Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

• Directed by: David Yates
• Rating: PG-13 (Violence/Scary Moments)

Average Reader Rating

4.5 rating, 189 votes

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Review Summary

Childhood ends with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series. A pop cultural happening extraordinaire, the Potter movies took uncertain flight in 2001 with Harry, then an orphan of 11, home alone with his grotesquely unloving relatives. Times were grim, at least offscreen — the first opened in November of that year — but Chris Columbus’s touch was insistently light as Harry was initiated into a world alive with odd doings, strange creatures and the evil that would almost consume it. A decade later, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends, Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint), have become powerful adult wizards while the actors are now stars. Look closely and you can see the beard inching along Harry’s or rather Mr. Radcliffe’s pale chin. Meanwhile, Ms. Watson, smoldering in bruising dark lipstick on the cover of the July Vogue, has her own hair and makeup artist now and the director, David Yates, even trains the camera on her generous peek-a-boo cleavage. Just as startling is the transformation of Mr. Grint who, in one early, anxious scene wears a goatee and a panicked look that together suggests a junior Paul Giamatti. My, how the children have grown — and the movies too. It’s taken two of them to translate J. K. Rowling’s last, exhausting tome. A long windup to the new one’s big-bang finale, “Part 1” was memorable for the death of the house elf Dobby and less so for the draggy scenes of Harry, Hermione and Ron hiding and quarreling in the wild. There’s no time for adolescent angst in war. Now, when a student (he who shall not be named so as not to ruin the fun) declares his affection for another — the air electric with fire, frenzy and young love (if never lust) — it’s because both may soon be dead. Fans of the books know how it turns out, and moviegoers can guess. Meanwhile, this sweet sentiment, especially given the casualties to come, may give you pause and also make you cry. — Manohla Dargis

Movie Details

• NYT Critics' Pick
• Title: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
• Running Time: 130 Minutes
• Status: Released
• Country: United Kingdom, United States
• Genre: Adaptation, Adventure, Fantasy

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)

• Directed by: John Requa , Glenn Ficarra
• Rating: PG-13 (Profanity/Sexual Situations/Scatological Humor)

Average Reader Rating

2 rating, 2 votes

Review Summary

“Crazy, Stupid, Love” is, on balance, remarkably sane and reasonably smart. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, this movie, packed with appealing stars, is a smooth blend of modern comic genres with a surprising undercurrent of dark, difficult emotion. Essentially a study in the varieties of masculine sexual confusion, it travels the circuit from bromance to a kind of Y-chromosome weepie that might be called male-odrama, with a detour into the briar patch of adolescent awkwardness. Steve Carell, who on the big screen often impersonates sweet, anxious guys dutifully holding their inner Michael Scott firmly in check, plays Cal Weaver, an everyman with a family, a nice suburban house and an office job. He also has a bad haircut and terrible fashion sense, as he will be told by Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a pickup artist who volunteers his services as coach in the game of seduction. Cal accepts the offer because his wife of more than two decades, Emily (Julianne Moore), has told him that she wants a divorce, and that she has cheated on him with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) only slightly less nebbishy than Cal himself. Nursing his self-pity at a sleek local bar, Cal meets Jacob, who tries to do for him something like what Will Smith did for Kevin James in “Hitch.” (The movie analogy Jacob proposes is Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid.”) In a determined, half-pathetic attempt to even the score with Emily, Cal sets out to score with as many women as he can. Complications, as the saying goes, ensue, but they are not necessarily the ones you might expect. The script (by Dan Fogelman, whose other credits include “Bolt” and “Cars”) follows what seem to be tangential threads of plot. These are eventually spun together in a chaotic climax that manages to be astonishing without destroying the film’s hard-won credibility. — A. O. Scott

Movie Details

• Title: Crazy, Stupid, Love
• Running Time: 117 Minutes
• Status: Awaiting Release
• Country: United States
• Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

The Future (2011)

• Directed by: Miranda July
• Rating: R (Sexual Situations)

Average Reader Rating

4 rating, 3 votes

Review Summary

To appreciate “The Future,” Miranda July’s ingeniously constructed wonder cabinet of a movie, you may first have to pass through a stage of mild annoyance or even something more intense. A recent profile in The New York Times Magazine depicted Ms. July — a quiet figure on the screen and a thoughtful, witty presence on the page — as an improbably polarizing filmmaker, as likely to be scorned for her supposed preciosity as celebrated for her ingenuity. And the first part of “The Future” seems, quite deliberately, to test the spectrum of audience response. Are you curious? Enchanted? Frustrated? All of the above? The two main characters, Sophie and Jason, a Los Angeles couple played by Ms. July and Hamish Linklater, are sweet and sincere, but also maddeningly passive, and their tentative, timid approach to their own lives might inspire equal measures of protectiveness and impatience. We first see them on the couch of their modest, bohemian apartment, each with a laptop, looking more like twins or a shaggy, bony, two-headed creature than like romantic cohabitants. Sophie and Jason dwell in a state of becalmed, bemused anxiety. Though they are well into their 30s and measure the span of their relationship in years, they seem as shy and unworldly as children, passive-aggressively resisting the demands and enticements of adulthood. Sophie teaches dance classes for toddlers, Jason has a low-level tech job helping confused consumers troubleshoot over the phone, and the two of them, individually and as a pair, occasionally glance at a vague and receding horizon of ambition, artistic and otherwise. But “The Future” is much more than a precise, deadpan portrait of a sensibility likely to be recognizable to the Sophies and the Jasons in the audience (or to anyone who has run into them at the local coffee shop, organic bakery or artisanal ice cream truck). Ms. July’s gift as a filmmaker, very much evident in her first feature, “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” lies in her ability to will the prosaic facts of the world into a condition of wonder. The anti-literal aspects of “The Future” might be described as surrealism, magic realism or Jabberwockian nonsense, but none of these terms quite capture her ability to blend whimsy and difficult emotion. — A. O. Scott

Movie Details

• NYT Critics' Pick
• Title: The Future
• Running Time: 91 Minutes
• Status: Awaiting Release
• Country: Germany, United States
• Genre: Comedy, Drama

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Review Summary

Galloping across the desert, his inscrutable baby blues fixed on the horizon, Daniel Craig makes for a surprisingly convincing cowboy. Some actors, including a few in his new movie, “Cowboys & Aliens,” look too modern for old-timey roles. There isn’t enough grit, suffering and poor nutrition in their faces, and their gestures and gaits are timed to the impatient rhythms of the information age. But Mr. Craig, with his brutally handsome face and coiled physicality, looks like a rawhide whip that’s just itching to get cracking. — Manohla Dargis He does, eventually, though it takes the director, Jon Favreau, a long time to wake up his movie, giving it a good kick about a half-hour in. Maybe it’s all the western clichés he had to line up, including the dusty town, the gun-toting preacher, the mild-mannered doctor, the trigger-happy scion of a powerful cattleman adored by the American Indian orphan who would make him a better son. Don’t forget the surrogate for this PG-13 picture’s presumptive audience, a wide-eyed boy whom you half expect to cry out for Shane. And then there’s the faithful pooch that in one scene yelps when (finally!) he encounters a genre-hopping extraterrestrial with razored lobster claws that looks like a cousin of the monsters from the “Alien” films. That these new beasties even evoke the nightmarish creatures that the artist H. R. Giger created for the first “Alien” film is a testament to his genius and to this movie’s lack of imagination. It’s too bad. Mr. Favreau, who directed the “Iron Man” films, isn’t an innovator, but he can have a nice, light touch, and his actors always seem as if they were happy to be there, which is true here too.

Yao Ming's Retirement

As Towering Star Retires, China Is Unprepared to Replace Him

BEIJING — Nine seasons after Yao Ming walked onto a basketball court in Texas and inspired a generation of young Chinese to learn to dribble — or at least to watch until the final buzzer — his looming exit from professional basketball is being accompanied by nostalgia for the man who became a national hero. It is also triggering frustration over why no one in China, which has tens of millions of basketball players, appears capable of replacing him as an N.B.A. star.
For nearly a decade, China has been enthralled by the cult of Yao spun by Communist Party propagandists and corporate sponsors: the winner, the gentle giant, the favorite son. His image was ubiquitous here, and the public basked in his glow even as other Chinese players in the N.B.A. sputtered.
Yet his retirement is forcing many Chinese to acknowledge that their country has relied on Yao alone for victory and national pride, ignoring shortcomings in the state sports system that leave China facing a future bereft of N.B.A. and Olympic basketball glory.
“We can either choose to blame the gods and whine about our misfortune or we can step up to the plate and train the next generation of basketball talent,” Zhang Weiping, a basketball commentator and former national team member, wrote in an editorial last week.
Yi Jianlian, who Time magazine once predicted would be the next Yao, is now an unrestricted free agent after being dropped by the Washington Wizards. Sun Yue, the only Chinese national to play point guard in the N.B.A., was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers but played 10 games, averaging a mere 0.6 points, before his demotion to the Development League. He has returned to the Chinese Basketball Association.
China, Zhang wrote in Basketball Pioneers magazine, must develop smaller, faster and more skilled players like the ones who thrive in the West.
“China has no shortage of this kind of talent,” he said. “We simply have coaching and systemic problems that prevent us from discovering and developing these players.”
While the United States develops players through an almost Darwinian process of natural selection in youth leagues, high school teams and colleges, China has a rigid, Soviet-inspired state network of athletic schools, coaches and bureaucrats that selects players as early as age 4.
Yao, the son of exceptionally tall basketball players, was a 5-foot-7 third grader when he was plucked by a local sports school for a life of endless drills geared entirely toward molding him into Olympic material. Every professional Chinese player has a similar body and biography. And yet, before and during the 30-year-old Yao’s N.B.A. career, China has managed to reach only the Olympic quarterfinals.
The state recruiting strategy is rife with problems. Officials choose children from across the country based solely on how tall they are. “If height were the determining factor, we would be the best team in the world,” said Li Nan, 32, who works for a Beijing advertising agency and plays basketball in his free time, noting that every member of the national team is 6-9 or taller.
But youth and height, as any N.B.A. fan knows, do not alone predict victory on the court.
“At age 10, you can’t identify the next Allen Iverson,” Bob Donewald Jr., the American coach of China’s national team, said in a phone interview. Nor the next Derrick Rose, the N.B.A.’s most valuable player last season, who stands 6-3.
As the coach of the national team and before that the Shanghai Sharks, Yao’s former team, Donewald sees the structural problems plaguing Chinese basketball up close. The system’s failures, he said, directly affect the quality of his players.
“What’s amazing is that in a country of 1.3 billion I can’t find a point guard,” he said.
A case in point is Shanghai, population 22 million, which picks a maximum of 30 people for its club team. “If you’re not selected, there is no coaching, no practices and no training,” Donewald said. “China is filtering through guys and cutting them off so early there’s no way for them to get better.”

Best Places to Retire Overseas

U.S. Wins in China

The United States won the new 5-kilometer open water team event at the world aquatic championships in Jinshan City, China. Ashley Twichell, Andrew Gemmell and Sean Ryan finished in 57 minutes 0.6 seconds.

GRAFFITI WRITING

Hollywood’s Highest-Paid Actresses

Hollywood is still a boy’s town where the men earn a lot more than the women. But don’t cry for the top female stars: The 10 highest-paid actresses in Tinseltown earned a total $218 million between May 2010 and May 2011, by our estimation.
Tying at the top of our list are Angelina Jolie and Sarah Jessica Parker, who each earned an estimated $30 million.

FULL LIST: Hollywood’s Highest-Paid Actresses

Jolie has made a name for herself as an actress who can easily handle action, drama and even directing. She wrote and directed the upcoming film In the Land of Blood and Honey, a romance set against the backdrop of the Bosnian War. That film follows up her two big-budget 2010 action movies, Salt and The Tourist. The latter, which co-starred Johnny Depp, initially looked like it was going to be a flop after a paltry opening weekend box-office haul of $16 million. But thanks mostly to the overseas market, the film went on to earn $280 million, cementing Jolie’s appeal abroad.
Parker still makes most of her money off of Sex and the City. She earns big from reruns of the TV show thanks to her dual role as star and producer, and the second movie, which hit screens in 2010,  performed pretty well. It wasn’t as big a hit as the first movie (which earned $415 million) but it brought in a respectable $290 million.

True to the values of Carrie Bradshaw, Parker has become a beauty icon. She makes money from her successful line of perfumes including Lovely, Covet and NYC, which brought in $18 million in 2010, and she recently started helping design clothes for the fashion line Halston.

To compile our earnings numbers we talked to agents, lawyers, producers and other industry insiders to come up with an estimate for what each actress earned between May 1, 2010 and May 1, 2011. Earnings consist of pretax gross income. Management, agent and attorney fees are not deducted.
Ranking third behind Jolie and Parker are Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, who each brought in $28 million.
Aniston has had more than her share of flops, like 2009’s Management, which earned less than $1 million at the U.S. box office. But lately, even films that looked like they were going to flop have turned out to be hits. The Bounty Hunter opened to a weak $20 million in 2010 but went on to earn $136 million on a $40 million budget. One of her most recent films, Just Go With It, co-starring Adam Sandler, is her fourth highest earning film in the U.S.
Witherspoon hasn’t been as lucky as Aniston at the box office lately. He romantic comedy How Do You Know, flopped, earning only $50 million on a budget of $120 million. It hasn’t hurt her quote though and she’ll still earn big for the upcoming romantic comedy This Means War, which is scheduled to hit theaters in early 2012.
Ranking fifth is Julia Roberts. Her most recent film, Larry Crowne, may have flopped its opening weekend (earning only $13 million to rank 4th) but the actress can still command a big pay check and a portion of a film’s back end when she chooses. Roberts earned $20 million between May 2010 and May 2011.

Three Ways Cars Are Getting Worse

A pothole more the size of a cauldron appeared from beneath the bumper of the Ford van I was following several car lengths behind onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
The driver ahead slammed on his brakes and swerved to avoid it. He failed—and so did I.
But where the van’s beefy tires shrugged off the impact, the low-profile rubber on the 18-inch wheel of the Audi A5 I was driving just buckled.

Look how small the sidewall of this Audi A5's tire is. - Credit: Audi

When the right front rim violently struck bottom, it felt and sounded like a shotgun blast. A bag on the seat next to me leapt into the air and spewed its contents all over the passenger footwell. Still rolling forward, I found myself in the middle of fast-moving traffic on a busy New York City highway, a $180 front tire tugging at the steering wheel as it quickly deflated.

This ordeal—which I muddled through by limping home on a flat that miraculously stayed intact and on the rim—is the unfortunate result of what some car designers and engineers call progress.
And it’s only one of several unfortunate trends in automotive design that are making cars less practical, less comfortable and in some cases less safe.
Huge Wheels
Wheels have been getting increasingly larger and wider, and not just on sports cars—regular ones, too.
They look cool and make the car grip the road better, so it can take turns faster and stop shorter. But the tradeoff is a pricier tire with a smaller sidewall that is less resilient to bumps and potholes.
What’s worse is that many new cars, including budget-minded ones like the Hyundai Elantra, are sold without a spare tire and jack now, to save weight and cost. You can usually add them as an option, though.

BMW 3 Series sedan - Credit: BMW

Others, like the BMW 3 Series I drove a couple of years ago, have “run flat” tires with beefed up sidewalls. In theory, they, allow you to keep driving when the tire is punctured.
I wasn’t a fan of them until hitting a huge pothole in that BMW, this time on the Grand Central Parkway. The reaction was as violent as in the Audi—a coffee tumbler got launched into the air on this occasion—but the tire stayed inflated.
When I got home, I found a two-inch gash right above the edge of the rim, much like on the Audi A5’s tire, only it didn’t go all the way through the rigid sidewall. You could see the tough woven fibers had kept it intact.
But there’s a downside to run-flats too: They create a more jarring ride. And on that 3 Series, which was already tightly sprung to begin with, the teeth-rattling discomfort started to overshadow the car’s otherwise stellar driving dynamics by the end of my week with it.
It wasn’t until driving an Infiniti G25 sedan recently that it struck me how truly stupid this trend toward larger wheels is. The G25 has 17-inch wheels with tires that have only half an inch more sidewall than the Audi A5’s.

Infiniti G25 - Credit: Infiniti

What a difference that half inch makes.
Sure, the steering was sharper on the Audi, but the Infiniti’s slightly taller tires easily absorbed holes and bumps in the pavement that I would’ve had to dodge in the Audi. For the peace of mind taller tires bring, I will gladly give up the minor improvement in steering feel on a daily driver.
Large rims are overrated on cars used for everyday transport. In fact, to me, they’re a liability that costs more money and causes more stress than they’re worth.
Go for the 20-inchers if you’re getting a Corvette or Ferrari. Otherwise, I recommend avoiding all the pricey wheel and tire upgrades available on so many regular cars these day.
High Belt Lines
As wheels get larger, the proportions of cars must change to accommodate them. That is, the sides grow taller to fit the larger wheel wells.

Note how small the rear windows are on the 2012 Hyundai Accent hatchback and sedan. - Credit: Hyundai

But even cars with normal-sized wheels seem to be getting slab sides these days. Just look at the latest crop of small cars, like the Chevrolet Sonic, Ford Fiesta and Hyundai Accent. All of them have huge swathes of metal above their wheel wells, disguised and gussied up with creases and curves.
The reason automotive designers are lifting belt lines on cars of all kinds is because they think it looks better. Mazda designer Derek Jenkins explained it to me this way: When considering the proportions of a car, the smaller the upper third is in relation to the lower two-thirds, the sportier it looks. That’s why sports cars have such low roofs and small windows.
But designers can’t squash a hatchback like the Kia Rio5 down to the size of a sports car. So instead, they raise the belt line to create the visual effect of minimizing the ungainly proportions of economy cars. Unfortunately, this often results in windows so small they almost seem like gun ports on a World War II bunker.
It’s one thing to live with compromised visibility in a Lamborghini, because it is so special and usually not driven often. Even the more common Chevrolet Camaro can be forgiven its claustrophobic interior, because style is such an important aspect of a muscle car.

The Acura ZDX has massive blind spots because of its high belt line and low roof. - Credit: Acura

But now crossovers and sedans are getting the same treatment and forcing the average motorist to make unnecessary compromises just for the sake of style. The Acura ZDX, Buick Lacrosse, Chrysler 300 and Toyota Matrix are afflicted with problematic proportions. All of them have belt lines so high that kids in car seats would be lucky to get a glimpse of the world outside.
Heck, even adults will have trouble seeing out of some of these vehicles because of their enormous blind spots. This is one reason rear parking sensors and back-up cameras are becoming so popular.
The Acura ZDX crossover is particularly bad with regard to blind spots, because it sits higher than most cars. Pulling into traffic from a side road or cross street can be a nightmare in this car.
Keep your expensive blind-spot warning and lane-departure avoidance systems. Just give us bigger windows.
Plunging Roof Lines
Low-slung roofs are another trick designers use to make cars look more appealing. And boy do they love dropping them as far as they can to create a fast-looking silhouette.

The roof and belt line on this Buick LaCrosse compress the windows almost into slits. - Credit: Buick

I’ve asked several designers in the past year whether that trend will ease up, and none of them thought it would. So we’ll only be seeing more squat-roofed cars like the Cadillac CTS, Hyundai Sonata and Jaguar XF.
If you’re tall, too bad. Because even some of the largest sedans available force you to duck down when getting in and out—almost as much as in a Porsche. My twelve-year-old niece, who is short, recently hit her head on the forward roof pillar when getting out of a Honda Insight. But the swoopy roof on that hybrid has a purpose beyond just looking good—its sleek shape helps save fuel by reducing aerodynamic drag. The same goes for the Chevrolet Volt, which also has a low roof.
Those hybrids might have an excuse for their steeply raked windshields. Buicks do not. My grandparents shouldn’t have to worry about smacking their skull on the roof pillar of their Buick LaCrosse. And yet every time they get in the front seat, it’s a concern.

The discontinued Buick LeSabre has much taller windows. - Image from Wikipedia

The problem is especially annoying when considering that the LeSabre they traded in a few years ago was much easier to get in and out of. Even the larger Buick Lucerne has a low roofline. So does the Chevrolet Malibu, Jaguar XJ, Kia Optima, Lexus ES, Nissan Maxima, and so on.
These are all medium-to-large sedans, meaning that they should have ample space to create easy ingress and egress. They also shouldn’t force rear passengers to slouch, or else hit their heads on the low roof. And why does a big sedan–or even a crossover for that matter–with so much space to spare need a roof that comes so far forward into the windshield that it obstructs the view of stoplights above?
It all comes back to style. With cars getting so good across the board, looks are fast becoming the biggest differentiator.
The question is—What compromises are automakers willing to make in order to create a design that they think will stand out and sell more cars?
Based on the latest models coming to market, clearly they’re willing to compromise comfort, convenience and safety for the sake of style. The good news is that at some point the pendulum will start to swing back the other way, and the huge wheels, high belt lines and low roofs designers consider cool today won’t be in style anymore.