Slate Articles

Frances Ha

Dana Stevens — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:01:59 GMT

Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, a black-and-white, French New Wave–influenced coming-of-age-in-New-York tale, has the earnest, wonky charm of a homemade valentine. The addressee is the 29-year-old actress Greta Gerwig, who plays the title character, co-wrote the script with Baumbach, and is also the director’s girlfriend—they became a couple after working together on Baumbach’s 2010 film Greenberg. If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to sit and watch Greta Gerwig just sort of behave for an hour and a half, your Sunday matinee plans are set. That’s not to say that Frances Ha dispenses completely with structure, plot and theme—it’s just that Baumbach treats those elements with more insouciance than is usual in his films, which have tended of late to be hyper-verbal, slightly sadistic drawing-room comedies (Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg).

Star Trek Into Darkness

Dana Stevens — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:49:23 GMT

In Slate’s Star Trek reader poll this week, The Wrath of Khan is handily (and deservedly) walloping every other Star Trek–based movie. As of this writing, 46.8 percent of respondents prefer the 1982 Shatner-vs.-Montalban showdown to any other cinematic installment in the ever-expanding, Talmudically complex Trek polyverse. (Khan’s closest competition, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home—the one where the Enterprise gang travels back in time to save the whales—has garnered less than 10 percent of the vote.)

Stories We Tell

Dana Stevens — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:46:00 GMT

The idea that no story can be told except from one particular and limited point of view, that no two accounts of an event are ever the same, that our own memories can deceive and betray us has been at the center of many great documentaries. Nonfiction directors from Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) to Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans) have explored the ragged border between provable falsehoods and knowable truths, often ending their films on a note of epistemological ambiguity—how can we ultimately be sure that what we think we know is really what happened? Stories We Tell, the third feature film and first documentary from the 34-year-old Canadian actress-turned-director Sarah Polley, also pivots on the irreducible fact of narrative unreliability. But the “truth” Polley sets out to discover isn’t a legal or journalistic one—rather, she’s interested in the complex and conflicting truths about how her family members (specifically, her siblings and father) remember, understand, and live with a series of painful events from their shared past.

The Great Gatsby

Dana Stevens — Thu, 09 May 2013 22:34:17 GMT

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The Iceman

Dana Stevens — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:42:19 GMT

Richard Kuklinski, the real-life contract killer whose grim life story is told in Israeli director Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman, redefines the category of “unlikable protagonist.” As played by a scarily intense Michael Shannon, Kuklinski is neither a dashing anti-hero nor a suffering, divided man. He’s a pragmatically minded sociopath with neither remorse for, nor interest in, the 100-plus murders-for-hire he committed before going to prison for life in 1986 (he would die there 20 years later). This film has its work cut out for it, trying to make us care about a creature as morally repugnant as Richie Kuklinski. But Shannon inhabits this character so completely that by the end of this hard-to-watch, hard-to-look-away-from movie you feel you can, if not understand Richie, at least wish he had found some redemption in life.

Iron Man 3

Dana Stevens — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:39:00 GMT

After you watch Iron Man 3, come back and listen to our Spoiler Special by clicking on the player below:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Dana Stevens — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:35:00 GMT

As the country struggles to understand what could have motivated two seemingly assimilated young Chechen-Americans to plant a bomb at the Boston Marathon and cut a swath of destruction through the city, the release of Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel about a young Pakistani man in the U.S. who’s drawn to religious terrorism after 9/11, would seem to be ideally timed. Unfortunately, you leave The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a meandering character portrait turned political thriller, with only the vaguest, most abstract sense of what might drive a disgruntled immigrant to take up arms against his adopted homeland—and almost no sense at all of what the hell went on in the movie’s hectic, twist-heavy final act.

Pain & Gain

Dana Stevens — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:21:59 GMT

After you've seen Pain & Gain, come back to listen to our Spoiler Special:

Dispatches From Ebertfest

Dana Stevens — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:21:47 GMT

One quality of Roger Ebert’s that was widely remarked on after his death was his ability to create a community around himself that was not about himself: not acolytes or followers, but people very different from himself who nonetheless considered him a mentor, teacher, and friend. That sense of community was in powerful evidence at Ebertfest, where conversations I had with an extraordinarily diverse cross-section of festival-goers all seemed to circle back eventually to the powerful and often very concrete effect that knowing this man had had on their lives.

Dispatches From Ebertfest

Dana Stevens — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:20:38 GMT

I’m not going to lie—as glad as I am to be here at Ebertfest, watching great movies in the company of lovely people (shout-out to the Methodist pastor from Effingham, Ill. who keeps saving me spots in the balcony), yesterday was a bizarre day to experience from inside the news-proof bubble of a film festival. In between feverishly checking Twitter for updates that seemed to come straight from an old episode of 24—a daylong manhunt involving SWAT teams and thousands of policemen? A city-wide lockdown? A bloody teenage bombing suspect discovered in a backyard boat?—1,500 of us sheltered in place in the Virginia Theatre to spend time in the comparatively sane company of a Norwegian drug addict (Oslo, August 31^st), a dying Japanese widow (The Ballad of Narayama), and an incompetent alcoholic kidnapper (Julia).

Slate Articles

Frances Ha

Star Trek Into Darkness

Stories We Tell

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The Great Gatsby

The Iceman

Iron Man 3

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Pain & Gain

Dispatches From Ebertfest

Dispatches From Ebertfest