By Adam Nayman Keep the Lights On begins with a very modern kind of masquerade: from his single bed in a Brooklyn apartment, Erik (Thure Lindhart) tries to sell himself as a sneering stud to a series of strangers on a gay-sex party line. Yet while this opening creates an expectation that the film will…

By José Teodoro and Adam Nayman Cosmopolis opens with a hubcap-level pan across a fleet of white stretch limousines, objects of ostentatious wealth, absurdly oversized and ugly, yet invisible in their anonymity and ubiquity, luxurious yet barely able to move through a teeming city’s daily traffic. A great deal of David Cronenberg’s film, which spans…

By Adam Nayman In his review of Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, J. Hoberman informs us that its protagonist, 37-year-old hack writer Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), “packs up and drives back to [her hometown of] Mercury, Minnesota, while playing a vintage mix tape heavy on The Replacements.” This is incorrect: the song that Mavis keeps blasting…

By Adam Nayman I’m not sure what the small clutch of filmmakers, buyers, distributors and other assorted festival-goers with a hole in their early-morning schedules got out of Jan Rofekamp’s presentation at RIDM’s market. Armed with a laptop containing short clips from about a dozen recent documentaries, the Films Transit International honcho didn’t so much…

By Adam Nayman The Occupy Wall Street protestors who assault the hapless Kenneth Park ( Bobby Lee ) near the beginning of A Very Harold and Kumar 3-D Christmas are a sight gag: an excuse to restage James Caan’s tollbooth execution in The Godfather (1972) with hucked eggs in lieu of bullets. “They’ve lost their…