.

The excellent idea of director Shane Black, who co-wrote the script with Drew Pearce, is to kick Stark out of his comfort zone. Instead of throwing money at every problem, Stark has to function as a lone gumshoe, think like a garage-mechanic, and, when necessary, jury-rig something crude — or, as we like to say nowadays, MacGyver it.

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures

David Edelstein on Ramin Bahrani’s new film At Any Price, starring Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron:

Dennis Quaid plays an unscrupulous farmer and entrepreneur who’s under siege by an even less scrupulous global agribusiness — shown here suing into bankruptcy farmers who attempt to re-use patented seeds. Teen idol Zac Efron is his son, who’d rather race cars than join the family business. Despite those racing scenes, the first three-quarters of the film has no driving force, and Bahrani doesn’t know how to direct his first star, Quaid, who overworks his face and pops his eyes to show how stricken the character is.

Then you see what Bahrani is really up to — setting a deceptive stage for something darker and more cynical, a moral tragedy rooted in the fear of losing one’s business and home. Efron is shockingly good; he goes from a teen dreamer into a man imprisoned — and deadened — by fate. The movie has a hell of a sting in its tail.

Image of Dennis Quaid in At Any Price via Sony Pictures Classics

David Edelstein on the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, Oblivion:

[The movie] is the most incoherent piece of storytelling I’ve seen in years and had me crying, “What? What?” over the din of the explosions. It was Wikipedia’s Oblivion entry that spelled out what was going on in the final flashback. And a few but not all of my complaints were answered on an imdb.com board in which posters argued over whether the problem was our lack of attention spans or atrocious screenwriting. I can’t speak for others but I’ve sat through many three-hour Romanian allegories with no complaint.

Image of Olga Kurylenko and Tom Cruise in Oblivion via Radical Studios

David Edelstein on Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder:

There are critics who’ve greeted Malick’s last few cinematic church services on their knees, and I went into this one with my mind open. But at some point a wind from On High blew it shut. It’s not that the characters’ struggles don’t interest me. You share those struggles, no matter what your faith or lack thereof, if you’re human. The problem is these characters don’t seem human. They’re not people, they’re symbols of people, so the whole thing comes off as generalized, even woozy.

David Edelstein on the new P.J. Hogan comedy Mental, starring Toni Colette:

Toni Collette plays every acting part as if she has nothing to lose — what director Hogan clearly treasures. Her Shaz has a bit of Auntie Mame, but this is no sixties R.D. Laing portrait of mental illness as healthful. We cheer Shaz when she takes revenge on people who’ve given the Moochmore girls a hard time — including the mother’s square sister, who hacks off part of the youngest daughter’s red hair for a Queen Elizabeth doll she’s making. But Shaz is in a dark place. She can turn on anyone, even the girls.

On today’s show, David Edelstein reviews three different films that share the common impulse to demonstrate indelibly how for girls, behaving outrageously is still a political act. Here’s what he has to say about one of those films, Beyond the Hills:

Mungiu based Beyond the Hills on a true story, though he soft-pedals the degree of sexual abuse the girl based on Alina suffered in the orphanage. But there’s no ambiguity: The more she acts out, the more outraged Papa becomes. It’s a long and grueling film with a haunting wide-screen palette, stark and oppressive but teeming with veiled women who come and go like puppets.

David Edelstein on James Franco’s lackluster performance in Oz The Great and Powerful:

To prove he’s a wizard, he has to kill a certain wicked witch, along the way picking up a sidekick monkey that flies and talks in the voice of Zach Braff. I’ve seen few actors as unconvincing as James Franco when it comes to staring down and talking to a creature to be computer-generated later — and Franco doesn’t just have to act opposite that insufferable monkey but also a sassy talking China Doll. It’s not that Franco is bad. He doesn’t risk enough to be bad. My guess is that with all his stammers and shrugs opposite actors playing it straight, he’s trying to be a cowardly hipster like Bob Hope in the Road pictures — or Woody Allen, who actually cited Hope as an inspiration, in Sleeper. But Franco doesn’t have the jokes. He’s playing a noncommittal character in a noncommittal way, so that he sort of floats above the role. You want to yell, “This isn’t a performance-art project! You’re carrying a movie!”

Image of James Franco in Oz, The Great And Powerful courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

David Edelstein reviews the new prequel to The Wizard of Oz, Oz The Great and Powerful:

The filmmakers’ notion is to go back before Dorothy and Toto and chart the journey from Kansas to Oz of the wonderful wizard himself — here called Oscar Diggs and played by James Franco as a traveling-carnival magician who uses his bag of tricks to get women into bed. No, it’s not author L. Frank Baum’s wizard, but I for one think the idea for the character is inspired. He’s the kind of flimflam artist Mark Twain might have come up with — and, in fact, did in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Image from Oz courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures

David Edelstein on an early scene in the new psychological thriller Stoker:

Director Park Chan-wook certainly works to make you uncomfortable. Take the early shot in which the teenage girl protagonist, India Stoker, played by Mia Wasikowska, sits in a meadow and muses in voiceover on the subject of free will versus destiny. She says, “Just as a flower doesn’t choose its color, so we don’t choose what we are going to be” — while draining a blister. In close-up. Which you don’t often see — at least onscreen. Park clearly likes the symbolism. He’s saying India has poisons that must be discharged.

Image Mia Wasikowska as “India” on the set of Stoker courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures

Two of the bigger surprises at last night’s Academy Awards were wins for Ang Lee as Best Director for Life of Pi and Quentin Tarantino for “Best Original Screenplay” for Django Unchained. We like and support surprises. Congratulations, gentlemen.

Here is David Edelstein’s Fresh Air review of Life of Pi and an interview with Tarantino about writing and making Django. Just for good measure, here’s an interview with Life of Pi star Irrfan Khan.

David Edelstein on the new film from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Caesar Must Die:

This isn’t a documentary, though it’s reality-based. The brothers were inspired by a prison production of Dante’s Divine Comedy and went back to the facility — it’s called Rebibbia — to work with resident theater director Fabio Cavalli, who plays himself onscreen. The actors are all convicts though some have served their sentences. The movie begins with the final scenes of the performance before an invited civilian audience. It goes very well. Then the Tavianis shift from color to a more stark and somber black and white, flashing back to the auditions and rehearsals.

image courtesy of Adopt Films

David Edelstein on the Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers:

It is, believe it or not, a critique. It’s a film in which your jaw drops lower and lower as you realize that these spooks, these professional paranoiacs, sound like peaceniks compared to much of the right-wing government. They believe in the tactics they devised. It’s the overall strategy they think is blind.

 The Gatekeepers doesn’t play like peacenik propaganda. It’s made with cunning, with suspense techniques not much different from Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. Moreh edits footage of riots and the intifada for shocking immediacy. The ambient score works on your nerves. And while you could call this, broadly, a “talking heads” documentary, the six heads in question — there are no other interview subjects — are amazingly vivid.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Holy cow. If you thought David Edelstein was rough on Les Miserables, check out Deborah Ross in The Spectator. This is probably the nicest thing she had to say:

The main thrust is Valjean vs Javert, the thin one from Wolverine vs the fatter one from Gladiator, although there are other characters, including Fantine (Anne Hathaway), a single mother who is forced to become a prostitute. (Women don’t come out of this particularly well, and generally expire in the arms of some man.) Still, Hathaway is the business. She can really sing. Her ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ with a blotched face and red eyes and spittle in the corners of her mouth and filmed as if she were Sinéad O’Connor doing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ is wonderful. The best thing in this film by miles. Pity she expires in a man’s arms early on. (SPOILER ALERT…oops, too late.)

In a more good-spirited frame of mind, here is a hilarious send-up of Les Miz that re-envisions the plot as being about trying to find a not-gross-food-involving gluten-free lifestyle.

Image via NPR