Thierry Valletoux / AP In this film image released by The Weinstein Company, Francois Cluzet, left, and Omar Sy are shown in a scene from "The Intouchables." (05-23) 13:12 PDT , (AP) -- On paper, "The Intouchables" looks like eat-your-vegetables cinema: the story of a wealthy, white disabled man and the troubled black youth from the projects who becomes his reluctant caretaker. Surely, life lessons will be learned by all and an unlikely friendship will form across racial and socioeconomic lines and we'll all feel good about ourselves walking out of the theater afterward. It could have been painfully mawkish, but writers and directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano upend expectations by infusing the comedy with a subversive, playful tone throughout, with some totally inappropriate ... Continue reading →

Review: Was anyone clamoring for 'Men in Black 3'? By CHRISTY LEMIRE, AP Movie Critic – 59 minutes ago There's a moment early on in "Men in Black 3" when Will Smith's Agent J sits down next to his longtime partner, Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K, and bemoans the fact that he's too old for this sort of thing — for running around New York in matching dark suits, chasing down aliens and zapping them with their shiny metal weapony doo-hickeys.We're paraphrasing a bit. But unfortunately, that's an excellent observation. We're all too old for this sort of thing — the shtick itself has gotten old, and it has not aged well.Fifteen years since the zippy original and a decade since the sub-par sequel, we ... Continue reading →

Sight and Sound Film Poll: Roger Ebert's Favorite Films This week Press Play introduces Sight and Sound Film Poll: Critics' Picks, a series of video essays featuring prominent film critics on films they selected for Sight and Sound magazine's poll of the greatest films of all time. New videos will premiere each week until the poll results are announced later this summer. To start off the Critics' Picks series, why not have the most famous film critic in the world? Roger Ebert needs no introduction, but his impact on film culture is something we have long taken for granted, and extends beyond his 45 years of film reviewing and television celebrity. His reach is felt even within the Sight and Sound Poll - as I ... Continue reading →

(05-21) 17:44 PDT , (AP) -- The contradiction inherent to all Wes Anderson films — the juxtaposition of the meticulous artificiality of the settings and the passionately wistful emotions that are longing to burst free — is at its most effective in a while in "Moonrise Kingdom." The director and co-writer's tale of first love, filled with recognizable adolescent angst and naive fumblings, feels at once deeply personal (and, indeed, it was inspired by a boyhood crush of his own) and universally relatable. Of course, it features the fetishistic obsession with production and costume design that is his trademark; nothing ever happens by accident in Anderson's films, which are frequently and accurately described as dollhouses or dioramas. Despite its rigid structure, which includes exact tracking ... Continue reading →

"Independence Day." Every week, Criticwire asks film critics a question and brings you the responses in The Criticwire Survey. We also ask each member of the poll to pick the best film currently playing in theaters. The most popular choices can be found at the bottom of this post. But first, this week's question: Q: Next weekend is Memorial Day, the traditional start of "summer movie season." So this week I want to know: what is the perfect summer movie? The critics' answers: Michael J. Anderson, Tativille: "Both as one of the cinema's supreme works of entertainment -- not that it is not also one of its finest art-objects -- and likewise as one of the medium's most evocative presentations of the stifling (non-air conditioned) ... Continue reading →

"Eraserhead." In this week's Criticwire Survey, I asked critics to name the ultimate midnight movie. Their responses were uniformly excellent, and ran the gamut from obvious classics like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "El Topo" to aspirational choices like "Starship Troopers" and "Wild Zero." Their answers reinforced the notion that the term "midnight movie" is incredibly flexible. There isn't just one kind of movie that's fun to watch late at night. So many genres, styles, and tones lend themselves to midnight screenings. But how many exactly? This seemed like something worth settling in quasi-definitive fashion. Glancing at the survey responses and my own DVD and Blu-ray collection, I jotted down a preliminary list of as many kinds of midnight movies as I could think ... Continue reading →