By Justin Marble
March 2–4, “Children of Invention” at the Brattle: Young filmmaker Tze Chun’s first feature was shot on location in Boston and focuses on a single mother with two small children struggling to make ends meet. When she doesn’t return home one night from her con-artist-esque job, it falls to the older [...]

“Avatar” is beautiful and otherworldly, but the film is so grounded in down-to-earth concepts that it restricts the viewer’s imagination rather than broadening it. An infinitely better and more complex recent space opera, “Mass Effect 2,” comes in the form of a video game. Is it art? Yes.
By Justin Marble
Over the centuries the [...]

By Justin Marble

Feb. 5-9, Recent Raves at the Brattle: Left out of the film talk at your last dinner party? Here’s your chance to get caught up. The Brattle is hosting a week of some of the best films of 2009, sponsored by the Boston Society of Film Critics. Harder to find titles like “Fantastic [...]

It’s easy, and popular, to write director Wes Anderson off as a hipster who offers nothing beyond quirk and the occasional funny line. But his films are really American versions of the French New Wave.
by Justin Marble
“He redeemed himself.”
“Redemption? Sure. But in the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind [...]

By Justin Marble
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By Justin Marble
Various Films at Stuart Street Playhouse
This isn’t so much a ringing endorsement of the current offerings, the biopic Coco Before Chanel or the British comedy Pirate Radio, as much as it is a plug for the brand-new Stuart Street Playhouse. Located in the heart of the city, the fantastic new venue offers a [...]

By Justin Marble
“If its Halloween, it must be “‘Saw,’” claims the trailer for the latest iteration of the tired torture-horror franchise surviving more on its audience’s predilection for gooey and gruesome death scenes than coherent storytelling. “Oh yes, there will be blood,” echoes the creepy “Saw” antagonist Jigsaw, a psychotic old man who creates elaborate [...]

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Edited by Robert Polito. Library of America, 1000 pages, $40.
Reviewed by Justin Marble
Film critic Manny Farber’s landmark 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” champions the underground, manic, frenzied, messy “termite” films against the by-the-book, consciously significant, pompous and often critically-adored “white elephant [...]

By Justin Marble
“The Beaches of Agnes” At the Coolidge Corner Cinema
If a motif exists in Agnes Varda’s sprawling new documentary, “The Beaches of Agnes,” it may just be the art of walking backwards. The 81-year-old director, famous among the art house crowd for French New Wave films like “Cleo from 5 to 7,” has a [...]

By Justin Marble
November begins the yearly onslaught of studio-groomed Oscar bait, and the amount of coverage that these films will get will probably kill off several small forests. Yet the art house theaters in Boston have, as always, put together a varied and compelling dose of counter programming. These films probably won’t hear their names [...]