Email Author Melissa Anderson

2010 Stories by Melissa Anderson

• Biutiful More Bloated than Babel, Even with Bardem

  published December 29, 2010

  Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first film since he split from screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, with... More >>

• Monkey See: The Life of an Orangutan in Nenette

  published December 22, 2010

  Stare at Borneo native Nénette, a 41-year-old orangutan who’s lived at the zoo in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes since 1972, long... More >>

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  Year in Film: Girl on Girl Action Gets Screwed

  published December 22, 2010

  ”It’s not about lesbians—it’s about family!” one straight critic and friend corrected me during a brief discussion of... More >>

• Celebrity Has Its Downside in Somewhere

  published December 22, 2010

  Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere,... More >>

• Yogi Bear in 3-D: It's As Good As You Imagined It to Be

  published December 15, 2010

  Rock-bottom expectations are rewarded, sort of, in this update of Hanna-Barbera's necktied ursus, which hopes to outdo the live action/computer... More >>

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  I Love You Phillip Morris Liberates Jim Carrey's Libido

  published December 1, 2010

  It’s taken almost two years for the bonkers, exhilarating same-sex romantic comedy I Love You Phillip Morris to finally reach... More >>

• Night Catches Us Takes a Brutally Honest Look at Black Power

  published December 1, 2010

  Writer-director Tanya Hamilton’s striking debut is the rare recent American-independent film that goes beyond the private dramas of its... More >>

• Lillian Gish: 20th-Century Vox

  published November 24, 2010

  “They abide and they endure.” That’s what Lillian Gish famously says of the resilience of children in the closing line of... More >>

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  In The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis Will Show No Improvement

  published November 17, 2010

  “What if we choose to exist solely in a reality of our own making?” asks Pittsburgh community-college lit professor John Brennan... More >>

• Made in Dagenham: Lady Power Gets Sentimental

  published November 17, 2010

  Wimmin power retrofitted as holiday heart-stirrer, Made in Dagenham recounts the real-life 1968 strike for equal pay by the 187 distaff... More >>

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  Isabelle Huppert Will Not Be Defined

  published November 10, 2010

  "In reality, people are most of the time enigmas." Isabelle Huppert is speaking generally, but her pronouncement could apply in... More >>

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  Investigating Eliot Spitzer's Own Worst Enemies in Client 9

  published November 3, 2010

  The usually silver-tongued Eliot Spitzer, political hero of last month’s Inside Job and now ubiquitous media personality, stammers... More >>

• The Rainbow Disconnection: Tyler Perry Mangles For Colored Girls

  published November 3, 2010

  It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, where Ntozake Shange first presented her combustible... More >>

• Scraping By With Barbara Loden's Wanda

  published October 27, 2010

  “Whatever film I make is some extension of myself,” Barbara Loden told French film critic Michel Ciment at the Venice Film Festival... More >>

• The Girl Whose Story We Cannot Follow in Hornet's Nest

  published October 27, 2010

  When we first see Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final adaptation of Stieg... More >>

• Hilary Swank Emotes Big in Awards-Bait Conviction

  published October 13, 2010

  After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio tries again to grab awards-season honors with... More >>

• This Crime Clan's Got Issues in Down Terrace

  published October 13, 2010

  U.K. TV vet Ben Wheatley’s zingy, caustic first feature about the pathetic dad-son kingpins of a two-bit syndicate in Brighton plays as a... More >>

• An American in Gaza: Investigating the Death of Rachel Corrie

  published October 6, 2010

  A hushed, solemn investigation, Simone Bitton’s documentary about the death of 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie—who... More >>

• Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Queer Cinema's Phantom Menace

  published October 6, 2010

  “In pre-made molds, I don’t know how to create myself,” softly sings a character in João Pedro Rodrigues’s To Die... More >>

• Get That Beard a Movie! On the Road With Micro-Indie Blah, Blah, Blah Douchebag

  published September 29, 2010

  Sam Nussbaum (Andrew Dickler), his Taliban-length beard an extension of his mullah-like self-righteousness about organic produce and bicycling,... More >>

• Kristin Scott Thomas as Desperate Housewife in Leaving

  published September 29, 2010

  In her recent English-speaking roles, 50-year-old, bilingual Kristin Scott Thomas has gamely endured the fate of most actresses her age, cast... More >>

• Ignoring the Inconvenient Truths in Waiting for Superman

  published September 22, 2010

  Davis Guggenheim's call-to-arms documentary on the failures of the U.S. public-education system—thoroughly laudable in intention if... More >>

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  Black Venus Rises

  published September 22, 2010

  Her name is synonymous with the ugliest of racial and sexual exploitation: The “Hottentot Venus”—born Sarah “Saartjie”... More >>

• The Cream Puff of Food Docs, Kings of Pastry

  published September 15, 2010

  Recording a three-day competition in Lyon, France, in which sugar is heated, stretched, and blown into delicate, rococo shapes, Kings of... More >>

• Easy A: A Waste of Emma Stone

  published September 15, 2010

  As far as teen comedies informed by 10th-grade English syllabi go, Easy A, partly inspired by The Scarlet Letter, is remedial ed... More >>