The Informant! (2009) NYT Critics' Pick

Matt Damon in "The Informant."
September 18, 2009
A Corporate Culture Cornfed on Greed
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 18, 2009

If you want to know why Steven Soderbergh tapped Marvin Hamlisch to write the zany score for “The Informant!,” a deadly serious comedy about corporate malfeasance, consider the title’s exclamation point. Like that unexpected mark of exuberance, which hints at fun times (yippee!), the brassy horns and racing piano notes of the neo-slapstick score — think of “Laugh-In,” “Bananas” and Benny Hill — initially suggest that Mr. Soderbergh has put on his party hat and broken out the kazoo. Except that he isn’t laughing, or at least not all the way through. The story he tells is too maddening for sustained mirth, so he kills the jokes, with a vengeance. More

Disgrace (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

John Malkovich stars in "Disgrace," a film based on the J. M. Coetzee novel and directed by Steve Jacobs.
In South Africa, Harsh Losses of Privilege
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: September 18, 2009

Midway in “Disgrace,” a faithful, compelling screen adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel, its protagonist, David Lurie (John Malkovich), a haughty South African professor of romantic poetry, muses loftily about instinct and desire. “No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts,” he declares to his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines) as they stroll through the arid, hilly landscape of the East Cape with three of her dogs. More

Bright Star (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

"Bright Star": Ben Whishaw as the Romantic poet John Keats and Abbie Cornish as his beloved, Fanny Brawne, in Jane Campion’s latest film, which opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
September 16, 2009
Keats and His Beloved in an Ode to Hot English Chastity
By A. O. SCOTT

John Keats was a Romantic poet. “Bright Star,” which tells the tale of Keats and Fanny Brawne, the love of his short life, is a romantic movie. The vernacular of popular culture and the somewhat specialized language of literary history assign different meanings to that word, but the achievement of Jane Campion’s learned and ravishing new film is to fuse them, to trace the comminglings and collisions of poetic creation and amatory passion. More

35 Shots of Rum (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

From left, Grégoire Colin, Mati Diop, Alex Descas and Nicole Dogue in “35 Shots of Rum,” by the French director Claire Denis.
Struggling to Decipher International Relations and Individual Lives
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: September 16, 2009

Lionel and his daughter, Joséphine, live in a tidy and comfortable apartment in a high-rise housing project on the outskirts of Paris. Lionel (Alex Descas), a widower and a man of few words, works for the commuter rail system, while Joséphine (Mati Diop) studies social sciences at university. She and her classmates debate about colonialism, resistance and relations between the industrialized world and “the global South,” dropping names like Frantz Fanon and Joseph Stiglitz as they try to make sense of a world that is both distant and immediate. More

Fuel (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

Josh Tickell in "Fuel."
Treating Oil Addiction
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: September 18, 2009

“Fuel,” Josh Tickell’s unabashedly intimate, 11-years-in-the-making attack on America’s addiction to oil, is not so much a green documentary as a red, white and blue alarm. But if you can resist the urge to run for the exit, you may leave the theater feeling a lot more hopeful than when you went in. More

Krugman

Baucus and the Threshold
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 17, 2009

So Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has released his “mark” on proposed legislation — which would normally be the basis for the bill that eventually emerges from his committee. And serious supporters of health care reform will soon face their long-dreaded moment of truth. More