Magic Mike

Some movies must be seen in first run, at a theater full of screaming women (or men, as the case may be). Such is the case with Steven Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike,” which would be much drearier to watch alone at home.

One Day on Earth, The Woman in the 5th, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

One Day on Earth

The Woman in the 5th

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

The collage film “One Day on Earth,” which consists of snippets of video footage shot around the world on a single day (10/10/10), follows on the heels of last year’s identically-conceived “Life in a Day.” I enjoyed the new film, which includes material from every country on Earth, more, but perhaps only for the fun of mentally ticking off 20 seconds in Andorra, and Djibouti, and Dominica, and Oman. Each film struck me as a solution in search of a problem – or, to the point, as mental masturbation. A day later, I’m at pains to remember a single moment from “One Day on Earth.” Nothing resonates. It’s all an exercise.

Paul Williams: Still Alive

Remember Paul Williams? Short little blonde guy? No? Well, in the 70s, he was It. Wrote “Out in the Country” for Three Dog Night. “We’ve Only Just Begun” for the Carpenters. A little song called “Evergreen” for Barbra Streisand. “The Rainbow Connection” for Kermie. “The Love Boat” theme? Yeah, that too. Won an Oscar and a Grammy and appeared 50 times on Carson’s “Tonight Show” and was pretty much ubiquitous. Then, suddenly, he disappeared. Mostly.

To Rome with Love

“To Rome With Love” is Woody Allen’s richest work in years, brimming with great ideas cleverly realized and chock-full of outsize laughs. It marks a welcome return to form for Woody after the mediocre “Midnight in Paris,” whose mass appeal lay primarily in the sort of name-dropping he lambastes here.

Brave

The Disney-Pixar collaboration “Brave” features the upstart’s first female protagonist, a willful Scottish mop of red hair named Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald), whose mum (the redoubtable Emma Thompson) and pop (Billy Connolly) arrange for three lords’ buffoonish sons to battle for her hand but who has the gall to want to choose her own love, whoever (and whenever) ...it may be. Macdonald and Thompson are too good for the whiny back-and-forth between Merida and Queen Elinor, a mélange of Glaswegian and Encino Birmingham High. The plot takes a turn to the bizarre when a woodcarving witch (Julie Walters) spells Elinor into a bear, which leads to tiresome computer-generated animal fights set to AC radio-ready tracks. “Brave” is dark and short on humor and not much fun for kids or adults. It screens with the deserving animated-short Oscar nominee “La Luna.”

Gerhard Richter Painting, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

Gerhard Richter Painting

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

There is truth in advertising to the title of Corinna Belz’s documentary “Gerhard Richter Painting,” approximately two-thirds of which consists of uninterrupted, nearly silent tracking shots of the octogenarian painter in the studio, applying wide swaths of titanium white and lemon yellow... paint to rollers and to his trademark giant squeegee, with which he turns vivid, colorful paintings into harder, more abstract and scraped-off pieces. At least one critic has pooh-poohed these sequences as literally watching paint dry, but to me the rare sight of a master painter at work was the most interesting aspect of the film. Richter the man is much less so – despite some powerful emotional traumas in his past – and he doesn’t provide much useful insight into the artistic process or art in general.

Bonsai

The Chilean import "Bonsai" is the kind of movie you'd walk out of on an airplane - just for a change of scenery. It's the sort of arch, pseudo-intellectual picture in which the main characters talk about having read all seven volumes of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Well, I'm here to tell you, I fucking hate Proust, and the only thing more soul-crushing than talking about reading "Remembrance" would be actually reading it. "Bonsai" is a literary romantic comedy that's more sexual than romantic, more detached and sardonic than genuinely amusing, and more interested in dropping literary names than exploring substantive themes. As I said of "The English Patient," it requires infinite patience for the sparest of pleasures.