Email Author Melissa Anderson

2011 Stories by Melissa Anderson

• Friends With Benefits

  published July 20, 2011

  A colossal waste of talent, Friends With Benefits is burdened with, like January’s No Strings Attached, a numbingly generic... More >>

• Good Grief: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Widowed, in The Tree

  published July 13, 2011

  No one grieves onscreen quite like Charlotte Gainsbourg, here playing Dawn, made a widow within the first 10 minutes of The Tree. When... More >>

• It Takes More Than a Village: Side-Stepping South African History in Life, Above All

  published July 13, 2011

  “AIDS” isn’t uttered until well past the halfway mark of Oliver Schmitz’s problematic South Africa–set tale about the... More >>

• A Girl's Lust for Adventure, Even at Rest, in Catherine Breillat's Sleeping Beauty

  published July 6, 2011

  The second film in her planned trilogy of subverted fairy tales, Catherine Breillat’s latest topples the tyranny of pink and princesses.... More >>

• Titan of Industry Brought Low in Rapt

  published July 6, 2011

  Inspired by the 1978 kidnapping of French titan of industry Baron Edouard-Jean Empain, Rapt, set in the present day, hopes to cash in on... More >>

• Marilyn Monroe: So Much More Than a Tragedy

  published June 29, 2011

  “Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty... More >>

• A College Massacre, and Its Aftermath, in Polytechnique

  published June 29, 2011

  Like his recent Oscar contender, the continent- and era-toggling Incendies, Québécois director Denis Villeneuve’s... More >>

• Illegal Immigration: The Soap Opera, in A Better Life

  published June 22, 2011

  Pitched to tug at even Jan Brewer’s heartstrings, A Better Life takes on the combustible topic of illegal immigration through the... More >>

• Let's Go, Naples: John Turturro as Musical Tour Guide in Passione

  published June 22, 2011

  In his fourth film as director (and his first documentary) John Turturro plays an amateur ethnomusicologist/corny travel guide, popping up... More >>

• Culture Clash Fail in The Names of Love

  published June 22, 2011

  Nothing screams “French crossover comedy” like jokes about Auschwitz and childhood sexual abuse, the main rib-ticklers of Michel... More >>

• The Whitest Kids U Don't Want to Know in The Art of Getting By

  published June 15, 2011

  Gavin Wiesen’s first film, as passive and vanilla as its title, continues the numbing trendlet begun in 2008 with Nick and Norah’s... More >>

• A Single Woman Suffers Summer in Eric Rohmer's Le Rayon Vert

  published June 8, 2011

  Though Eric Rohmer’s breakthrough film stateside was the lustrous black-and-white, winter-set My Night at Maud’s (1969), the... More >>

• Man and His Beast: A Love Story of Sorts in One Lucky Elephant

  published June 8, 2011

  The love story between David Balding and Flora, the 10,000-pound main attraction of Lisa Leeman’s temperate documentary, began in 1984,... More >>

• Gangsta Excess From the Congo in Viva Riva!

  published June 8, 2011

  “Your country is the worst shit pile I have ever seen,” César (Hoji Fortuna), an Angolan crime boss, tells a Congolese... More >>

• The Birth of a Movement in !Women Art Revolution

  published June 1, 2011

  Like Joan Braderman’s 2009 doc, The Heretics, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s lionizing chronicle of the birth, in the late ’60s,... More >>

• As Tears Go By: The Soap Opera as Inspiration in Drama Queens

  published June 1, 2011

  In a 1977 essay, high priestess of film theory Laura Mulvey praised the melodramas of Douglas Sirk for “probing the pent-up emotion,... More >>

• Introducing the Best Yodeling Lesbian Sister Act You've Never Heard of: The Topp Twins

  published May 11, 2011

  “On paper, they should be commercial death,” New Zealand comedy writer Paul Horan says of Jools and Lynda Topp, a yodeling,... More >>

• Culture Clash and Corny Antics in Tyler Perry Knockoff Jumping the Broom

  published May 4, 2011

  Like 2008’s Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom, in which two boyfriends wed on Martha’s Vineyard, Salim Akil’s first... More >>

• Take the Money and Run: Action, Not Emotion, in The Robber

  published April 27, 2011

  What makes Johann run—and rob? Benjamin Heisenberg’s second feature is as taut, lean, and fleet as its title character, played by... More >>

• Beautiful Darling: A Too Shallow Look at the Far More Than Skin-Deep Warhol Superstar

  published April 20, 2011

  One of Warhol’s last superstars, Candy Darling—born James Slattery in Massapequa Park, Long Island, in 1944—idolized Kim Novak,... More >>

• Madea's Big Happy Family: Tyler Perry Gives Up On Coherency Altogether

  published April 20, 2011

  Five months after showing how bad he could do all by himself in adapting Ntozake Shange, Tyler Perry returns to transferring his own stage work... More >>

• The New New Wave Has Arrived in 'Free Radicals'

  published April 13, 2011

  “All of us at Cahiers [du Cinéma] thought of ourselves as future directors. Writing was already a way of making... More >>

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  The Genius of Charles Burnett Honored With a Complete Retro at MOMA

  published April 6, 2011

  It took 30 years for Charles Burnett’s first film, Killer of Sheep (1977), one of the greatest evocations of daily hardship and... More >>

• Illegal: Laudable but Creaky Look at Undocumented Immigrants

  published March 23, 2011

  Laudable in intent if creaky in execution, Olivier Masset-Depasse’s second feature awkwardly combines a scalding condemnation of... More >>

• Revisiting a Queer Cultural Landmark in Making the Boys

  published March 9, 2011

  When Mart Crowley’s landmark The Boys in the Band opened Off-Broadway to sellout crowds of gays, starved for representations of... More >>