Category: Eleanor Ringel Cater

So there I sat at “Moonrise Kingdom.”

Waiting for the enchantment to kick in.

After all, that’s what I had been promised by an overwhelming number of movie reviewers filing from Cannes earlier this spring.

Well, it never did.

“Bernie” is absolutely the best show in town.

As my pal Spring A. said, I envy you the opportunity to see it for the first time,

Try to ignore the just-lays-there title. And please —on pain of ruining your own movie-going experience — do not read any review that tells you the entire plot.

I dutifully took myself to “Men in Black 3” and report on it almost as dutifully.

I was a huge fan of the first movie. There was, I remember, a special screening on a Sunday morning to accommodate some New York Times type and I dragged myself to it because, back then, I had to see everything.

Thankfully, that’s no longer true.

Old movie titles die hard.

I want to call this “The Best Little Whorehouse in India.”

The title, in fact, is “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”

And Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton aren’t anywhere in sight.

A primo example of the variety-pack approach to summer block-busters, “The Avengers” lumps together a half-dozen super-heroes, in much the same way cereal companies stack grocery shelves with snack-packs of Sugar Pops, Special K, Cheerios, Coco Puffs, Raisin Bran and Fruit Loops.

The Damsel in the most distress during Whit Stillman’s arch new comedy, “Damsels in Distress,” was undoubtedly me.

Precious and self-consciously hyper-verbal, “Damsels” takes place in some time-out-of-mind (read, timeless, I guess?) leafy college known as Seven Oaks (the Seven Sisters meet the Kentucky Oaks?)

“Jeff Who Lives at Home” is the sort of little movie you expect to grow on you.

Instead, it grows away from you, losing its grip in a mildly ingratiating manner.

Nonetheless, it does lose its grip. And its audience.

The biggest bully in the much-talked-about documentary, “Bully,” isn’t some vicious kid — though we see evidence of their cruelty in the faces of those they’ve attacked.

Rather, it’s an adult. An assistant principal, actually, named Kim. One of those bluff, pseudo-cheery types —her students are her “golden cherubs” — she gives you the creeps early on.

“The Three Stooges” is like being nyuck-ed to death.

It was shot in Atlanta by the Farrelly Brothers (who are still looking to replicate early boxoffice smashes like “”There’s Something About Mary”). The picture would’ve been one of those one-line, do-I-really-have-to-tell-you reviews.

Just when you thought Hollywood couldn’t do any worse (“The Vow,” anyone?), the place regurgitates something like “Mirror, Mirror.”

Smug, bitchy and just plain bad, the movie isn’t so much a re-working of the Snow White fairy tale as it is an unwitting peek into the maw of the beast that purports to entertain us.

Madonna is in the house.

The movie house, I mean. She’s directed a movie It’ called W.E. and I wish it were good. Or provocative. Or at least spicy. Or transgressive. Or any of the many Madonna-stamped attributes her Me-dia factory has been churning out for almost 30 years.

“W.E.” pilfers the then-and-now configuration used in “Julie & Julia,” but to little effect. Or more accurately, perhaps, to no effect.

If you remember, the earlier film cast Meryl Streep as celebrated chef, Julia Child and Amy Adams as a present-day woman who is obsessed with her and her recipes.

Movie screenings have been a part of my life for over 30 years. I take them so much for granted that sometimes I forget that, to most people, an advance screening of a film is sorta exotic.

So I thought I’d write a bit about the recent afternoon screening of “The Hunger Games” (which is terrific).

For the longest time, the term “March Madness” had no real meaning for me.

At best, it summoned up Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter (loony from the dye fumes) and March Hare (loony with love). But basketball?

Well, as time went by, March Madness got me. Mostly due to the obsessive affection of one David Secrest, but there are others: My cousin Jane, Janet Ward, Jack Wilkinson…

In Agnieska Holland’s new movie, “In Darkness,” the director takes us back to the Holocaust and another implausible yet certifiably true story. 1990’s “Europa, Europa,” was about a Jewish boy who hides his religion and ends up a “hero” of the Nazi Youth.

“In Darkness” focuses on a completely different sort of hero: a stolid Polish sewer worker named Leopold Socha (played with great subtly and craft by Robert Wieckiewicz).

We need to talk about “We Need to Talk about Kevin.”

Because, having lost its best shot at an Oscar when its star, Tilda Swinton, wasn’t nominated in the best actress category, it’s likely the film will slip in and out of town without much notice.

“A Separation,” the excellent new movie from Iran (and likely Oscar winner for best foreign-language picture) begins on a feminist note. A couple with obvious marital differences sits before a judge.

She wants to leave Iran. More opportunity, she feels, for both herself and their adolescent daughter.

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

Possible the only thing wrong with “Pina,” the new 3-D dance documentary by Wim Wenders, is its title. I mean, you don’t call a movie “Jagger” and expect people who’ve never heard of the Rolling Stones to know what you mean.

Pina is Pina Bausch, a bracingly original German choreographer who was friendly with Wenders. They’d talked about making a movie showcasing her work for years. Unfortunately, she died in 2009, only 68.

Jack London cozies up to Frederick Nietzsche in “The Grey,” a sweaty-palmed action film about survival of the fittest.

On every imaginable level.

En route to an oil rig in Alaska, Liam Neeson and a snack tray of assorted humans crash-land somewhere in the Great White North. There they must survive wolves, weather and each other.