Riverview Theater

James Franco rivals his calamitous performance as Oscar host in Disney and director Sam Raimi's gargantuan attempt to turn L. Frank Baum's children's novels-- and one of the most beloved of all Hollywood movies-- into a wellspring of fresh... More »

James Franco rivals his calamitous performance as Oscar host in Disney and director Sam Raimi's gargantuan attempt to turn L. Frank Baum's children's novels-- and one of the most beloved of all Hollywood movies-- into a wellspring of fresh product tie-ins and theme-park rides. A wildly inventive, unpredictable actor when he wants to be, Franco is all wrong for the role of a huckster sideshow magician who finds himself somewhere over the rainbow, trying to convince the good people of a besieged kingdom that he's their prophesied savior. Reading his lines with the sneering warble of the young Dennis Hopper and flashing a strained smile that's more disturbing than dashing, Franco may be the least convincing flimflam man in movie history, more young Norman Bates than the man who would be Oz. He's surrounded by a Day-Glo freak-out of special effects and two very resourceful actresses, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams, reduced to glowering at each other and unleashing bursts of electromagnetic fury from their fingertips. If only the movie could run off with Mila Kunis's radiant Theodora, a nominal "good” witch whose passions rage louder than most, who gives her heart too willingly and, who, when betrayed, turns positively green with jealousy. She's by far the most dimensional being in this flaccid 3-D affair. « Less

6:50 PM

Welcome back to Middle Earth. A decade after bidding farewell to his Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson has returned to J.R.R. Tolkien to make three more films based on The Hobbit, the slender 1937 volume in which the author... More »

Welcome back to Middle Earth. A decade after bidding farewell to his Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson has returned to J.R.R. Tolkien to make three more films based on The Hobbit, the slender 1937 volume in which the author first deployed his Middle Earth mythology. And this first installment feels like much ado about not very much, dragging its hairy feet for nearly an hour before it even sets out on the "unexpected journey" of the movie's subtitle, in which the dandyish hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) joins forces with a band of warrior dwarfs to help recapture their ancestral homeland from the claws of a fire-breathing dragon. It goes without saying that all of this is executed at an exceptional level of craft, but unless you want to see something that looks like Days of Our Hobbit Lives, stay far away from Jackson's much-ballyhooed "High Frame Rate" version of the film playing in selected cinemas. Some welcome cameos from the LOTR cast keep things fitfully engaging, but mostly the movie feels like self-conscious monument art-- and it's all too unclear whether that monument is to Tolkien or to Jackson himself. « Less

9:15 PM

There are two things that are certain in life. One is that death will come for every one of us, in this case for Georges and Anne, an elderly couple. The other is that every film Michael Haneke makes will have a fair shot at the Cannes Palme... More »

There are two things that are certain in life. One is that death will come for every one of us, in this case for Georges and Anne, an elderly couple. The other is that every film Michael Haneke makes will have a fair shot at the Cannes Palme d'Or. Amour, Haneke's much-garlanded latest, is set almost entirely within a well-appointed Paris apartment, amid the cathedral hush that is the director's preferred working condition. Anne is played by 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour), and Georges by 81-year-old Jean-Louis Trintignant (My Night at Maud's, The Conformist); Georges ministers to his diminishing wife through her slow decline, his fierce will for her to live pitted against her increasing will to die. Haneke elides the moments of crisis, focusing instead on details of daily caretaking, the process by which a home slowly becomes a hospice. Trintignant is at his most touching as a man vainly trying to decipher his wife's blurred speech so as not to let go of the thread of their lifelong rapport. As ever, Haneke shoots in a style that is reserved and restrained—in a word, cold. In applying an unflinching style to an inevitable process, Amour has a certain perfection to it, but what Haneke expresses thereby is so meager as to make it a single-minded, barren perfection. Haneke remains infallible—but so what? A movie in which incident is as spare as it is in Amour can certainly be great; a movie in which ideas and feelings are so sparse cannot. « Less

(4:20 PM)