Culturopolis

  With the double-whammy combination of Bridesmaids and Young Adult , 2011 is officially the year of the stunted, frustrated girl-misfit. A toxic spin on all of those cutesy chick flicks where career girls yearn for marriage, the latter film is the convention-busting story of semi-slovenly, semi-slatternly 37-year-old Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), who is hellbent on busting up a marriage. Mavis is a woman old enough — the social code goes — to be married and the proud owner of a child (or two). But instead she's floundering in a sea of insecurity when it comes to both love and career. It is an outrageously refreshing change of pace from the priss-pots and put-a-ring-on-it obsessives who constitute the majority of romantic comedies. In a deliciously terse opening sequence, Mavis is introduced waking up in her cluttered Minneapolis high-rise apartment — more dorm room than grown-up pad — in a hungover funk that you sense she's been riding for a long time. A post-divorce bachelo

  If fly-on-the-wall British director Mike Leigh decided to make a mumblecore film, it might look very much like Like Crazy , an ebb-and-flow love story where the blockages to romance are not Shakespearean feuding families but visa issues. Not since Green Card has so much romance been yoked to the ox cart of bureaucracy. British journalism major Anna (Felicity Jones) has a visa to study in Los Angeles, where she meets a boy who in many ways feels like her male equivalent: artistic, creative Jacob (Anton Yelchin). An aspiring furniture designer, Jacob's first gesture of true devotion is to engrave one of his chairs with the words "Like Crazy" and present it to Anna for her seating pleasure. A surprisingly sensitive male character in a Gen-Y cinema awash with duuuudes, Jacob is a candy-coated dreamboat from girl-bait central casting. He clutches a bouquet of flowers for airport rendezvous, treats women with Old World tenderness, and can make goo-goo eyes like nobody's

A semi-sinister little film with the eerie, sunlit ambiance of headspace thrillers like Rosemary's Baby or the original The Stepford Wives , Martha Marcy May Marlene presents a young woman trapped between two worlds. Having escaped an insular cult in the Catskills presided over by guitar-strumming head-hippie Patrick (John Hawkes), Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) has sought refuge at her older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and husband Ted's (Hugh Dancy) vacation home in Connecticut. But even hours away, Martha is haunted by her memories of the cult — and a feeling that its members

Melancholia opens with one of life’s most joyous occasions: a wedding. The doll-like, delicate Justine (Kirsten Dunst) has just married a handsome, adoring husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). The pair hold court at a lavish wedding reception bathed in opulent golden light in the upscale resort home of Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). But despite the jubilant mood, Justine seems more a bystander than participant in the party, slipping away to take a bath and to search for her equally distracted mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) and father Dexter (John Hurt), clearly hoping to confide in them. As the evening spirals into disaster and Justine falls into inescapable despair, she has sex with a young party guest and tells off her boss Jack (Stellan Skarsgard). Despite all of Claire’s ministrations and efforts to head off the looming cataclysm, Justine is deep in the throes of a profound, crushing, ruinous depressi

In addition to evidence that J. Edgar Hoover was gay, a cross-dresser, a conspiracy nut, and a Red-hater, in the engrossing new biopic J. Edgar, director Clint Eastwood contends that the notorious G-man and founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigations was also a major nerd. A fascinating portrait of an influential American, J . Edgar presents Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a flawed but prescient figure whose public role building the FBI into an important institution is contrasted with a private life as a closeted gay man devoted to his right-hand man Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), who became a devoted soulmate. For the most part, Eastwood tends to soft pedal Hoover's most malicious and damaging acts of wire-tapping and bad behavior, glossing over the fallout of his character assassination. Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ( Milk ) prefer a more humanizing approach. J. Edgar begins with a gray-haired, dour, heavyset, and aging Hoover di

The uproarious comedy Cedar Rapids comes from the blushing cinema of embarrassment that gave us Cyrus and The 40 Year Old Virgin . At the film’s center: a 34-year-old sunny geek Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) convinced selling insurance is an expression of god’s love. As heartily as he sells that message, you almost begin to believe it. You don’t know whether to hug him or give him a wedgie. Is Lippe arrested? Baby-fied? Filmmaker Miguel Arteta ( Chuck & Buck , The Good Girl ) doesn’t make any bones about the stunted but poignant status of its orphan hero, who has lost both parents and looks to his boss for nurturing. Lippe even has a Mrs. Robinson, the over-age hottie Macy Vaderhei (Sigourney Weaver) who, wait for it — used to be his seventh-grade teacher. Can you say m

There is something innately fascinating about hidden worlds: the subway tunnels that underlie cities; the phosphorescent creatures lurking in the ocean's sunless depths; the insular subcultures of bikers and circus folk. New Orleans photographer Lisette de Boisblanc's photos in Taken by the Fog at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery (which moves to the Westside this month) document a hidden world, too, one that serves as a metaphor for the similar intangibles that lurk inside our own flesh casings. Something between a photographer and a scientist (in fact, the artist once worked in science), de Boisblanc has X-rayed a bevy of her grandmother's dolls against an inky black background. The images bear a distinct resemblance to Man Ray

Recently nominated for an Academy Award in the Foreign Language category and winner of the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival, the dark, kinky Greek psychological drama Dogtooth bypassed Atlanta on its tour of big city art houses. Heralded by smart critics across the country, this film is now accessible via Netflix and Amazon in your own home, probably the best place to experience the skin-crawling excesses of this creepy gem with special relevance to artists interested in its critique of patriarchy, government, family, and the highly subjective, easily shaped notion of “reality.” A prolonged shout-out to the power of nurture over nature, Dogtooth centers on a Greek businessmen and father (Christos Stergioglou) who lives with his family in an Edenic, gated compound of green lawns and swaying palm trees in an unidentified rural section of Greece. The father has created his own disturbingly self-defined utopia inside. Behind the wall that encircles his f

We’re so enamored with the love story, with its promise of happy endings and the sunny side of life, that watching a film about the dissolution of a marriage triggers deep feelings of loss and sadness. Blue Valentine is a difficult, heartbreaking film, but it’s also essential viewing if only for offering a corrective to all of the tales of blissful, uncomplicate

Felicia Feaster was born in Jimmy Stewart's hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania.  She received her B.A. in film studies from the University of Florida and her M.A. in film studies from Emory University.  Her master's thesis on exploitation film became a book, Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film co-authored with fellow lowbrow connoisseur, husband and filmmaker Bret Wood ( Hell's Highway , Psychopathia Sexualis ) and a Kino Lorber DVD series .  A former staff art and film critic for Atlanta’s alternative newsweekly Creative Loafing, Felicia is currently a managing editor at HGTV.com and TravelChannel.com and the art critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution .  Her writing has appeared in Elle , The Economist , New York Press , Atlanta magazine, Sculpture , Art in America , Travel + Leisure , Artnews , Playboy online and Art Papers .  She has curated exhibitions for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and TEW Galleries in Atlanta. She has received mul

Natalie Portman loses her mind in the exquisitely gothic Black Swan Just Dance by Felicia Feaster Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures Nina (Natalie Portman) has got a real nasty case of pink eye Black Swan Starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, and Vincent Cassel Directed by Darren Aronofsky Rated R

The Company Men is relevant but heavy handed at times In Good Company by Felicia Feaster Courtesy of Odyssey Entertainment These guys really wish they hadn't spent all their money on suits The Company Men Starring Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Tommy Lee Jones, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kevin Costner, Craig T. Nelson, and Maria Bello Directed by John Wells Rated R