Email Author Melissa Anderson

2012 Stories by Melissa Anderson

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  10 Movies to Watch in 2013

  published December 27, 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 >>

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  Any Day Now Makes Injustice Risible

  published December 20, 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 >>

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  Holy Motors creates the cinema history it laments

  published November 29, 2012

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

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  David France's stirring history of ACT UP

  published October 18, 2012

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

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  Surveying Whitney Houston's checkered film career

  published August 16, 2012

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

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  A child — and child performer endures in Beasts

  published July 19, 2012

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

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  Seth MacFarlane's Ted is stuffed with more of the same

  published June 28, 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 >>

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  With Your Sister's Sister, the creator of Humpday verges on the conventional

  published June 28, 2012

  Beginning with a bilious toast and ending with a group hug, Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister, her fourth film, expertly makes us... More >>

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  Brave is the rare family film about courage that actually has some

  published June 21, 2012

  With her flame-colored ringlets, Merida, the barely adolescent heroine of Pixar's thirteenth feature, looks like a wee Rebekah Brooks, maybe a... More >>

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  Nothing's so funny in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding

  published June 7, 2012

  Three generations of fine actresses are squandered in Bruce Beresford's Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, an incompetently structured film... More >>

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  A toothless satire of the Catholic Church in We Have a Pope

  published May 10, 2012

  Suitable entertainment for a Knights of Columbus fundraiser, Nanni Moretti's Good Friday–released We Have a Pope finds the Most... More >>

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  A couple struggles with weather, relationship in The Five-Year Engagement

  published April 26, 2012

  There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a... More >>

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  Beyond the mascot, the comprehensive Marley stirs it up

  published April 19, 2012

  I spotted a bottle of something called Marley's Mellow Mood, "a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages," in my neighborhood deli... More >>

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  Hunger Games rages against our stupid culture

  published April 5, 2012

  "If no one watches, then they don't have a game," a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins'... More >>

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  Life is an erotic cabaret in Frederick Wiseman's Crazy Horse

  published March 15, 2012

  Recording "Les Filles du Crazy," an anthem that they'll later lip-synch onstage, half a dozen women — performers at the Crazy Horse,... More >>

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  Bro, how times have changed: 21 Jump Street now a buddy comedy

  published March 15, 2012

  The TV show 21 Jump Street, about cops who go undercover as high schoolers, debuted on FOX in 1987 — one year after the network... More >>

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  An unconventional parenting setup in a highly standard rom-com, Friends With Kids

  published March 8, 2012

  In the opening scene of Friends With Kids, a conspicuously placed copy of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion on the bedside table... More >>

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  It's the actors who need rescued in trapped-whale saga Big Miracle

  published February 2, 2012

  Starring everyone who wasn't in New Year's Eve — and larded with just as many bromides — Big Miracle is inspired by... More >>

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  Complicating late childhood in Tomboy

  published January 26, 2012

  A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence — when bodies and identities are still fluid — Tomboy astutely... More >>

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  To be young, gifted, black and lesbian in Dee Rees's Pariah

  published January 19, 2012

  The first ten minutes of Dee Rees's funny, moving, nuanced and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are... More >>

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  Is Nothing Sacred? The godly union of Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah, sullied in Joyful Noise

  published January 12, 2012

  A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a small-town Southern gospel choir, lifts from Usher's "Yeah!" to give... More >>