EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

Movie Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop
5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Banksy, arguably the world's most famous street artist and certainly its most elusive, has fascinated me since college. An anthropology class introduced me to the prankster-provocateur's blithely controversial body of work, which, via spray-paint stenciling and 3-D objects, has over the last decade turned the streets of London into a kind of art gallery amusement park, transcending the normalcy of urban graffiti and causing its viewers to stop, think and, sometimes, gasp. Often political and often incorporating their concrete canvases to create illusions of depth and dimension, Banksy's pieces have rendered him a hero and a terrorist, a visionary and a menace. And no one even knows who he is.

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DEATH AT A FUNERAL

Review: Death at a Funeral (2010)
1.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Out of a sizable ensemble, the two lead characters in “Death at a Funeral” are brothers Aaron (Chris Rock) and Ryan (Martin Lawrence), whose father's death brings their disparate, dysfunctional family members together. Aaron and Ryan are both writers – the former an unpublished hopeful whose dreams got sidelined by grown-up responsibilities, the latter a published author of what sound like smut novels – and one of the movie's recurring debates is over what constitutes good, legitimate writing. Being the eldest, Aaron wants to write and deliver the eulogy, and, yeah, he has that long-gestating manuscript of a novel just waiting to be submitted, but shouldn't Ryan, the real deal, be the one to do the honors? Or, as is also pointed out, is Ryan just a hack who writes garbage? Surely the filmmakers didn't mean to draw attention to the ineptitude of their dead-tired screenplay, but so they have, and thus the only memorable irony of this arduously unfunny farce is entirely unintentional.

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DATE NIGHT

Movie Review: Date Night
4 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

As a romantic action-comedy, “Date Night” is pretty routine stuff: Take a Regular Joe and a Regular Jane, drop them into an outrageously dangerous scenario, allow their ignorances and idiosyncrasies to gradually emerge as strengths, and see them outfox a batch of bad guys far more practiced in derring-do (trust me, I've spoiled nothing). But as a celebration of long-term relationships, from the magic to the inevitable monotony, this thoughtful outing is special and ridiculously sweet, enriching its sterile storyline with the adorable, believable isms of its lead couple, New Jersey suburbanites and parents of two Phil and Claire Foster. The Fosters are portrayed by America's must-see-TV sweethearts, Steve Carell and Tina Fey, who are so splendid together they made this reviewer cross his fingers in hopes of future collaborations.

With their full-time jobs compounded by parental duties, Phil, a tax consultant, and Claire, a realtor, are pretty pooped by the time the sun goes down. (“Here we go,” Phil says one morning after his son has torn off his nasal strip, begging for breakfast. “It begins,” Claire responds after getting a piledriver wake-up call from her daughter.) But, determined to keep at least a dash of spice in their marriage, the fatigued 40-somethings never miss their weekly date night, which usually involves swinging by the same local steakhouse, ordering the same potato skin appetizer, hurrying back to relieve the high school babysitter and going to bed without sex. The Fosters' best friends, Brad and Hayley Sullivan (Mark Ruffalo and Fey's former “SNL” co-star Kristen Wiig), found their relationship to be following a similar ho-hum procedure and are now splitting up.

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VINCERE

Movie Review: Vincere
4.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Historical fact does a mesmerizing dance with artistic license in “Vincere,” an epic Italian melodrama-cum-biopic pristinely directed and co-written by 70-year-old legend Marco Bellocchio (“The Wedding Director”). A contender for the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2009, the film tells of Ida Dalser, Benito Mussolini's one-time lover and supposed first wife, whose story – as told by Bellocchio and fellow scribe Daniela Ceselli – is by turns romantic, glamorous, scintillating, enraging, pitiful and deeply tragic.

While no records confirming Dalser's marriage to the formidable Fascist dictator have ever been found, she apparently remained insistent unto her death that the two were formally wed, and that Mussolini was the father of her only son, Benito Albino. “Vincere,” a title that translates to “victory” or “win” in English and warrants multiple interpretations, takes the liberty of filling in the holes of what's on the books about Dalser's downward-spiral life (dramatizing the secrets uncovered by investigative journalist Marco Zeni), and lifts what could be reductively described as a Lifetime-movie setup into the lofty realm of great Italian cinema.

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