Apple of My I
She dreams of them. She fills her computer screen with digital drawings of them. One is left on a swing at her house. Snow White is poisoned by one in her daughter’s play just before the abduction. In her kitchen are dozens of them that she chucks into the kitchen sink, which then explodes with brown muck. She cannot escape them, but she also surrounds herself with them. Claire is torturing herself with the fucking apples. Overripe and finally fetid, Neil Jordan’s In Dreams goes very, very wrong as a thriller in its final act (and even wronger in its epilogue), but if you fall asleep the first time you see Robert Downey Jr.’s face, you might think you’ve seen something weirdly special. Actually, it is pretty special, but you need to dive below the silly surface.
Maynard James Keenan – the frontman for prog-metal gods Tool, the co-leader of A Perfect Circle, and the founder of Puscifer – isn’t the type of person you’d expect to see as the subject of a thorough documentary. He has a reputation for being reclusive, and for jealously guarding his privacy. As he says in the movie Blood Into Wine, “I’m not much of a people person.” Yet Keenan, along with his wine-making partner Eric Glomski, is at the center of that documentary, a freewheeling but thoughtful mix of wine primer, underdog story, buddy picture, and sketch comedy.
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is an incredibly ballsy movie. I don’t mean its scope and ambition, both of which are indeed impressive. I mean the audacity of choices that could have easily backfired: following Heath Ledger’s nuanced, razor-sharp Joker with the nearly blank thug Bane; recycling Batman Begins’ sinister plot, doomsday machine, and League of Shadows; inserting teenage-boy masturbation fantasy Catwoman into a universe largely devoid of sex appeal and camp (and non-Rachel Dawes women, period); crafting a lengthy, convoluted first act made even less comprehensible because of the sound design and score; and relegating Batman to captivity of one sort or another for the vast majority of the movie’s first 115 minutes.
In Slate.com, Hua Hsu 
Our Box Office Power Rankings have been grim in recent weeks. George Clooney’s Leatherheads tops this week’s rankings – breaking Horton’s three-week reign – and was the second-best-reviewed movie in the top 10 with mediocre Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores of 53 and 56, respectively. It’s a bad crop out there, people. So it seems appropriate to get grimmer with Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own 
I am admittedly writing mostly from ignorance, but I can’t see any way that the 
Because I do have a memory – not a very good one, but a memory nonetheless – I can save myself some work by providing Rupert Murray – the filmmaker behind Unknown White Male – with a few lessons I’ve learned from other movies and simply link to previous essays.