Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Taking Woodstock</em> or <em>The Final Destination</em> - Photo Gallery

<p>Ang Lee follows up his most recent dramas <em>Brokeback Mountain</em> and <em>Lust Caution</em> with a gentle trip back to 1969 with <em>Taking Woodstock</em>, based on Elliot Tiber's memoir. Tiber, who was helping out at his parents' motel, is played by Demetri Martin while Eugene Levy plays Max Yasgur. The Post's Lou Lumenick <a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/08262009/entertainment/movies/dump_this_stock__186569.htm">gives it 1.5 stars</a>, "Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore." But the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/taking-woodstock,1156234/critic-review.html#reviewNum1">Wahsington Post's Ann Hornaday</a> writes, "If you stick with this wistful, fitfully funny little trip, you will be rewarded with a movie that makes up in warmth, humanism and self-effacing modesty what it lacks in crackerjack pacing and epic pop-historical grandeur."</p>

<em>The Final Destination</em> (and in 3-D) didn't screen for critics and it didn't really need to as <a href="http://chicago.metromix.com/movies/movie_review/the-final-destination-review/1416758/content">Metromix's Matt Pais explains</a>, "This isn't a franchise, it's an arcade game."

<em>The September Issue</em> takes viewers behind the scenes at Vogue. Director R.J. Cutler followed editor Anna Wintour and her crew—including the formidable fashion director Grace Coddington— while they prepare the fall fashion issue, traditionally the biggest issue of the year. Salon's <a href="http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2009/08/27/september_issue/index.html">Stephanie Zacharek says</a>, "R.J. Cutler's vibrant and mischievous documentary The September Issue is only partly a movie about fashion. At its heart, it's really a movie about work, about the ways individuals compete with, grate against and inspire one another in the workplace.

<p>We interviewed <em>Big Fan</em> star Patton Oswalt today, and the NY Times' Manhola Dargis thinks the tale of a devoted Giants fan from Staten Island, written and directed by Robert Siegel, <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/movies/28fan.html">scores</a>, "One of the pleasures of this agreeably low-key and modest film is that he isn’t selling a message or trying to wring a grand metaphor out of his humble material: he’s created a somewhat simple story about a man who turns out to be rather less simple than he first appears. Unlike his script for <em>The Wrestler,</em> with its embarrassment of clichés and bucket of tears, the screenplay for “Big Fan” avoids sentimentality without abandoning sentiment. Paul might make you squirm, but Mr. Siegel refuses to sell him out so you can feel more comfortable with his eccentricities, no small thing in contemporary independent cinema."</p>

<p>Musician turned director Rob Zombie is back with a sequel to his re-imagining of <em>Hallowee</em>—<em>Halloween II</em>. Peter Hartlaub of the <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/28/DD6019ET5A.DTL&amp;type=movies">San Francisco Chronicle says</a>, "This movie isn't horrible, but it seems like a waste for Zombie to keep revisiting someone else's world." Then again, it may be your only chance to see Malcolm McDowell on the screen with Weird Al.</p>

<p>Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda covers family drama in <em>Still Walking</em>. The <em>Village Voice's Anthony Kaufman decrees</em>, "What's remarkable about Still Walking, Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda's seventh feature film and one every bit as sensitive as his previous triumphs <em>After Life</em> (1998) and <em>Nobody Knows</em> (2004), is that the familiar comes across as fresh. Despite recycling potential clichés—the grouchy elderly father, the disenfranchised second son—Koreeda imbues the story with such specificity, tactility, and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional family reunion becomes a cinematic tone poem."</p>

<p>Revisit the 1990s website Pseudo.com, which rode the dot-com wave as the first Internet television network, with people living in a bunker (cameras on them, of course) for 30 days. The site's founder Josh Harris is called "the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of" by director Ondi Timoner in the documentary <em>We Live in Public</em>, which also catches up with Harris when he's bankrupt. The <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/we-live-in-public,32208/">AV Club's Noel Murray writes</a>, "At the time, Harris’ exploits were the subject of magazine profiles and network-news stories, and yet he’s barely remembered today. On that count, Timoner is correct: Harris is unduly obscure. But was what he accomplished really all that great?... <em>We Live In Public</em> doesn’t show that Harris was a genius so much as that he was a mentally and emotionally unstable egotist, trying to force a revolution in self-broadcasting and connectivity that later happened more naturally."</p>

<p>The documentary <em>At the Edge of the World</em>, directed by Dan Stone, follow activist Paul Watson, who left Greenspan to fight causes his way, and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as they hunt Japanese whale poachers. The <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-08-25/film/at-the-edge-of-the-world/">Village Voice's Elena Oumano</a> was dazzled, "From <em>Edge</em>'s opening wide shot of the Shepherds leaping off an iceberg into encircling rings of crystalline turquoise waters, the sea's vast expanse becomes a looming character in its own right—by turns stupendously beautiful and grimly terrifying, and best appreciated in a movie theater."</p>

<p>The <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/movies/20090828_A_cringeworthy_dating_comedy.html">Philadelphia Inquirer's Carrie Rickey is aghast</a> at <em>Play the Game</em> a tale of a ladies' man giving his widowed grandfather—played by Andy Griffith-tips on scoring, "Surely, there is a way of expressing the joy of sex without the potty-mouthed dialogue that desecrates the persona of a television and movie icon."</p>

<p>Jean-Luc Godard's <em>Pierrot Le Fou</em> is <a href="http://www.madmuseum.org/DO/film%20series.aspx">screening at the Museum of Art and Design</a> at 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday; the 2 p.m. screening is Agnes Varda's <em>Le Bonheur</em>.</p>

<p>The Graham Greene-penned British noir <em>Brighton Rock</em> is at <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/britnoir.html#828">Film Forum this weekend. The New Yorker's David Denby says, "One of the strongest Graham Greene adaptations. Attenborough, silent, calculating, pale, and unblinking, offers one of the cinema's most convincing embodiments of paranoia and violence."</a></p>

<p>This weekend's <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/films/paradise-lost-2-revelations/">midnight movie at the IFC Center</a> is <em>Paradise Lost 2: Revelations</em>, director Joe Berlinger's 2000 followup to his 1996 documentary <em>Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills</em>, which followed at the trials of three teens accused of killing and sexually mutilating three young boys. The 1996 film suggested the teens could be innocent and Berlinger goes back to see the appeals process.</p>