Email Author Melissa Anderson

2012 Stories by Melissa Anderson

• The Year in Film: 10 Movies to Watch in 2013

  published December 26, 2012

  Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind like so much inert gas. But one... More >>

• "Rust and Bone": Dismembering a Cinematic Beauty

  published December 19, 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 Impossible": A Thorough Whitewashing

  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 >>

• "Any Day Now": A Travesty's Travesty

  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 >>

• "Lay the Favorite": One Day She'll Win

  published December 5, 2012

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

• "Playing for Keeps": Shut It Down, Ladies

  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 >>

• "Starlet": The Old and the Beautiful

  published November 28, 2012

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

• "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II": At Long Last

  published November 21, 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 >>

• "Holy Motors": Hark, Behold, Watch the Uncategorizable

  published November 14, 2012

  Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking, Holy Motors, the first feature-length film from Leos Carax since Pola X (1999)... More >>

• "Ornette: Made in America": Portraits in Space, Time, Performance, and Jazz

  published October 31, 2012

  The invaluable American independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke (1919-97) once said: "There is no real difference between a traditional fiction... More >>

• "The Sessions": Physical, Spiritual, Sexual

  published October 24, 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 House I Live In": The Straight Dope

  published October 17, 2012

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

• "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel": Fashion Dominatrix

  published September 26, 2012

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

• "Won't Back Down": That'll Show Those Teachers' Unions

  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 second-grade... More >>

• "10 Years": Reeling in the Aughts

  published September 19, 2012

  An amiable, seriocomic high-school-reunion movie, 10 Years succeeds in pulling off a fine varsity talent show. Although some performers,... More >>

• "How to Survive a Plague": Here's Who Saved the World

  published September 19, 2012

  In his filmmaking debut, journalist David France, who wrote the first story about ACT UP for the Village Voice, assembles a thoroughly... More >>

• "The Words": Somehow Less Exciting Than Its Title

  published September 5, 2012

  Although The Words might be witlessly titled and executed, you can pass the time coming up with fancy phrases to describe its basic... More >>

• "Beloved": Songs Sung Blah

  published August 15, 2012

  Writer-director Christophe Honoré revisits the musical — the genre of his biggest stateside hit, Love Songs (2007) —... More >>

• Whitney Houston: Surveying the Great Diva's Checkered Film Career

  published August 15, 2012

  In anticipation of the remake of the 1976 girl-group melodrama Sparkle (which didn't screen in time for our deadline) — Whitney... More >>

• "Sparkle": Whitney Houston Shines in Lackluster Remake

  published August 15, 2012

  Post-blaxploitation and pre-Dreamgirls, the original, funky, low-budget Sparkle from 1976 set its girl-group rise and fall in... More >>

• "The Babymakers": Oddly Generic Sperm Bank Heist Caper

  published August 1, 2012

  Not pulling out soon enough — its 95 minutes feel like a trimester — the wheel-spinning comedy The Babymakers follows a... More >>

• "Farewell, My Queen": The Beautiful and Damned

  published July 11, 2012

  Benoît Jacquot's soapy, sexy, and lezzie adaptation of Chantal Thomas's 2003 novel about the chaos at Versailles on the eve of the 1789... More >>

• "Beasts of the Southern Wild": A Child Endures

  published July 4, 2012

  A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth, and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the... More >>

• "Take This Waltz": Sarah Polley's Summer of Loves

  published July 4, 2012

  Sarah Polley's second feature, much like her first, the superb Away From Her (2006), thoughtfully probes the pitfalls of coupledom and... More >>

• "Ted": More of the Same from Seth MacFarlane's Minor Ursus

  published June 27, 2012

  Fans of Seth MacFarlane's Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with... More >>