Forty years ago, on a chilly afternoon in November, the Harvard and Yale football teams met at Harvard Stadium to play their final game of the season. For the first time since 1909 both schools were undefeated, and when the game was all over it was an instant classic, a thing of collegiate and sports lore. Sitting up in the stands that day in 1968 was undergraduate Kevin Rafferty, who would grow up to become a filmmaker (Blood in the Face, The Atomic Café) and now has made a documentary about the historic game, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (the title was a Harvard Crimson headline).  read more »

For those of you who are closely following the November and December horse race of potential Oscar films, don’t count out Slumdog Millionaire. It might not have a Leo or a Kate or even a Batman in it, but this latest film from Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later) is just the kind of feel-good, energetic film that will have voters feeling magnanimous come voting times. And rightly so, because Slumdog Millionaire (in spite of having a title that really does nothing for you until you’ve actually seen the movie) is very sharp, smartly executed and has just enough sneaky sentiment that reviewers will surely bust out all their clichés (“you’ll be cheering in your seats!”).  read more »

In The World Unseen, we learn (unsurprisingly) that Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1950s—at the start of apartheid—was anything but good times for blacks or Indians or really anyone who wasn’t lily white. In this film, adapted and directed by Shamim Sarif from her own novel, so many hot issues are at play that it’s a bit dizzying to keep track of who is being oppressed by whom. But here goes: Amina (Sheetal Sheth), an Indian woman who dresses just like the Mary Stuart Masterson character in Fried Green Tomatoes (there are other similarities, too, but more on that in a minute), is living dangerously by running a popular cafe with the “colored” (i.  read more »

When Kevin Smith’s Clerks came out in 1994, who could have known that the first-time filmmaker from Jersey was paving the way for filmmakers like Judd Apatow to take over the world? “Bromance” may not have been in our cultural lexicon 14 years ago, but that’s what Mr. Smith was dealing with—whether it be Jay and Silent Bob, or Ben Affleck and Jason Lee in Chasing Amy, or Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in (the underappreciated!) Dogma. But now, Mr. Smith has turned his attention to a more typical kind of romance, even though at the beginning it’s obscured by, well, porn.  read more »

It’s a story that can still amaze after 35 years: In October 1972, an airplane carrying members of the Old Christians, a young Uruguayan team of rugby players, took off for a match in Chile. The plane lost contact with the control tower, and for 10 days, search-and-rescue teams sent out by Argentina, Chile and Uruguay found no trace of any plane or the 45 passengers. Heavy snow started to fall and hope was lost. Ten weeks later, a shepherd in a valley by the Andes Mountains saw two very skinny, dirty and tired men (who “smelled of the grave”), who turned out to be two of the 16 survivors of the crash.  read more »

There are surprises (some good, some not as good) in The Secret Life of Bees. For me, the biggest shock of all was realizing that the actress portraying the lead 14-year-old protagonist was none other than formerly creepy child star Dakota Fanning. Don’t get me wrong, she’s definitely still a little spooky—there’s a preternatural stillness about the budding beauty, and her eyes convey a wise weariness that makes her seem older than she is. But it’s less startling now than it was, say, when she starred in I Am Sam or Man on Fire. Plus, there’s the fact that in this film it’s a plus for her to be a little haunted-looking, as she’s playing a young girl who (as we learn in the opening of the film) killed her own mother at the age of 4.  read more »

It’s entirely probable that Mike Leigh is having a bit of fun with audiences with his new movie, Happy-Go-Lucky. When we meet Poppy (Sally Hawkins) at the start of the film, she’s a suspiciously bubbly 30-year-old, riding a bicycle, wearing brightly colored clothes and trying to spread good cheer to a foul-tempered bookstore worker. It’s much easier to identify with his mood than hers, and in fact, you might wonder: What’s the deal with this annoyingly cheerful weirdo? Just what the hell is wrong with her? The joke of the film, of course, is that nothing is wrong with Poppy … unless you count being happy and in a good mood even after your bicycle is stolen, you throw your back out or you’re being stalked by your driving instructor.  read more »

Bill Maher is a brave man. He’s also a smart and witty one, which is why sometimes watching his HBO show Real Time With Bill Maher can be very entertaining or occasionally cringe-inducing, as he appears entirely unafraid to go there on topics polite society tends to shy away from. (His comments on Politically Incorrect after 9/11—“We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly”—led to ABC firing him.) Because of his outspokenness, people either tend to love Mr.  read more »

Anytime a movie opens with the words “based on actual events,” it is understandable to pause. Add to that a sports movie with metaphors about how to play that brutal game of life, and it’s perfectly O.K. to want to actually press pause, and switch over to ESPN. Don’t get us wrong, cinema has given us plenty of wonderful sports movies—Hoosiers, The Natural, Raging Bull (not to mention Mystery, Alaska!)—but the genre is anything but unpredictable. There’s a troubled hero/team, a coach whose tough exterior hides a soft underbelly of love, an insurmountable challenge (usually a championship game) and then a satisfying win—preferably at home.  read more »

It’s hard enough to get mainstream movies made and distributed (even Jennifer Aniston’s Toronto film Management is still looking for a buyer), let alone get them seen—do we even need to lament again the fact that no one wants to see anything to do with the war? So we admire the fact that a movie like All of Us will even make it into theaters. Because this documentary—about a young doctor in the South Bronx researching why heterosexual black women are being infected with H.I.V. at disproportionately high rates—may be incredibly interesting, but it’s also terribly depressing.

Emily Abt’s first film, Take It From Me, was a feature-length exploration of welfare reform, so she must be conditioned to tackling projects on topics that people would rather ignore.  read more »