We knew it would one day come to this, it’s fallen upon us at last, there is no escape. Reviews for Sex and the City have been generally derisive, ranging from Rolling Stone: “Some dudes say they'd rather light their dicks on fire than endure this movie version of the ultimate in TV chickcoms. Snap out of it, guys, you just might learn something.” To the Daily Mail: “In years to come, I suspect - and hope - that people will watch this movie, laugh at the naivety of its faux sophistication, and find its assumptions as quaint, bigoted and unconsciously racist as those of Gone With The Wind.” But Hollywood Elsewhere wins with his summation: “A Taliban recruitment video.”
Savage Grace tells the decadent true story of Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillaine), heir to a plastics company fortune, and his impulsive wife Barbara (Julianne Moore) as they fall apart all over Europe in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The Times’s A.O. Scott deems it “oppressive”: “Bisexuality! Marijuana! Anal sex! A father who sleeps with his son’s girlfriend! A son who sleeps with his mother’s boyfriend! All of great intrinsic interest, to be sure, but Savage Grace doesn’t seem quite sure of how to communicate its own fascination with such doings, whether to convey shock, envy, pity or bemusement.”
Christopher Bell’s first documentary Bigger Stronger Faster* goes from focusing on his Rambo-loving brothers’ steroid abuse in Poughkeepsie to a full-bore expose on drug use in competitive sports. The Voice’s Michelle Orange calls it a “scrappy, remarkably expansive, crazily watchable documentary… Bell finds the epitome of that tragedy in his own family and digs unflinchingly at its roots.”
The Times’s Stephen Holden says Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic, a documentary that covers the making of John Adams’s and Peter Sellars’s postminimalist opera about the last 48 hours before the first atomic bomb was exploded, “enthralling.” And Stuck, Stuart Gordon’s black comedy inspired by the nurse who accidentally hit that guy with her car and left him dying in her garage, has been getting great reviews, with Variety’s Joe Leydon calling it “ingeniously nasty and often shockingly funny.”
The Sundance at BAM screenings began last night with the surprisingly terrific documentary American Teen and continue with a host of past festival hits through next week. This week’s midnight movie at the Sunshine is Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, Film Forum’s Godard series wraps up with Vivre Sa Vie, and The Brooklyn International Film Festival kicks off tonight at the Brooklyn Lyceum.
