Email Author Melissa Anderson

2012 Stories by Melissa Anderson

• The Cold War Drama Barbara Is One for the Ages

  published December 19, 2012

  A transfixing Cold War thriller set in the East Germany of 1980, Christian Petzold's superb Barbara is made even more vivid by its... More >>

• The Impossible

  published December 19, 2012

  When the words "true story" appear twice in a film's opening disclaimer, it's a guarantee that what follows will include at least one... More >>

• Aquí y Allá

  published December 19, 2012

  You'll witness no border-crossing histrionics in writer-director Antonio Méndez Esparza's first feature, which translates as "Here and... More >>

• Any Day Now Makes Injustice Risible

  published December 12, 2012

  Gay-male weepies have left a long trail of tears, stretching back to the sobbing, self-loathing queens of The Boys in the Band, released... More >>

• Save the Date

  published December 12, 2012

  Unremarkable, thinly sketched characters, many adorned with creative careers or hobbies, populate the romantic dramedy Save the Date,... More >>

• Bigger Than the Movie: Rebecca Hall Almost Saves Lay the Favorite

  published December 5, 2012

  A wan comedy about gambling that takes no risks, Stephen Frears's Lay the Favorite has none of the stinging sordidness of The... More >>

• Playing for Keeps

  published December 5, 2012

  Gerard Butler, playing George, a former soccer great now dodging bill collectors in suburban Virginia, speaks in his natural Scottish accent in... More >>

• Love, Marilyn

  published November 28, 2012

  "Marilyn Monroe was an infinity of character and mystery that was impossible for me, or anyone else, to explore, because it was so vast. There... More >>

• Boxing Cotillard: Rust and Bone Dismembers Cinema's Beauty of the Moment

  published November 21, 2012

  To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard's outrageous melodrama Rust and Bone without... More >>

• 'The Rolling Stones: 50 Years on Film'

  published November 14, 2012

  "There's a sexual thing onstage between performer and audience," Mick Jagger, then 22, dryly observes in Charlie Is My Darling, Peter... More >>

• The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part II

  published November 14, 2012

  There's plenty of red glare in Twilight's last gleaming, emitting mainly from the peepers of Bella (Kristen Stewart), now 100 percent... More >>

• Starlet

  published November 7, 2012

  An empathic, absorbing tale of the old and the beautiful, Starlet tracks an unlikely intergenerational friendship in the San Fernando... More >>

• In the Undead Comedy Vamps, Amy Heckerling Loses the Pulse

  published October 31, 2012

  At times winningly dopey but still easily forgotten, Amy Heckerling's undead-BFFs comedy Vamps sends up our pop cultural fascination... More >>

• Perfect, Placid, Mad: Deneuve's Unraveling, 50 years Later

  published October 31, 2012

  The first film in English for both director Roman Polanski and star Catherine Deneuve, the still-terrifying Repulsion renders language... More >>

• The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965

  published October 24, 2012

  Excruciating memories of those lizardy old guys croaking out "Jumpin' Jack Flash" in Martin Scorsese's Shine a Light (2008) will be... More >>

• Hark, Behold, Watch: Holy Motors Creates the Cinema History It Laments

  published October 17, 2012

  Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking, Holy Motors, the first feature-length film from Leos Carax since Pola X... More >>

• Bestiaire Ponders What Transpires When We Look at Animals

  published October 17, 2012

  Animals have been used to teach moral lessons since Aesop; the medieval bestiary, from which Denis Côté's absorbing documentary... More >>

• La Vie au Ranch

  published October 17, 2012

  A series of yakking, lipsticked cartoon mouths open La Vie au Ranch, a film that puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous,... More >>

• The Sessions

  published October 17, 2012

  'You were really and truly inside me," Helen Hunt's sex surrogate Cheryl assures her client, 36-year-old Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes), a poet and... More >>

• The Embers of Paris Glow for 'Born in Flames: New Queer Cinema'

  published October 10, 2012

  On the cover of this publication dated March 24, 1992, two naked men were locked in a deep kiss in a scene from Derek Jarman's Edward... More >>

• Gayby

  published October 10, 2012

  Making a kid "the old-fashioned way" becomes the plot engine for the second time this year—after Jennifer Westfeldt's Friends With... More >>

• The House I Live In Pushes the Straight Dope

  published October 3, 2012

  The winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance, Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In, an occasionally muddled... More >>

• Won’t Back Down

  published September 26, 2012

  The fat, lazy public school teacher who can’t be bothered to stop diddling with her phone or shopping for shoes online while her... More >>

• Radio Unnameable

  published September 19, 2012

  A sporadically hard-selling homage to a cult hero from an overchronicled era, Radio Unnameable considers the career of Bob Fass, whose... More >>

• Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

  published September 19, 2012

  Raconteuse, epigrammatist, and mythomaniac, peerless fashion editor Diana Vreeland (1903–89) might have loved words as much as she loved... More >>