Sarah Polley films the film in ‘Stories We Tell’

With her films Away From You and Take This Waltz, Sarah Polley has proven to be a ridiculously sharp and gimlet-eyed young filmmaker—who’s also an accomplished actress, should she ever want to return to it.

In her newest, Stories We Tell, Polley digs into the not-so-hidden secrets of her family history using a variety of methods: self-aware techniques, contradictory stories, re-created “home movie” footage, and plenty of dry humor. It’s a wonderful piece of work all things told, honest and playful and curiously wise.

Stories We Tell opens on Friday. My review is at Film Racket, here’s part of it:

To understand how memory is fluid, just ask two relatives to recall the same incident. More often than not, their recollections will have major discrepancies. Next, throw in more family members from different generations, and layer onto that a mealy mix of secrets; pretty soon a simple story turns into a Russian novel. That’s what Sarah Polley comes up with in her engrossing documentary exploration of how the bricks of memory are untidily piled together to create messy and incomplete personal stories, and out of those stories comes a life. Or a version thereof…

You can check out the trailer here:

David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas is one of those books that has been long assumed to be unfilmmable. But then the Wachowskis jumped into it, bringing on board Run Lola Run‘s Tom Tykwer for additional directing help. The result is a nearly three-hour karmic sci-fi epic that just keeps hitting crescendo after crescendo and made for one of 2012′s most memorable, if under-seen, epics.

Cloud Atlas is available today on Blu-ray and DVD. My full review is available at PopMatters, here’s part of it:

Eager to entertain and suffused with nervous energy, Cloud Atlas spans many continents and about half a millennia of human history. As faithful to David Mitchell’s novel as any $100 million enterprise could be, it’s the most daring, thrilling, satisfying, swiftly churning engine of big screen adventure to come along in some time. It even works in a halfway decent Soylent Green joke, which one would imagine wasn’t possible anymore. And oh yes, Hugh Grant plays a bloodthirsty cannibal…

You can watch the extended trailer here:

Bella Heathcoate and John Magaro in ‘Not Fade Away’

It wasn’t the most obvious project for David Chase to take on after The Sopranos—many thought he should just do a crime movie—but his 1960s garage band comedy Not Fade Away has some of the same roots of the TV show (dysfunctional family, Jersey) while striking into new territory (a lighter, satirical touch).

For everyone who missed Not Fade Away in theaters (which was most everybody, given how short its run was), you can now check it out on DVD and Blu-ray.

My full review is at PopMatters:

If it weren’t for the playful sense of fantasy and satire that licks through Not Fade Away, the weight of its pop cultural nostalgia would be almost overpowering. Every TV seems to be playingThe Twilight Zone and most of the young people are listening to the circa 1960s brash new music or aping the mannerisms of the bands themselves. The walls of these suburban New Jersey homes feel like those of small prison cells. Everybody’s either resigned to living inside them forever or itching to bust out…

The trailer is here:

Ta-Nehisi Coates posted a piece in The Atlantic a few days back about how to be the best kind of political-opinion journalist. His advise is well-suited for those many who make their livings opinionating throughout the Beltway mediaverse and blogosphere, but is also a good rule of thumb for writers in general:

…To paraphrase Douglass, a writer is worked on by what she works on. If you spend your time raging at the weakest arguments, or your most hysterical opponents, expect your own intellect to suffer. The intellect is a muscle; it must be exercised.

He’s talking about the bad habits of political writers, who tend to pick the most obvious strawmen to go after as a way of formulating their own beliefs. This is an attractive way of operating, but ultimately lazy.

But everybody who puts pen to paper or key to blog is well served with this advice: Don’t do what you’ve always done. This isn’t to say that all writers shouldn’t identify their areas of strength, but to never venture outside those safer realms is to risk creative calcification.

Michael Shannon plays ‘The Iceman’

Richard Kuklinski was a hitman for a branch of the New Jersey mob up through the 1980s, though he also had a sideline in killing for his own pursuits or just plain kicks. In one of the more obvious casting choices ever, Michael Shannon plays Kuklinski as a stone-faced monolith in The Iceman, a film that might be based on true events but feels as false as a dozen other mob flick knockoffs (complete with energetic but wasted Ray Liotta performance) from the past couple decades.

The Iceman is playing now, here and there. My review is at Film Racket.

The trailer is here:

Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm consider whether ‘Love Is All You Need’

There’s nothing about the premise of Susanne Bier’s Love Is All You Need that sounds promising. A young couple plans their wedding in a sumptuous Italian villa while their newly-single parents strike up a potential romance of their own. Add some comic relief annoyances and the stage is set for wacky misunderstandings and love under the lemon trees. The result, while not spectacular, is fortunately much more satisfying than expected.

Love Is All You Need opens today in limited release. My review is at Film Racket.

Here’s the trailer:

Have you heard about how the glass ceiling has been shattered by women moving into positions of power across American industry? No? Neither has New Republic reporter Lydia DePillis, whose new Tumblr 100 Percent Men does nothing but highlight all the “Corners of the world where women have yet to tread.” Some highly sarcastic selections:

• Every person on US bank notes ever.
• All bylines in the April 29 issue of the New Yorker.
• Everyone in the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

So some are more surprising than others (NASCAR). As snark goes, it’s a handy flashlight on the unspoken biases still permeating a society that has supposedly moved beyond such things.