Kurt Loder Reviews Men in Black III and Moonrise Kingdom

Men in Black III reenlists the talents of
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, writes Kurt Loder, and it’s good to
have them back, togged out in their black suits and shades and
riding herd over America’s vast alien-creature community. But what
really energizes this third installment of the franchise is Josh
Brolin, who plays a younger incarnation of Jones, and seems to have
inhaled the older actor’s grumpy essence and to be exuding it
through his pores. It’s a flawless comic performance.

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, meanwhile, which
opened the Cannes Film Festival last week, is a movie whose
pleasures are largely formal. Anderson acolytes will welcome
another demonstration of his deadpan visual strategies—the
locked-down shots facing off on split screens, the camera panning
slowly past a series of rooms to introduce some of the
characters—and his detached narrative style. Those who find the
director’s work flawed by preciousness, however, Loder writes, may
grow impatient well before the movie reaches the 90-minute
mark.