Rex Reed
Recent Articles
The Odds Are Ever in Its Favor
Overcoming hype, The Hunger Games movie provides sci-fi nourishment
March 22nd, 2012
This futuristic tale of teenage violence is so not my kind of movie that I approached it grudgingly. Imagine my surprise when I ended up being totally exhilarated and enjoying it immensely.
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‘Fishing’ for Laughs
A satiric script and charming stars make Salmon Fishing in the Yemen a good catch
March 22nd, 2012
When Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a loopy satire about England’s efforts to bring salmon fishing to the Middle East for political reasons, was unveiled last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, initial reviews used the words “broad,” “uneven,” “undemanding,” “syrupy” and “contrived.” But as comedy sinks lower by the day, this charming little film by polished director Lasse Hallstrom looks better all the time.
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Friends Has Benefits
A multitalented filmmaker/actress succeeds with this observant relationship film
March 22nd, 2012
The co-writer and star of the independent film Kissing Jessica Stein now returns as producer, actress, sole scriptwriter and director of Friends With Kids. (OK, Westfeldt is a quadruple threat.) It’s a snappy and warmly observed film about the contemporary mores of dating hell, marriage and parenthood.
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Flunk Out
With this sad story of a substitute teacher, director Tony Kaye flubs his comeback
March 15th, 2012
Detachment is the latest curiosity by London-born singer/songwriter/painter/film director Tony Kaye, whose first film, a violent exposé of neo-Nazism called American History X, caused a minor sensation in 1998. This film is about one month in the life of a different kind of tortured, alienated soul—the substitute teacher.
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Grim Like Flynn
De Niro holds his own in this father-son tale, but his screen spawn sours the story
March 8th, 2012
Paul Weitz is a writer-director with talent and imagination. I can’t imagine what lured him to Being Flynn, a depressing and downbeat rendering of a book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.
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From Big Love to Big Snooze
After this poorly made thriller, Seyfried’s career is going… going… gone.
March 1st, 2012
Amanda Seyfried is not well. So much potential and Star of Tomorrow hype has failed to pay off. Her career looks anemic. Her screen presence has turned her pallid—and me, too. It’s hard to believe, but she walked out of her leading role as the most sensible Mormon in the hit HBO series Big Love after 45 episodes to play Meryl Streep’s gooey daughter in the nauseating Mama Mia and then fall in love with a werewolf in the idiotic Red Riding Hood. Now she gets star billing in a latent snooze called Gone
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Bullhead Offers Belgian Bovine Brawn
This Oscar entry about meat, Mafia and manhood muscles into the foreign picture running
February 23rd, 2012
Competing for this year’s Foreign Language Oscar, Bullhead is pretty much what experience has taught me is a characteristic example of filmmaking from Belgium—a dark, gruesome, sickening but extremely original work that is both repellent and fascinating. It’s about a vicious, bullying cattle farmer named Jacky, who swings a shady deal with a Mafia meat trader that results in the murder of a federal cop investigating the use of illegal hormones in meat-packing plants.
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What If Juliet Were a Man?
Private Romeo successfully moves the classic Shakespeare tragedy to a military academy
February 9th, 2012
From a World War II Macbeth to a Harlem-based Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare has been boldly “opened up” before. But a gay Romeo and Juliet, both played by military-school cadets on their way to West Point, is a new one on me. It’s Private Romeo, a brave, controversial, not always successful, but hugely adventurous and highly liberated movie that offers a fresh take on the Bard in the age of same-sex marriage. Like it or not, you will not go away yawning.
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Tasteless
A disease ravages the world’s senses in this apocalyptic thriller. It seems to have hit the filmmakers first.
February 2nd, 2012
You sense an instant prognosis of pretentiousness with the opening words of soundtrack narration in a horror called Perfect Sense: “There is darkness. And there is light. There are men, and there are women. There is fruit. There are restaurants. Disease. There is work. Traffic.” And there is Ewan McGregor.
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Gender Pretender
Glenn Close skillfully portrays a man, but this period piece lacks the whole package
January 26th, 2012
Albert Nobbs is now expanding to commercial marquees for public scrutiny. Thanks to a quirky performance by Glenn Close featuring enough prosthetics, wrinkles, painfully binding corsets and pinched diction to generate critical acclaim and give Meryl Streep a run for her money, attention must be paid. But not too much.
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