Cross-dressing comic actor Tyler Perry may not be the best choice for a cinematic reboot of formulaic author James Patterson’s forensic-psychologist super-detective franchise (Morgan Freeman has played Cross twice), but he certainly is the worst. Madea chasing bad guys would have been more believable, not to mention less painful to watch. This dismal, disjointed mess ...
A worthy adaptation by Cary Fukunaga of the Charlotte Brontë classic often considered to be one of the first examples of feminist Western literature. It focuses, as have most of its 27 filmed versions, on the time the young title governess spends at the gloomy Thornfield Hall, where things go bump in the night, and ...
Okay, I took some flak recently for going easy on a couple of rom-coms. (I just can’t help it—sniffle—they’re so fulfilling!) Well, it gets worse, because here comes an endorsement of a chick flick. As you might surmise, this distaff Hangover is about a wedding; more specifically about the mismatched mess of misfits chosen by ...
Someone blows up the Kremlin and frames the IMF, resulting in the activation of the title protocol, shutting down the entire organization and leaving Ethan (Tom Cruise) and co. (Paula Patton, Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner) to save the world and clear the group’s name, all without support. It’s the best M:I flick of the ...
The invading Americans once banned anything related to traditional Hawaiian language and culture, but it is flourishing now, thanks to efforts such as the Kamehameha Schools Song Contest, in which thousands of students compete with songs written in the islands’ own language. The film follows a handful of “student directors,” as they prepare and rehearse ...
The sailboat carrying a quintet of thirtysomethings off for a jaunt through the Bermuda Triangle is overturned in a freak storm, but they manage nonetheless to board a passing Ghost Ship. Natch. They’re not the first ones there. Or more accurately, this is not the first time they’ve boarded it. Sisyphean story (think Groundhog Day ...
A geeky, often bullied 12-year-old (Kodi Smit-McPhee⎯The Road) is befriended and then defended by his mysterious young neighbor (Chloe Moretz⎯Kick-Ass) who only comes out at night and has unusual appetites. Call it an antidote to Twilight. This character-driven horror flick is a toned-down remake (by Matt Reeves⎯Cloverfield) of Sweden’s darker Let the Right One In, ...
Julian Schnabel’s controversial 50-year saga about four women and their influence on the Palestinian complexities, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Rula Jebreal, is a noble effort. But the director’s dogged adaptation (nearly a transcription) and flat storytelling results in something that’s more baffling than it is cathartic. Fine cast includes Hiam Abbass, Alexander Siddig ...
I read somewhere that poor judgment in investing is what’s forcing Nicolas Cage to appear in cheap hooey like this. Sad, but preferable to believing that it’s poor judgment in role selection. During the Crusades, Nic and Ron Perlman are tasked with delivering a young maybe-witch (a good Claire Foy) through a dark forest to ...
84-year-old Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge never got an education, having spent his youth as a Mau Mau fighting for Kenyan independence (for which he was awarded ten years in the camps). So when in 2002 Kenya declared free education for all, he shows up for school. On his side is a young schoolteacher (an excellent Naomie ...
I chuckle at those who gush that this vapid, morally idiotic, unabashedly mindless mess is the “best Transformers movie yet!” There was a good one? It does have a marginally more cohesive plot than T2 (hardly difficult), starting with the intriguing idea that one of the Apollo missions was actually to check out an alien ...
A vaguely Taliban man is captured and tortured by US forces, but escapes when the prison van taking him to an “advanced interrogation techniques” facility in wintertime Poland overturns. Starving and freezing, he wanders through the woods killing (lest he be killed) all he encounters to get food (mother’s milk at one point). Not everyone ...
A rusty Mel Gibson takes a break from drunken anti-Semitism to make this disappointing, less-than-thrilling revenge thriller (his first film in eight years), adapting (cramming) a six-hour BBC miniseries into a single gloomy, poorly paced movie. The twenty-something daughter of a Boston cop is shotgunned on his front porch. The shooters are initially thought to ...
An alien-invasion saga boasting a character-based, well-written narrative with adequate acting that reportedly cost less than $20,000 to make? Right. Apparently a NASA probe carrying samples back from the Jovian moon Europa crashed in Mexico, soon after which these giant squid-tree-thingies, kind of like LOTR’s Ents, except really mean when attacked, began to appear. The ...
Indifferently directed hokum produced and written by M. Night Shyamalan has five thinly drawn characters trapped in a stalled elevator. One of them is the title character, who injures or kills one of the others each time the lights go out (the movie’s most interesting moments). Little atmosphere or suspense for a stalled-elevator flick, it’s ...
L.A. Frenchman Thierry Guetta one day picked up a video camera and began to document the inherently impermanent street art movement. He traveled the world recording and frequently assisting the likes of Shepard Fairey, Invader, and the legendary anonymous Brit known only as Banksy. He said he was making a movie, but it turns out ...
A cop (Channing Tatum) is assigned to the same working-class Queens neighborhood where he grew up in the projects, and by the way killed a couple of crack addicts. The deaths were covered up by the police because his cop dad had just been killed in the line of duty. Now someone who Knows has ...
The reason this flashy, witless, Michael Bay-produced action/adventure/romance/sci-fi/teen drama/superhero/monster movie manages to cram in so much is that it’s cobbled together from the best bits of a dozen better movies. Mainly Twilight, substituting moody teenage aliens for moody teenage vampires. Yet still it fails. Mysterious hunk (of wood) Alex Pettyfer, the new guy in school, ...
The plot in this slow-burn, deliberately paced art house Euro-thriller is not new: A cold-blooded, soul-weary professional assassin preparing for One Last Job is inspired through his interactions with a priest and a hooker to re-examine his hollow life and begins the slow journey back to humanity. But (co-producer) George Clooney, acting against type, puts ...
A mad German scientist kidnaps three tourists, one a Japanese. He then offers them a quaint AV lecture on what he plans to do with them, namely join them, mouth-to-anus, to create the title creature. Then he does so. If this seems remotely entertaining to you, get some help. The outrageousness of the concept alone ...
Natalie Portman portrays Emilia, a woman mired in grief over the death of her baby daughter at the age of three days. She’s also having problems relating to her young stepson, which are not being helped by the machinations of her husband’s first wife. Yes, Emilia is a home wrecker, the other woman, and is ...
A ham-fisted editing together of the first few episodes of Steven Seagal’s low-rent TV show, a formulaic cop opera imitating far better programs. You know, the ones with the wise, middle-aged team leader (usually an over-the-hill movie actor) guiding his/her band of young but talented undercover cops. There’s little cohesion (or logic, or intelligence), and ...
Concert footage from the 1981 Rolling Stones tour, directed for some reason by Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude; Being There; Shampoo). The brief, soundless glimpses backstage only served to make me wish I were watching a documentary, perhaps on the state of the “Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World” at that time, already ...
Hotheaded and, it has to be said, gullible god of thunder (Chris Hemsworth) reignites an ancient war in Asgard, whereupon his dad, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), strips him of his powers and cast him down to live among the mortals of New Mexico, one of whom is this cute scientist (Natalie Portman). Being SFX-driven “entertainment,” expect ...
A mixed quintet of squabbling city/country kids is descended upon by the title witch/nanny (writer Emma Thompson) and, as in the first film, are taught the values of good behavior (while engaging in plentiful poo jokes). We’ve seen this before, and it would not especially impress were it not for the good writing, acting (Thompson, ...
The problem with being a sequel to a film better than anyone thought it would be is being revealed as the film they expected in the first place. But though it lacks the surprise factor, this sloppy seconds raunch-fest remake does what it set out to do. Gross you out. The sleaze level is cranked ...
Now, I realize that films take a while to get to Japanese screens, but 1948? Kidding. It’s being shown here now to capitalize on the wild success of Black Swan, for which it was a major inspiration. And that’s a good idea. It deals with a fictitious ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale ...
Director J.J. Abrams’s (Mission Impossible III, Star Trek, lots of TV) new film conjures up memories of Steven Spielberg’s early works, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or ET (but without the cute). In fact, you’d call it a Spielberg rip-off if Spielberg himself weren’t the producer. It’s 1979. Six young kids having a ...
A father and son (Rainn Wilson & Devin Brochu) paralyzed with grief at the recent loss of Mom are descended upon by the title character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an antisocial headbanger whose unconventional manners and anarchic antics eventually (somehow) pull them out of their life-threatening funk. Kind of like a violent, foul-mouthed, pothead Nanny McPhee with ...
Documentary for the rock cognoscenti about the title band, its personnel changes, its successes, its brief lapses (just one non-fatal OD) and eventual maturation. The band began with the sudden end of Nirvana, when drummer Dave Grohl picked up a guitar and decided to become the front man of a new group. Since he was ...
Aron Ralston, a cocky rock climber (James Franco) heads out for a solo crawl through the canyons of Utah, neglects to tell anyone where he’s going, and then…oops! He falls down a crevasse and gets his hand trapped under a boulder. He then spends the title time period trying to get out, ultimately Doing What’s ...
A young man struggling to pay his dad’s medical bills assumes the identity of an OD victim he had overheard talking about a lucrative business deal. But he’s a tad dismayed to learn upon arriving at the appointed gothic mansion that he has apparently signed up to participate in an elaborate, circular game of Russian ...
Bunch of cheesy alien space ships start slurping up the citizens of Los Angeles while a group of extraordinarily hollow nobodies in a penthouse tries to avoid being ingested. This impossibly derivative alien-invasion mess is from Greg and Colin Strause, the former SFX wonks who brought us Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. You’d think they could ...
It’s a welcome thing in this age of overproduced CG pirates, werewolves, vampires, mutants and robots to come across a compact little indie film that generates palpable dread, escalating suspense and even a few dark chuckles with only three actors, basically one set and a tight script. Short-film director J. Blakeson’s assured debut feature, an ...
No one ever accused stage and screen director Julie Taymor of lacking inventiveness or boldness. (Titus, stunning; Across the Universe, gag.) But perhaps The Tempest, Shakespeare’s contemplative farewell play, could have used a bit less bombast. That said, this is worth seeing for the cast alone. In a brilliant move, Taymor has pulled a gender ...
Prequels and “origin” movies are what you make when you’ve run out of ideas but are told by the accounting office to do something—anything—to reboot a profitable franchise. This one examines the origins of Magneto and Professor X, with Michael Fassbender playing the young Erik Lehnsherr and James McAvoy the young Charles Francis Xavier. Kevin ...
When a movie is this rotten on so many levels it’s difficult to decide where to start. Catherine Hardwicke, who inflicted upon us Twilight, brings her interspecies dating problems to the Grimm Brothers’ classic tale, making the wolf a werewolf, creating a love triangle among the title character (Amanda Seyfried) and a pair of hunky ...
If this smart and effective comedy/drama is anything to go by, perhaps no longer being an A-list movie star has given Michael Douglas greater opportunities to practice the craft of acting. In it he plays a divorced, formerly rich and famous owner of a car dealership empire, a 60-year-old charmer who has since been indicted ...
You have to wonder about anyone who would want to make a flick this despicable, let alone remake one (Roger Ebert famously awarded the 1978 original zero stars). Comely female writer renting a backwoods cabin is raped and beaten by a quintet of local knuckle-draggers, but later returns to wreak upon them some arguably worse ...
As near as I can figure, this is Iceland showing that it can make splatter flicks as crappy as Hollywood’s. Or maybe it’s an attempt to sabotage tourism. A boat carrying a group of stereotypical tourists is disabled at sea. Rescuers appear in the form of an inbred family of fishbilly whalers. “Rescuers” apparently the ...
A quintet of noted documentarians brings the 2005 bestseller to the screen, with predictably mixed results. Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me) does the chapter “A Roshanda by Any Other Name,” about whether one’s name has any bearing on success in life. A tad facetious. Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) takes on “Pure Corruption,” about ...
An Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) near-miss that’s nonetheless an intriguing sit, at least until the Hollywood-ish third act. Up to that point, it’s an interesting examination of deception, perception and jealousy. A Toronto woman (Julianne Moore) suspects her admittedly flirty husband (Liam Neeson) of cheating, and hires a call girl (Amanda Seyfried) to ...
This ruminative, conceptual documentary by Danish director Michael Madsen on storing nuclear waste is essentially a string of questions; appropriately so, considering the mind-boggling, physical, moral and philosophical conundra it addresses. How do you store tons (250,000 so far) of radioactive material that will remain lethal for 100,000 years? If you bury it, do you ...
This movie will make you mad. Okay, madder. It’s as though James Bond was this time cruelly defeated and the greedy, warped villains won, taking over Wall Street and governments as well as financial rating and regulatory agencies, and even corrupting academia in order to attain untold wealth while remaining beyond the law. I don‘t ...
It’s hard to make one of the most feared warriors in the history of airborne combat seem boring, but this dreary, Hollywood-ish, English-language, German-made melodrama takes a pretty good rat-a-tat at it. This lifeless movie attempts to return some humanity to the lethal ace (played by a callow Matthias Schweighofer) by disingenuously portraying him as ...
You know, they’re going to make these things as long as you keep buying tickets. The first movie—inspired by a Disneyland ride—surprised everyone, and a $equel was inevitable. But the SFX-fuelled yo-ho-ho is wearing a bit thin, creativity-wise, in this fourth installment. Consists of about a half-dozen witless set pieces strung together, and there’s a ...
Title notwithstanding, this is more a moody revenge melodrama with a few car chases and knife fights than it is an action thriller. Dwayne Johnson (referred to only as “Driver”) winds up ten in the pen, hops into a vintage muscle car (cool) and purposefully goes after his brother’s murderers. Billy Bob Thornton (“Cop”) is ...
An examination of the real effects of globalization by people on six continents who advocate a halt to the ongoing multinationalization of the planet and a move toward more human-scale efforts, stressing localization instead. The filmmakers (who should probably have hired a narrator) point out that the explosion in big business and international banking has ...
Title refers to a rare condition called “anesthetic awareness,” which causes sufferers to appear unconscious but remain aware while enjoying surgical procedures. In this suspense-free medical thriller, Hayden Christensen, who is arguably more interesting zonked out than awake, does a lot of scenery chewing through flashbacks, and Jessica Alba frets prettily in the waiting room. ...
TV Tokyo and later Reuters “reporter” Kyoko Gasha turned her back on job and husband and fled to New York City to free herself of Japan’s sexist, seniority-based employment system—making a minor name for herself in the Big Apple. Now she calls herself a “documentary filmmaker,” and offers this film to support that claim, despite ...
A young woman (the ubiquitous Amanda Seyfried) discovers hidden in a wall in Verona below what’s purportedly (Romeo and) Juliet’s balcony a 50-year-old letter from a lovesick teenager. She answers it and subsequently meets the now-elderly woman (an inevitable Vanessa Redgrave). They and the woman’s priggish grandson then set out to locate her love once ...
It’s a rare film that can mesmerize you with beauty while it fills you with dread. Darren Aronofsky’s intellectually intriguing, superbly twisted, high-art companion piece to his low-art The Wrestler shows that while the hermetic world of ballet may be a lot prettier than pro wrestling, it’s not a bit less brutal. This psycho-horror-drama is ...
Formulaic horror flick has six one-dimensional twentysomethings venturing into an Australian jungle and getting serially possessed/infected/eaten by a pointy-toothed evil entity that turns them into fast, strong and hungry zombies. You’d think the bloody-fanged bunny rabbit they caught the first night might have tipped them off. Don’t these kids ever go to splatter flicks? Necks ...
With the cops breathing down his neck, an injured bank robber (Clayne Crawford) charmingly lies his way into the home of a mild-mannered man (David Hyde Pierce) preparing for a dinner party, but before long he’s looking at jail time as a reasonable alternative. This smart, twist-ridden little indie then becomes a tense cat-and-mouse game, ...
An American professor in Berlin for a biotechnology conference is involved in an auto accident. When he emerges from a coma four days later, his wife doesn’t recognize him and worse, there’s a guy at the hotel with her who says he’s him and can prove it. I guess Liam Neeson liked being an action/suspense ...
I like it that music documentaries teach me stuff I didn’t know. Usually. I realize it’s churlish to criticize a nice, modestly talented kid, but I feel obliged to try. Because this fake movie is pure marketing, aimed solely at his squealing fans, from awww-inspiring baby pix to his grassroots “discovery.” His Youtube-fueled rise to ...
When a pair of teenage half-siblings conceived through the artificial insemination of their married (to each other) mothers using sperm from the same donor seek to meet their birth father, the dynamics in their functional-as-any, upper-middle-class household are shifted. Mother Nic (Annette Bening), a doctor and the alpha female, resents it when the guy (Mark ...
Fans of experimental cinema that have a spare 2:19 might want to absorb this gorgeously filmed, intricately detailed effort by Belgian filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael. Others, well… It’s nothing if not all-inclusive, invoking concepts from the butterfly effect to quantum physics, parallel worlds, alternate realities, divergences within divergences, and the Cartesian concept that choosing not ...
Okay, I get what writer/director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) was trying to do. His masterful send-up of ’90s comic books and video games is fast-moving, visually arresting, bizarre, outlandish and absurd, and it takes place in a reality governed by the laws of Nintendo. But to enjoy a satire, any satire, ...
A wheelchair-bound club scratcher and skid-row denizen street-named Delicious D (Christopher Thornton) discovers one day that he can heal the sick by the laying on of hands. Naturally he blows off the soup-kitchen priest (Mark Ruffalo) who wants to use his gift for the church and instead joins an evil punk-rock band named “Healapalooza” (really) ...
Ordinary documentary about an extraordinary high-school basketball team, the Fighting Irish of St. Vincent-St. Mary in Akron, Ohio. Kristopher Belman’s filmmaking may be pedestrian, but his insight and timing couldn’t be better. He caught on to the skills of a quintet of kid B-ball players while they were still in the eighth grade, one of ...
In 1944, in an attempt to fool the Red Cross and convince the outside world that the death camps were just a rumor, the Nazis made a film about how nice it was to live at Theresienstadt, their show camp for “Jews who would be missed.” Inmates attended concerts and the theater, strolled about, played ...
Natalie, Natalie, Natalie. Don’t you realize that after you win a Best Actress Oscar (for Black Swan), you no longer have to appear in these lame romantic comedies opposite vacuous pretty boys like Ashton Kutcher? Two attractive people who have known each other since childhood agree to become “friends with benefits,” and just have sex ...
A lonely eight-year-old Australian girl named Mary Dinkle one day randomly writes to Max Horovitz, an obese, 44-year-old Jewish New Yorker with social issues, asking to be pen pals, thus beginning a unique 20-year friendship. This hilarious and heartbreaking claymation by the Oscar-winning Adam Elliot touches on such atypical subjects as death, suicide, alcoholism, and ...
If you’re as tired as I am with happily-ever-after rom-coms, this unflinching autopsy of a decaying marriage will seem like a breath of if not exactly fresh, then refreshingly real air. Director Derek Cianfrance’s debut film is not a whole lot of fun, but every frame feels genuine. Nothing unusual happens, and that’s what makes ...
Apparently, through the eons, the inhabitants of Mars have somehow forgotten how to parent, assigning the task to “nanny-bots.” But these machines just can’t get the TLC part right, so the dystopian matriarchy that now runs the planet has taken to kidnapping good mothers from Earth and extracting their “mom-ness,” with which they program their ...
Zach Snyder, who has previously inflicted upon us 300 and Watchmen, this time works from his own script, ripping off filmmakers too numerous to mention in his efforts to cram in every possible geeky fanboy fantasy without a single storytelling thread to bind them together. A young woman is committed by her evil guardian to ...
I’m not sure Michael Winterbottom was the best director to bring this bleak pulp novel by Jim Thompson to the screen. It’s about a ’50s west Texas deputy sheriff—a polite, soft-spoken, even intellectual guy—who happens to be a psychopath. Not only does he kill, but he kills those he loves, without guilt or conscience, and ...
As I’ve asked before, why can’t films aimed at entertaining little kiddies include even the slightest degree of educational value? The only thing this crappy waste of celluloid has to do with the classic 18th-century social satire by Jonathan Swift, who must be spinning in his grave like a break-dancer, is a big guy (an ...
This direct-to-DVD Bruce Willis flick might have been viewed as a mildly clever blending of the high-school-angst and noir genres if this had not been done before, and with far greater style and wit, in 2005’s Brick. A nerdy aspiring scribe for the school paper writes an article about the student body president that amounts ...
One might wonder why Julien Temple (The Filth and the Fury Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten; Glastonbury) would choose the obscure ’70s pre-punk band Dr. Feelgood as the subject of his next rock doc. The band comprised four ne’er-do-wells (including songwriter/guitarist Wilko Johnson and lead singer Lee Brilleaux) from refinery-infested Canvey Island in the ...
Movie postponed until further notice. LA-based Frenchman Thierry Guetta picked up a video camera one day and began to document the inherently impermanent street art movement. He traveled the world recording and frequently assisting the likes of Shepard Fairey, Space Invader and the legendary anonymous Brit known only as Banksy. He said he was making ...
What is it about Japanese directors working in English? Does the high level of traditional nonverbal communication among Japanese people make for lousy actors and, by extension, an inability in directors to recognize good acting from bad? Because this happens time and time again. (I’m not talking about the separate “cute” problem here.) Some ambitious ...
Fans of Sofia Coppola will find this graceful but static portrait of an unimaginative and unmoored movie star (Stephen Dorff) to be thoughtful and accurate, but its languid pace and level of pretention will bore the socks off everyone else. I realize what she’s doing, but couldn’t find it in myself to care about the ...
Movie postponed until further notice. Big, stupid, loud and lazy alien-invasion piece of crap has Aaron Eckhart (who should know better) leading a squad of Marines in the defense of the title city against computer-generated alien spaceships and warrior thingies. The story’s not difficult to follow, since it basically doesn’t exist. (So why does it ...
Mark Wahlberg is excellent as the title pugilist in this based-on-real-people story. He plays a promising boxer named Micky whose hopes for a title fight are constantly frustrated by his self-involved mother’s poor management and his ex-pug, cokehead brother’s poor training. This barely functioning status quo is disrupted when his sweet, tough-talking new girlfriend encourages ...
What if mankind “solved” the problem of disease and aging by raising clones of each person in orphanage-like farms for the purpose of future organ transplants? This is the premise of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, which dips in and out of the short lives of three such “donors” approaching with resignation and melancholy their “harvest” time ...
Movie postponed until further notice. Letter to Katherine Heigl: Knocked Up was a hit, but enough with the bland rom-coms. You have shown signs you can act, but people are starting to have difficulty envisioning you as anything but a plucky blonde with a great smile in cloying, annoying fluff like this. Thank you. “Plot”: ...
Movie postponed until further notice. I believe I said this about the first two Jackass movies: if this film fails to offend you even once, I don’t ever want to meet you. Johnny Knoxville and his mob of moronic, masochistic man-boys are back with a new bunch of sanity-defying stunts aimed at causing themselves maximum ...
In 1982, Jacques Tati’s daughter inherited the screenplay for what the late great French comedic actor intended to be his final film. Eventually she made the very wise decision to give it to Sylvain Chomet, animator of the marvelous The Triplets of Belleville, who has brilliantly recreated Tati, right down to the too-short pants and ...
The eclectic Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited) applies his dryly humorous, visually arresting style to the field of animation with this smart little stop-motion jewel from a story by Roald Dahl. The title fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a retired chicken thief, now a ...
In this lightweight yet insightful road movie for grown-ups by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road), a newly pregnant couple (played with genuine chemistry by The Office’s John Krasinski and SNL’s Maya Rudolph) are musing upon what kind of world they want for their child. They visit a crude former co-worker in Arizona (Allison Janney), ...
The creator of an online chat room is, unbeknownst to the other four members he allows in, a suicide-obsessed teen sociopath intent on manipulating one of them into, um, logging off. It’s a mildly interesting premise if that’s what floats your boat, but director Hideo Nakata (Ringu), probably envisioning filming in London and in English ...
The Coen Brothers’ remake of the 1969 John Wayne epic is superior in every way: stronger acting, greater attention to period detail, more faithful to the 1968 novel by Charles Portis, a tighter script and more humor (though the last is so low-key you’ll have to watch for it). The real pleasure here is the ...
Movie postponed until further notice. As this is supposedly based on the true-life experiences of a California priest sent to the Vatican to study with a master exorcist, you’re not going to get any green projectile vomiting or spinning heads. But you’re not going to get much else, either, save for watching Anthony Hopkins trot ...
This is a somewhat sanitized (but still suitably raunchy) account of the rise and disintegration of the pioneering mid-’70s all-girl rock band noted for launching the career of Joan Jett (played by Kristen Stewart, who can actually act when not working opposite shirtless vampires and werewolves). The main character, however, is not Jett but lead ...
Disney applies its formidable history of watering down traditional fairy tales (they say it’s the last) to the story of Rapunzel, a plucky young lass held captive in a tower by a witch whose youth is preserved by the girl’s magical (and, at 25 meters, plentiful) hair. It is not until Rapunzel’s 18th birthday and ...
If you’re looking for a conventional swords-and-sandals epic, keep looking. But for thinking moviegoers, this film by Alejandro Amenabar (The Sea Inside, Abre Los Ojos), about the historical development of ideas and the age-old struggle between science and superstition, plays better than Troy. The story revolves around Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), a female philosopher, mathematician and ...
It’s an admirable thing in this age of megabuck blockbusters to be able to make a movie on a shoestring budget (this one was supposedly made for £45). Basically it’s a few days in the life of the freshly minted title zombie, as he shambles around London looking for people to eat. But low-budget moviemaking ...
On a picturesque Venice-bound train, a mild-mannered American schoolteacher (Johnny Depp) meets “by chance” a femme fatale (Angelina Jolie) trying to elude both the cops and the mob. Through endless plot machinations, she sets him up as a fall guy. Or not. Now, I like a good mystery. I enjoy picking up on dropped clues ...
This story of the struggle to end Britain’s participation in the slave trade spans a period between 1782, when idealistic MP William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) first introduced a bill to that effect, and 1807, when the abolitionists finally won out. It’s a noble theme, and though the storytelling is choppy in spots, the movie is ...
If you’ve been under a rock for the last month and immune to the buzz this life-affirming film has been generating, here’s the story: King George VI of England (Colin Firth) ascended to the throne only reluctantly when his brother abdicated in 1936 to marry an American divorcee. George Albert (“Bertie”) and his wife (Helena ...
Two “interviews” with Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring challenged for the first time the use of untested toxic pesticides in the US. The quote marks are because Carson, who has been called the patron saint of the modern environmental movement, died of breast cancer in 1964, and this is a recreation by writer ...
Young, relentlessly cheerful producer (Rachel McAdams) hires out-to-pasture veteran newsman Harrison Ford to co-anchor (with Diane Keaton) a fourth-rated morning TV show. But his disdain for senseless banter is evident, and ratings continue to drop. Then Rachel starts to chip away at his irascibility and gets creative. Good chemistry among the cast, and it doesn’t ...
The Coen Brothers continue to defy categorization, this time applying their profound philosophical inquiry to a comedy of discomfort about Jewish Midwestern life in the ’60s. Physics professor Larry Gropnik’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) hopes for tenure are being sabotaged, his wife is leaving him for a friend, his babe neighbor has taken to nude sunbathing, and ...
Though few would agree with Denmark’s Lars Von Trier’s self-assessment that he is the greatest director of all time, he is undoubtedly one of the most innovative working today (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark). So it’s sad to watch him go so completely off the rails with crap like this. It’s a shame ...
I should recuse myself from reviewing any more Narnia flicks (although after this bomb, it’s unlikely any more of the seven C.S. Lewis books will reach the screen). I blame this on an extreme case of not giving a horse’s patootie. I also object to heavy-handed religious proselytizing couched in stories for children (yes, yes, ...
If you don’t know who Hunter S. Thompson was, you need to see this artfully assembled bio-doc. If you do, you still need to see it. This gun-toting, drug-crazed inebriate was also a patriot and a dynamic political writer who made up his own set of rules, filtering reality through an innovative kind of participatory ...
Movie postponed until further notice. Clint Eastwood continues his refusal to cater to the multiplex crowd with this intelligent and haunting (and non-religious—no easy feat) look at what might await us after we shuffle off this mortal coil. The film centers on three individuals—a French TV journalist who almost died in the Indian Ocean tsunami ...
Adrian Grenier, who’s famous for playing a guy who’s famous for being famous on TV’s Entourage, noticed that one of the paparazzi stalking him was just a kid, 13-year-old Austin Visschedyk. So he turned the tables, as well as his own camera, on the boy to fashion this fascinating look at the uneasy if symbiotic ...
The original was a nice application of the amateur-video Blair Witch technique to the haunted house genre. It was basically a string of “Boo!” moments, and the ending was scary. But you could replace the “2” here with “more of,” as this is closer to a remake than a sequel. (BTW, it’s a prequel, too—don’t ...
A-listers Reese Witherspoon (a pro softball player), Paul Rudd (a financial fall guy about to be federally indicted) and Owen Wilson (a Washington Nationals ace pitcher and king of the one-night stand) help writer/director James L. Brooks (The Simpsons, Terms of Endearment, As Good As It Gets) elevate this amiable if unremarkable love triangle to ...
I’ve never much cared for Ben Affleck’s acting, but he has apparently paid attention to what was going on behind the camera, and is emerging as a competent director (Gone Baby Gone). His clear, fluid style focuses on character, and he can create tension. Consider the squirm-inducing scene involving a tattoo and three people having ...
Incredibly cheesy take on the old devil-at-the-gates theme, in which a small, eclectic band of people in a house/saloon/shopping center fight off monsters/zombies/aliens/dark forces that have already eaten/turned/abducted the rest of the town/country/planet. This one’s probably worse than most for starring Hayden Christensen as the hero. The bad thingies this time are these Dark People ...
The leader of a struggling rock ’n’ roll band (writer/director Rob Stefaniuk) is unnerved by the fact that his musicians, starting with babe bassist Jessica Paré (outstanding), are turning into vampires—but delighted by the resultant charisma boost. This, however, attracts the attention of vampire killer Eddie Van Helsing (a nearly inevitable Malcolm McDowell). Good imagery, ...
Some iconic movie characters should stay in retirement or, in Gordon Gekko’s case, prison. In this sequel to Wall Street, Gekko (Michael Douglas) has done his time for the crime, and has come back to the Street to preach to us about the 2008 crash. He’s a watered-down version of the 1987 Gekko we loved ...
This is not so much a movie as it is one of those “opportunities” to watch A-list actors, in this case aging ones, having fun at work. Kind of a geriatric Ocean’s Eleven. Or Space Cowboys with spies. Or The Expendables with good acting. The plot is simple: a quartet of retired CIA black operatives ...
A working-class British woman’s (Michelle Williams) husband and young son are killed in a massive terrorist attack on a soccer stadium while she is at home in the arms of a neighbor (Ewan McGregor) in this thriller/romance/psychological portrait. The movie doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, and ends up collapsing under the ...
If Super Size Me caused you to give up eating in fast-food joints, this activist documentary may make you give up eating altogether. It’s informative, entertaining and scarier than any horror flick. Did you know that the vast majority of the “choices” we find in our supermarkets are provided by four monstrous agribusiness corporations? (USA; ...
Certified bohemian Jeff Johnson works his way south on a sailboat, hooks up with Easter Island’s first female surfer, and takes her to Chile, where they retrace the 1968 ascent of the treacherous Corcovado—the mountain’s sole summiting. To say Jeff’s a free spirit doesn’t even begin to describe this shoestring adventurer. This beautifully filmed (cinematography ...
An angry father takes matters into his own hands when his family’s killer is let off easy. Snore. As the plot becomes increasingly unfocused and the disbelief suspension more difficult, sleazeballs start getting bumped off in a variety of manners bordering on torture porn. But the probable killer, the father (a colossally unconvincing Gerard Butler), ...
After the first ten minutes, my hopes for magic in the pairing of director Michel Gondry with actor/writer Seth Rogen were dashed by the crushing tedium of this patchy mishmash. It’s the dumbest superhero film since Catwoman. Or even Daredevil. Fanboys will not be pleased with this desecration of the TV series that introduced Bruce ...
I had hoped for better from costars Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis and director Todd Phillips (The Hangover) than this desperate, mildly amusing, odd-couple road trip. Uptight Downey loses all his ID and money in Atlanta and is forced to hitch a ride to LA with annoyingly friendly goofball Galifianakis. The problem is that ...
What? Is the overwrought horror-thriller some kind of station of the cross for declining movie stars? A newly single father (Kevin Costner) for no discernable reason moves his two kids to a big old house in the country. Mainly I guess because that’s where movies like this happen. Daughter (Ivana Baquero—Pan’s Labyrinth) discovers an Indian ...
The biggest question surrounding Time’s Person of the Year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is how such an antisocial wonk was able to create this phenomenal new social milieu. Ah, but the fact that he didn’t quite do it alone is the crux of this fascinating, frightening, funny (and fictionalized) film. The subject matter is inherently ...
OK, it’s not about the music. It’s about the backstage logistical, legal, social and personal obstacles that Bethel, NY, town president Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) had to overcome to bring this generation-defining concert to his town. Make that “background,” as “backstage” implies actually hearing some music. A problem is that while Martin is a gifted ...
Rodrigo Garcia (Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Nine Lives) explores with compassion, insight and heartrending realism the lives and complex emotions of three women (Naomi Watts, Annette Bening and Kerry Washington, all excellent) affected in one way or another by the impact of adoption. The three tales eventually connect, for a ...
A guy (Vince Vaughn) espies the wife (Winona Ryder) of his best friend/business partner (Kevin James) canoodling with another man, but hesitates to tell him because the two guys are at a crucial stage in the development of their product (an electric engine that makes sounds like a muscle car). Really. So where’s the dilemma? ...
Not since Speed have I seen a film so effectively put the motion into a motion picture. A pair of railroad men, a veteran and a rookie (Denzel Washington and Chris Pine), are tasked with catching up to and stopping a driverless 800-meter train barreling along at 110kph before it hits a curve in a ...
A neurotic film director who gets visions takes a crew to Transylvania to recreate, in the same locations, an unfinished film from the ’20s about a cursed gypsy, the cast and crew of which mysteriously disappeared. Odd, mostly derivative things start happening on the set. Members of the crew go violently insane; others die progressively ...
In this almost serious approach to the ethical questions raised by corporate-funded gene-splicing, a pair of brilliant but impatient bio-engineers (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) illegally mix a little human DNA with that of several animals, and produce a rapidly maturing, vaguely humanoid, not-quite-cute thingy that they come to look upon as a daughter (not ...
I don’t think this kind of direct-to-video horror-thriller crap is what Sarah Michelle Gellar had in mind when she quit TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer in order to seek more interesting projects. A woman blissfully married to a perfect husband must share their home with husband’s seriously bad-ass parolee brother. A freak but picturesque head-on ...
Eric Bishop (a spot-on Steve Evets) is a disillusioned middle-aged Manchester postal worker who has inflicted upon himself more than the usual share of life’s hardships. His two teenage stepsons are on the cusp of criminality, and he still feels guilty about the wife he abandoned years ago (Stephanie Bishop). His friends try to cheer ...
Somali supermodel Waris Dirie (played by Ethiopian supermodel Liya Kebede) had a hard time getting to where she is. Circumcised at 3, sold at 13, a teen street urchin in London. She was eventually discovered by a fashion photographer and catapulted to the big time, and has since become a celebrity activist and UN ambassador ...
If you were to go wading through the plot of this two-hour Christina Aguilera music video, you wouldn’t get your toenails wet. And the storyline was old before they invented talkies. Aguilera plays a small-town Iowa girl who heads for El Lay to make it in the singing and dancing biz. She wheedles a job ...
This is a hard one to call. An average teen (Aaron Johnson) decides to costume up and fight injustice, and finds allies of a like mind (Chloe Moretz as “Hit Girl” is a young actress to watch). This morally murky mayhem has a decidedly non-comic-book, ultra-violent edge to it that some will relish but others ...
The title phenom went from starving teenage graffiti artist to world-renowned millionaire painter in just a few years. He always knew he’d be famous; he just didn’t realize that it would devour him, and he flamed out with a heroin overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. This compelling tribute combines informal interviews (shelved ...
The dazzling first few minutes of this sequel to the cultish, not-that-great 1982 CG groundbreaker almost changed my attitude toward 3D. Almost. Then it settled down to a lot of repetitious Frisbee-throwing and motorbike racing. It’s interesting that Jeff Bridges plays opposite a facial performance-capture version of himself 28 years earlier. For a while. Then ...
A Stanford-bound young man (Zac Efron) drops out of society after a car accident that kills his younger brother, and takes a job at the cemetery so he can play catch with the boy’s ghost each evening at twilight. He himself was flatlined for a few seconds, see, and he can see dead people. Omigod! ...
Our family-friendly ogre, unhappy with not being scary anymore, is tricked by the impish Rumple-stiltskin into entering an alternate universe, one in which he has never met Fiona or Donkey, and where Rumpel is the ruler (like Back to the Future, only not funny). Only a true love’s kiss can put things right, but in ...
Woody Allen returns to Manhattan and his angst-ridden roots with this fun farce about happiness and accepting it when it comes. The main character is a 60-ish misanthrope named Boris Yellnikoff, a brilliant nuclear physicist once “almost nominated for a Nobel Prize.” Boris is played by Larry David (creator of Seinfeld and the writer/star of ...
Apparently, the witty and carefree forest-dwelling thief we know and love, who flirted with Maid Marion and amusingly confounded the Nottingham Sheriff, didn’t buckle his swash sufficiently or something for director Ridley Scott. So instead we have this turgid, joyless, big-deal “prequel” to the myth of the main merry man, in which a lowly archer ...
Jeez, Steven, if you insist on continuing to make (and write) movies, even direct-to-video ones, couldn’t you exert the tiniest effort to make a new one? Or use your own voice? This ultra-cheapie throwaway, again filmed in Romania but this time taking place there, is so generic-Seagal that I have no idea what it’s about, ...
This delightful bit of elderly escapism is a tour de force for Joan Plowright (77 when this was made in 2005). Dame Joan plays an elderly woman seeking a bit of independence from her daughter in Scotland. She books, sight unseen, a room in a rundown London residential hotel for people at a certain stage ...
Latest effort by the tasteful guys who gave us the Crank movies explores a degenerate world that has merged porn and punishment into a lethal online game, delicately titled Slayer, that involves avatars of death-row convicts, controlled by brain implants, killing to win their freedom (with the most successful gaining acclaim from a bloodthirsty, pay-per-view ...
In this direct-to-video American remake of a 2001 German flick, volunteers for a sociological experiment are divided into two groups, prisoners and guards, and placed in a prison environment. All they have to do to earn $14,000 each is abide by a set of rules for two weeks. Pacifist Adrien Brody falls into the first ...
This slightly jumpy and vaguely hagiographic documentary about legendary Motörhead frontman and bassist Lemmy Kilmister, an unapologetic drinker, drug user and womanizer, reveals (gasp!) that he’s a pretty sweet guy. He is who he is, and anyway doesn’t care what you or anyone thinks, even about his collection of Nazi memorabilia (which includes a tank). ...
Brain-dead my-husband’s-a-hitman rom-com shoot-’em-up stars a smarmy Ashton Kutcher as a CIA superspy, and if you buy that, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona I’d like you to look at. Katherine “get a new agent” Heigl’s the clueless blonde he falls in love with and marries but keeps in the dark about his violent ...
One would wonder why the pointy-toothed undead in countless vampire movies never foresaw the little complication upon which this speculative B-movie nightmare is built: what happens when the bloodsuckers have been so successful in “turning” humans that almost everyone’s a vampire and there’s no one left to drink? (A visually diverting subplot graphically demonstrates how ...
Aviatrix Amelia Earhart was one of the most exciting people of the 20th century. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, a pioneering feminist and a Depression-era inspiration. So a greater mystery than her disappearance over the South Pacific in 1937 is how talented director Mira Nair could have turned out ...
This is a lesson to all actors: pay your income taxes or you’ll have to star in crap like this to get out of the hole. Wesley Snipes is a disillusioned CIA assassin protecting a bad guy from badder guys. I don’t know why. Three quarters of the film is a shootout in a hospital, ...
This first half of the seventh Harry Potter installment is about what it needs to be. Fans will dig it, and newcomers will be entertained, if not exactly enthralled. It is of course darker and, like its three protagonists, more grown up, and that seems fitting. Fans of this ten-year franchise, perhaps children when Harry ...
Early 20th-century educator, editor and journalist Leonie Gilmour (Emily Mortimer) was instrumental in nurturing the talents of her son, Isamu Noguchi, who would become the world-renowned sculptor and architect. There are interesting scenes of her time as a kind of proto-gaijin in Japan in this well made film, which is a cut above most things ...
During the first few minutes of what seemed a perfunctory documentary about an elderly pair of art collectors, I was formulating in my mind a perfunctory review. (I know squat about art.) But not far in, I began to get interested, then fascinated, and finally moved. Herb and Dorothy Vogel, a postal worker and a ...
To stand out these days, zombie movies have to be parodies (like Shawn of the Dead or Zombieland) or seriously different and scary (28 Days Later). Hardcore zombie buffs will find all the right ingredients in this admittedly well-crafted but completely unnecessary and tame remake of a 1973 George Romero flick. But even the most ...
Mexploitation maestro Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Spy Kids, Sin City) applies his finely honed grindhouse skills and razor-sharp wit to this sharply written, cutting self-parody, and makes a few acute political points in the process. Danny Trejo plays the title ex-Federale with a gruff, straight face (“Machete don’t text”). Michelle Rodriguez is a taco-truck girl who ...
The undeadly dull walk on the mild side continues in this gloppy third installment. “Vegetarian” vampire Robert Pattinson and buff werewolf Taylor Lautner, evidently too poor to afford a shirt, are still vying for the attentions of Kristen Stewart, oblivious to the fact that she’s clearly a tease. This time the bloodsuckers and lycanthropes must ...
Two British schoolboy misfits in the ’80s (Bill Milner and Will Poulter), a habitual troublemaker and a sheltered kid from a religious fundamentalist family, pool their fertile imaginations to film their own version of Rambo: First Blood. The project leads to popularity and greater acceptance, as well as Life Lessons Learned. Pity, though, that the ...
The mere concept of being buried alive is enough to cause many people to pass on this brutally intense little squirm-fest from Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés, but that would be a mistake. A kidnapped civilian truck driver in Iraq (a very good Ryan Reynolds) awakes inside a buried coffin. He finds in there a cigarette ...
An intelligent if not constantly riveting examination of how the emotional turmoil of John Lennon’s formative years led to the almost mystical mix of joy and sadness we find in many of his lyrics. It’s not about The Beatles. The cocky but impressionable John (Aaron Johnson) was raised by his unsmiling Aunt Mimi (a spot-on ...
Don’t even begin to think you know where this little character-driven psycho-duel is heading; it’s just playing on your expectations. Nor should you take what the three main characters are saying at face value; you’re going to have to read between the lines. It’s hard to say who puts in the most convincing performance. Robert ...
Many have claimed over the years that Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s books are unfilmable, but it’s taken director Robert Logevall and screenwriter Scott Coffey to prove it. The central character is this preposterously well-endowed, moody young man named Kengo (dialogue: “God gave me this huge cock”), played by Jason Lew with a total lack of ...
Melodramatic, violent and often overheated cop opera from Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) follows the lives of three morally compromised officers in the toughest precinct of the title borough. Ethan Hawke needs cash for his huge and growing family; Don Cheadle is so completely embedded in a drug ring that he sometimes forgets who he is; ...
A megalomaniacal criminal mastermind (oddly voiced by Steve Carell) who aspires to become the Greatest Villain of All Time cynically uses a cute trio of cookie-peddling orphans in a nefarious plan to steal the moon. If their eventual melting of his cold, evil heart comes as a surprise to you, you really need to get ...
If you didn’t dig the 1991 Oliver Stone biopic, Tom DiCillo has now made a documentary for you. Or more correctly, he has assembled a bunch of clichéd film clips from the late ’60s, persuaded Johnny Depp to do a banal voiceover, and called it a documentary. Initially, it’s mildly interesting, as it takes a ...
I don’t usually feature Japanese films here, but occasionally one comes along like this delight by writer/director/producer Atsushi Ogata that is subtitled in English and charming enough to warrant a look. It’s about a perpetual supporting actor (Toru Matsuoka) whose current role is a uniformed patrolman in a terebi cop opera. The only thing he’s ...
New Zealand’s Niki Caro, who delighted the world with the moving Whale Rider, has clearly made a misstep with this overly ambitious and clumsy adaptation of a fantasy drama by Elizabeth Knox. A young French peasant aspires to make great wines but is frustrated at having to work for a mediocre chateau. Then a homoerotic ...
Less irritating than usual rom-com thanks to crisp direction by Nanette Burstein, likable leads Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, and the fact that the required second-act complication takes the form of a 3,000-mile gap between domiciles rather than some made-up jealousy or misunderstanding. The turn-off for me was the constant and gratuitous profanity. The screenwriters ...
If this grindhouse boobs-and-bullets chick-sploitation movie fails, it won’t be for lack of energy. Three luscious babes—a corporate type, a stripper and a drug dealer—arrive at an abandoned desert gas station in search of buried diamonds. There’s a backtracking storyline, some bone-crushing catfights, and some original if overcooked wordplay. You have to admire, at least ...
“The Disposables” might be a better title. Writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone (a concept scary in itself) has assembled an impressive crew of aged beef for this desperate, self-conscious, preposterone-fueled romp. Sly is joined by Rocky’s old nemesis Dolph Lundgren, who has reportedly been indicted on charges of aggravated overacting. Then there’s Jet Li, whose character’s name ...
The multiplex crowd won’t at all enjoy this period romance adapted by director Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen) from a novel by Colette. And I mean that in the best possible way. Michelle Pfeiffer, who at 52 is still getting better, plays a legendary belle epoque courtesan of a certain age who dallies with ...
A clueless woman (Cameron Diaz) bumps into a charming man (Tom Cruise) in an airport. Twice. This Meet Cute is no accident. Turns out he’s a MacGuffin-toting spy on the run, and she’s soon swept up in the intrigue. Why? Because, silly, it wouldn’t be much of a star-driven romantic action flick if she wasn’t. ...
George (an Oscar-nominated Colin Firth in a career best) hasn’t enjoyed much of anything in his life since long-time partner Jim died in a car accident eight months ago, so today he has decided to blow his brains out. But he’s English, so it will have to be done in an orderly manner. He goes ...
A pair of astronauts (Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid) awake from long-term hyper-slumber aboard this kind of giant Noah’s Ark spacecraft on its way to populate a new planet, with only a vague idea of who or where they are and what they’re supposed to do. (During this time, you will be trying to figure ...
A high-powered New York lawyer, haunted by a near-death experience as a child, as well as by the SIDS death of his toddler son and subsequent separation from his wife, is approached by a spooky man known only as Dr. Kay, who claims to have the psychic ability to spot those who are not long ...
Jeez, the title of this me-first memoir by journalist Elizabeth Gilbert made me gag when it was on the bookshelves! A colossally self-absorbed woman (Julia Roberts) dumps her devoted husband (Billy Crudup) for reasons undefined in order to “find herself.” She takes up with a young actor (James Franco), but dumps him too and heads ...
If you’re hungry for a spot of middlebrow literary historical fiction, served by a superb cast, you could do far worse than this adaptation by writer/director Michael Hoffman of Jay Parini’s novel on Leo Tolstoy’s final year. By 1910, at age 82, Tolstoy’s writings had become considerably more political, giving rise to the “Tolstoyan” movement, ...
Formulaic, gory Euro-thriller from Dario Argento, the once-great Italian master of horror. A moody American cop (an extremely slumming Adrien Brody) is trying to catch Giallo, a serial torture-killer of beautiful women (Brody again, in rubbery, prosthetic makeup, and billed as the anagrammatical “Byron Deidra”) in a Turin where everyone, even the bad guys, speak ...
It’s nice to see a documentary on the perceived inconsistencies and outright conspiracy theories surrounding the official 9/11 report that’s told from a fresh angle, in this case Italian. Or it would be if it offered anything new. Or didn’t depend on the emotional opinions and outright whackery—did you know that there are two Osama ...
The satire in this send-up by Barry Levinson (Wag the Dog) of the Hollywood film machine is constant and sly. So sly, however, that those not directly involved in the “movie business” may miss most of it. I loved it, but I can understand how it could seem a tad tedious to cinematic outsiders. Central ...
Jersey auteur Kevin Smith’s latest and most juvenile film is this flaccid buddy-cop opera starring Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis (zilch chemistry) that thinks it’s way funnier than it is. In this homage to a genre that no one ever really liked, two disgraced cops slog through a forest of bodily function jokes to retrieve ...
Bruce Beresford’s (Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy) adaptation of the autobiography of Chinese ballet star Li Cunxin is kind of an Asian Billy Elliot, and just as heartwarming. Li was plucked at the age of 11 from his home and family in Shandong Province and taken to Beijing to be trained in classical ballet. Years ...
Japanese directors periodically and wisely shake off the bonds of Japan’s “creative” system and go off to study filmmaking overseas, usually with the dream of becoming a “breakthrough,” cross-cultural phenom. Then in the end they merely shoehorn some half-assed gaijin actors into Japanese stereotypes, write a lame, self-indulgent story around them, include an oddball or ...
The plot barely exists, the dialogue’s dumb, the characters are shallow, the action’s pointless, and it lacks the smallest trace of intellectual stimulation. Hey—it’s Sex and the City for males! This mildly entertaining two hours of preposterone-fuelled, compacted trash is based, of course, on the cheeseball ’80s TV show starring George Peppard and Mr. T. ...
The original movie, a 2001 CG-lips-on-talking-animals flick, was so forgettable that I recently watched the entire thing on DVD, thinking it was this charmless sequel, and not a single frame rang a bell. This ain’t no Babe. I’m not even going to go into the plot, since there’s nothing here for adults save numerous 007 ...
Pretty good as remakes go, even with the old fish-out-of-water storyline that was hackneyed 26 years ago (underdog New Kid in School finds Wise Mentor who helps him go up against Big Bully in Final Sporting Event). In this darker but more grounded version, the action has moved to China, Ralph Macchio is now Will ...
Fun, gloriously bizarre George Clooney military-satire vehicle about what we are told was a covert US Army psychological-warfare unit in the ’70s called the “New Earth Army,” which trained “psychic spies” to utilize New Age peace-love-dope techniques to influence the enemy. It becomes apparent not far in that this is a one-joke movie, and it ...
The latest product of Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney, an evil collaboration bent on dazzling preteen boys out of their allowances, is this uninspired fantasy (is that an oxymoron?), a shameless and utterly predictable SFX-driven Harry Potter rip-off. Disney apparently even saw fit to throw into the profit pit its own classic title scene from Fantasia, ...
This latest effort by Dreamworks Animation, which gave us Shrek but since then mostly a lot of kids’ stuff, is about a boy named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), the slightly nerdy son of the chief of a medieval, vaguely Viking village (where people of course speak English with Scottish accents). His village devotes most ...
Three generic and charmlessly written college kids find themselves stranded on a ski lift, at night, too high to jump, with the resort closed for the next five days. The film undoubtedly sees itself as a winter version of the successful Open Water, but a ski lift is not the open sea, primal-terror wise, and ...
In this wonderfully absurd distaff Bourne flick, a decorated CIA operative (Angelina Jolie) is fingered by a Russian defector as a deep undercover agent, planted as a child during the Soviet era in order to carry out a nefarious plan to bring down the United States by causing it to nuke Mecca or something. Out ...
Surprisingly, and a little sadly, this awful flick about a flesh-eating, projectile-vomiting, demonically possessed teen queen was scripted by Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody. But I don’t think even Ellen Page could have saved this amateurish shot at comedy/horror. The Body of the title belongs to Megan Fox (both Transformers), who attempts to add (literal) ...
If I told you the ending, it wouldn’t make a spot of sense. Writer/director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia, The Dark Knight) spent ten years crafting this smart, labyrinthine and original mind-messer, and you’ll have to pay attention and use your intellect. A corporate espionage expert (Leonardo DiCaprio) specializing in infiltrating his quarries’ minds to steal ...
Most zombie movies today have fallen back on humor, usually dark, usually lame. They’re neither scary nor funny. So it’s good to see one come along that just runs with it, and uses a sharp script to get the laughs. It’s downright infectious! Jesse Eisenberg plays a nerdy pandemic survivor who has remained healthy by ...
The father (Brendan Fraser) of a pair of kids suffering from a rare genetic disorder convinces a curmudgeonly researcher (Harrison Ford) who’s close to a cure to let him help raise funds for the remaining research. This is one of those inspired-by-true-events flicks, which means it’s 90 percent made up by screenwriters. Ford is in ...
Geez, I hope so. Note to readers: the other two movies opening this week are both better, but I thought this drab and dingy disaster would be more fun to write about. The film calls attention to one of the greatest mysteries in Hollywood today: why do people continue to give M. Night Shyamalan perfectly ...
Eight ambitious candidates for the job of assistant to the secretive CEO of a major biotech firm file into a claustrophobic exam room for their final hurdle. After receiving terse, precisely worded instructions (only one question, and one answer) and told to begin, they immediately get their first surprise. There’ll be more. Though fierce rivals, ...
Another Steven Soderbergh “experiment,” this bare-bones, true-to-life murder mystery involves three workers at a doll factory, which is kind of a creepy setting to begin with. It plays more like a documentary and doesn’t have much of a plot, but succeeds largely on character development. Refreshing, that. Its deliberate pacing will bore some but hypnotize ...
Would that all film studios were like Pixar. They’ve never made a bad movie, and even their sequels stand on their own, probably because they don’t start production until they have a strong and original story. This time they throw in a little bittersweet reality and go deeper emotionally. And the emotions are earned; no ...
The aim of this film school-level documentary is to get you closer to the people who populate islands threatened by global warming, namely Tuvalu, Venice and the Arctic isle of Shishmaref. And that’s all fine. It’s hard to criticize noble ambitions, but this is a film column, and this self-indulgent, amateurish attempt by Tokyo’s Tomoko ...
A down-on-his-luck bounty hunter is delighted to learn that his next quarry is his ex-wife, a bail-jumping investigative reporter. This unnecessary and tiresome mishmash simultaneously and blithely gets wrong the romance, comedy and action genres, offering generic dialogue, off-the-shelf adventure sequences and coasting, zero-chemistry stars (Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston can do way better). Not ...
This is one of those lewd, crude and rude frat-boy comedies that I never expected to like. Three guys (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis) wake up with pounding headaches in a wrecked $4,200/night Las Vegas hotel suite after a bachelor party of epic proportions; they’re unable to remember anything they did the night before. ...
In the future, artificial organ transplants are commonplace. But they’re still pricey, so you can pay on the installment plan. The fine print, however, stipulates that if you can’t make the payments, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker will show up and, well, see title. Clearly before health care reform. But then Jude suffers a catastrophic ...
Steven Soderbergh, whose typical style is best described as atypical (Che; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Ocean’s Eleven), checks in with this artful, cryptically structured, voyeuristic character study of a $2,000/hr call girl (played with cold eyes by real-life porn star Sasha Grey). Her services include sex, of course, but her forte is understanding what her ...
A man and a boy (superbly played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) trudge across a namelessly devastated America, searching for food while avoiding becoming same for roaming gangs of cannibals. Probably the best of the recent spate of post-Apocalyptic movies, this one gets the atmosphere right and the characters, too. But that said, it’s ...
In this latest bomb remake of a far superior horror classic (see the recent Halloween and Friday the 13th abominations; or better yet, don’t), several sleep-deprived, soon-to-be-dead teenagers scream a lot while falling victim to Freddy Krueger’s one-liners and those (snicker-snack) disemboweling knife thingies he has for hands. (I wonder what qualities they were looking ...
You probably know the details about this Oscar-winning agit-prop doc. It’s shocking and clever, and plays like a caper flick. But let me see if I’ve got this all straight: 28 fishermen in a little village in Wakayama catch dolphins for the purposes of (1) selling the best into dreary performance captivity in marine-mammal gulags ...
It’s nice, in a nostalgic sense, to see a pair of ’80s action icons give it one more slam-bam shot. And I can truthfully say that the acting by Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren is every bit as good as it ever was. This gleefully violent, direct-to-video retread by Peter’s kid John Hyams is ...
Three emotionally shaky drifters travel through Katrina-devastated Louisiana. Brett (William Hurt, who can do anything) is a fresh ex-con wondering if he should continue to plague the life of his woman (Maria Bello in flashbacks). The runaway Martine is given unexpected depth by Twilight’s Kristen Stewart, and the Eton-educated Eddie Redmayne puts in an annoyingly ...
In the mood for a religion-themed, post-apocalyptic samurai/western/superhero thriller starring Denzel Washington? Look no further. Denzel’s this guy who’s been walking across America for 30 years carrying what we are led to believe is the last known copy of the Bible and defending it from the usual Mad Max cast of roadside hijackers, thieves and ...
Dear Rob Zombie: OK, we get it. We understand your fascination with ’70s splatter flicks. Now please rent several dozen of them, get some beer, and go home and stop bothering us with your repellent, ego-driven remakes. Repetitive brutal killings of trailer trash and copious gore do not a Halloween movie make, and you’ve made ...
Jackie Chan is a Chinese CIA agent (lots of those) who retires to be with his neighbor girlfriend and her three exceptionally annoying kids. The kids hate him until they all get together and fight off some Home Alone bad guys with Boris-and-Natasha accents while Jackie falls down a lot. If this sounds entertaining, you’re ...
“Bad” Blake was long ago a major C&W singer-songwriter, with fans filling arenas to watch his shows. But alcoholism and bad choices have reduced him to playing bowling alleys, and he plays them because, well, he needs the money and, besides, what else would he do? A chance at redemption arrives with the love of ...
The theme of a three-night concert dovetailing with the 1974 Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” (beautifully chronicled in the 1996 Oscar-winner When We Were Kings) was black musicians from around the world returning to their African roots, as it were. Such absolute luminaries as James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, Bill Withers and Celia Cruz ...
Sometimes I think George Romero just sits around thinking up new ways to re-kill zombies. Then, when he’s jotted down a dozen or so original and/or amusing ones, he spends up to an hour writing a screenplay, hires a few actors and makeup artists, and crunches out a new zombie flick. Because that’s what his, ...
Boy, that Tony Stark. What a self-aggrandizing jerk. Ah, but it’s all just a cover—it’s not easy being Iron Man. That thingy in his chest is slowly poisoning him, the Pentagon wants control of the suit, a whiny Sam Rockwell is a wannabe rival manufacturer, and a growling, vindictive Mickey Rourke comes out of nowhere ...
OK, I wasn’t looking for art going in to this Disney package adapted from a weepie by Nicholas Sparks (who—gag—considers himself a better writer than Cormac McCarthy!) and starring Miley Cyrus (don’t toss that blonde wig just yet, hon), but I didn’t expect anything this toxic. Or so badly out of tune. Miley is a ...
This witless wad of fake, flabby fashionista feminism may actually be worse than the first (not easy). Shouldn’t gender equality mean more than merely being as repulsive as men? Our four self-absorbed, whiny commodity fetishists abandon the City (and any pretense at taste) to take the Sex to Abu Dhabi, apparently in order to set ...
Jim Sheridan’s (My Left Foot, In America) remake of the 2004 Danish film Brodre by Susanne Bier illustrates without cliché the dehumanizing effects of war (any war; no politics here). Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is an upright, responsible Marine captain bound for Afghanistan. He is looked upon with favor by his father (Sam Shepard) and ...
Jane Campion’s Austen-ish drama about the last few years in the life of the great romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw—Perfume), who died in 1821 at 25, and on his unlikely and probably platonic love affair with his fashionista neighbor (and muse), Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish—Candy). It’s an intricate, intelligent movie that can’t have been ...
In an imagined ancient Persia, a plucky street urchin is adopted by the king and raised as a prince, to eventually become a buffed-up, acrobatic Jake Gyllenhaal. (Jake, Jake, Jake. You’re an exceptional actor. You don’t have to do this moronic Matthew McConaughey-level stuff. Not even to round out the old resume. And what’s with ...
A small-town Texas girl desperate to escape her smothering, pageant-obsessed stage mom (Marcia Gay Harden) and her understanding but TV sports-crazed father discovers life’s meaning in the sport(?) of women’s roller derby. Small but fast and fairly vicious, she adopts the rink name of Babe Ruthless, and joins Maggie Mayhem, Smashley Simpson, Eva Destruction, Iron ...
Jeez, where to start? A half-American salaryman (Eric Bossick) whose father was a biochemist begins to turn into a cheesy anti-flesh collection of lethal firearms when he gets angry. And he gets really angry when someone purposefully and repeatedly drives a car over his young son. Shinya Tsukamoto’s third telling (1989 and 1992) of his ...
Egomaniacal goombah filmmaker Troy Duffy is back ten years later with what amounts to a remake of his only film, a colossally juvenile flop that inexplicably became a cult fave once it got to DVD. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think auds were champing at the bit for more Boston Catholic vigilante ...
You may have seen the trailers with frightening images of a befanged old lady climbing the walls and a freaky stretch-jawed man, and you are presumably supposed to think there’s more such cool scary stuff to come. There isn’t. I don’t know about you, but Armageddon tired of all these fake end-of-days movies, and this ...
Paul Greengrass imbues this fictional story about the chaotic days after the fall of Baghdad with some strong nonfictional elements, putting forward one of the more credible conspiracy theories. It focuses on the neocons’ second worst decision (after starting the war in the first place), of disbanding the Iraqi Army, which could conceivably have helped ...
A gaijin drug dealer is killed in Tokyo, but comes back to fulfill a childhood vow to watch over his slutty sister (Paz de la Huerta). Apparently, after death people have a lot of explicit sex. This film is certainly audacious, but pretentious French director Gaspar Noe, who has clearly started believing his own press ...
Producer Luc Besson checks in with his latest Euro-trash retread involving much shooting of people, chasing of cars and blowing up of things, and apparently can’t decide whether it’s a mindless action comedy or a mindless action drama. An apparatchik at the American Embassy (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) accomplishes his dream of getting promoted to the CIA, ...
In this “atmospheric” (read: “dreary”) genre piece by Hong Kong action auteur Johnny To, a vaguely menacing French chef travels to Macao and Hong Kong to avenge the murders of his daughter and her family by a trio of hit men. He hires an interchangeable trio of hit men to help him find them, and ...
Director Mimi Leder clearly thought that the star power of Morgan Freeman and Antonio Banderas would propel this dogged heist flick to success, and couldn’t be bothered with things like plot, dialogue or originality. Went direct to DVD Stateside. Nothing much is explained, but that’s OK—you’ve seen this chestnut so many times it doesn’t really ...
A financially struggling young couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) is presented with a mysterious box by a dignified, horribly disfigured (struck by lightning) and clearly very rich man (Frank Langella), and told that if they simply push the little red button on the top of the box within 24 hours, they will receive, tax-free, ...
Post-apocalyptic puppet show for pre-teens (too dark for little kids) about nine little rag-doll robots on a no-more-humans Earth doing battle against a larger and more menacing robot that wants their souls. Souls? It’s visually creative—techno and fantasy fans will love it—but the emphasis is on action, and opportunities to explore the intriguing, hinted-at philosophical ...
The annual Homeless World Cup in Cape Town is an event that fairly cries out for a documentary. This perfunctory effort focuses on a half dozen individuals with troubled backgrounds from Ireland, Spain, Russia, Kenya, Afghanistan and the US of A. It follows them through team selection and training, and listens as they tell how ...
Let’s make no mistake here. This retelling (or reimagining, or whatever) of the legend of Perseus in crappier-than-usual 3D is fairly lame. But it’s kind of supposed to be (look at the title), and if you’re not expecting great cinema, this creature feature on steroids can provide some amusing mythological mayhem. I had fun. The ...
Clareece “Precious” Jones’ 16 years on this planet have not been an unalloyed pleasure. She’s dangerously obese, taciturn, nearly illiterate, and pregnant with her second child by her rapist father (the first has Down’s syndrome). She’s forced to wait on her detestable, domineering, poisonously angry welfare mother (comedienne Mo’Nique, in a shattering portrayal that won ...
It’s 1998. A quintet of geeks, one of whom is dying of cancer, get it into their heads to drive to California, break into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, and steal a copy of the as-yet-unreleased Star Wars, Episode One. There’s nothing remotely original about this genial road movie, and it appears to have been edited ...
This bleak vision of a post-pandemic world is fairly effective, as far as it goes. It follows the wanderings of four uninfected young people (Lou Taylor Pucci, Chris Pine, Piper Perabo and Emily Van Camp) through a deserted Southwest, scavenging what they can. This is not a zombie movie; the infected don’t bite or even ...
Luc Besson’s incomprehensible sequel to his incomprehensible Arthur and the Minimoys has Arthur (Freddie Highmore) again passing through a reversed telescope to this little enchanted place in his garden where everyone’s a 5mm, vaguely disturbing Smurf, to romance some babe he met last time. These movies are adapted from stories written by Besson for his ...
The violence and gore inherent in today’s mega-movies don’t really mix with good old gothic storytelling, and when you try, you get, well, this. It will not rate high on Benicio Del Toro’s filmography. Plus, Joe Johnson, the SFX-heavy director responsible for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, forgot to make it scary. His cartoonish attempts ...
This exhilarating trek through the crazed mind of philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek uses clips from 43 movies to illustrate his ideas on sexuality and notions of reality vs. fantasy, often imaginatively presented from the very places where the films were shot. He concentrates on Hitchcock, Kubrick and Lynch, but includes the Marx Brothers and ...
If Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are going to be in movies together, they should choose better scripts (and directors; Jon Avnet perpetrated 88 Minutes). In this lackluster police procedural, two veteran cops, one angry and intense, the other laid-back, are trying to track down a vigilante serial killer targeting obviously guilty creeps sprung ...
It’s always fascinating to witness the birth of a new star. This coming-of-age tale, based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, is well acted, ably screen-written by Nick Hornby, and deftly directed by Lone Scherfig. Worthy credentials. But what makes it click is actress Carey Mulligan, and comparisons being made to Audrey Hepburn ...
Shooting Dogs or Hotel Rwanda without the nice. There are few things more heartrending than the children forced into rebel armies in Africa and trained to kill with an intensity that would make a Marine look away. And few films will give you a more intimate look at this societal aberration than this French-made effort ...
The last thing I expected from Tim Burton was a dumbing down for the multiplex crowd. And since when did he ever need that annoying 3D? It’s “Burton does Disney” rather than Disney releasing Burton. This “reimagining” of the classic tale works for a while. But then it starts adding other Lewis Carroll stuff, reduces ...
To stretch the cliché to its limits, all is not what it seems in this dark and devious, A-list B-movie from Martin Scorsese. In 1954, a federal marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives at an island hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient. But his thinking becomes increasingly muddled as the investigation ...
Well, maybe if you’re allergic to brow-furrowing. Steven Seagal’s latest remake of the same direct-to-video movie he’s been doing for a decade (OK, the zombie movie was a departure) features lines like, “I’m gonna f**k you up ugly”; several actors even worse than the Great Glaring One (starting with hottie of the month Marlaina Mah); ...
As (a very good) Sam Rockwell nears the end of his three-year hitch as the lone human operator at an automated lunar mining base, strange things begin to happen. He seems to be hallucinating, and his health is inexplicably deteriorating. His only companion is an obsequious robot (an open and unambiguous nod to 2001’s HAL, ...
When aliens finally arrive on Earth, they are neither planet-busting monsters nor cuties trying to phone home. They are not little or green and certainly not men (more resembling grumpy, two-meter lobsters). There are several thousand of them and they’re destitute and dying in a gargantuan spaceship stalled over Johannesburg. Our initial, humanitarian response is ...
I’ve always thought one of the green movement’s best tag lines was, “Be a better ancestor.” Well, this sarcastically titled film by Franny Armstrong posits that if we don’t each smarten up and reduce our carbon footprints—and soon—we won’t even have any descendents to be ancestors to. Pete Postlethwaite, circa 2055, is the curator of ...
Julianne Moore is one the top actresses working today, so if she chooses to appear in a psycho-thriller, it’s likely to be good and scary. (OK, she did Hannibal, but everyone makes mistakes). This is a scary one. I’m talking Silence of the Lambs scary. She plays a forensic psychiatrist who specializes in disproving the ...
It may be possible to make a less inspired heist-gone-wrong flick, but I don’t know how. Surprising that it comes from Nimrod Antal, who did the tight motel-from-hell number, Vacancy. Bunch of squandered actors (Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, even Laurence Fishburne) dutifully play armored truck guards planning to rip off $42 million. They ...
Martin Landau plays a pushing-80 bachelor who finds love late in life, in the form of new neighbor Ellen Burstyn. It’s kind of nice, don’t you think, that these two veterans still have a crack at leading roles, and Landau in particular puts in a nuanced, multi-layered performance. Then a third-act revelation necessitates a reexamination ...
It’s a rare movie that’s both funny and sad, cynical and moving, romantic and grounded in reality, and on top of all that, taps into the zeitgeist of our recession-hit times. None of this is easy to do, but director Jason Reitman (Juno) makes it look effortless. The plot has to do with a corporate ...
Sacha Baron Cohen returns to the US with his confrontational, culturally anarchic brand of guerrilla comedy, this time to skewer the New American Dream, which is to be hugely famous for no apparent reason. His latest title character is a monstrously gay, disgraced (had to do with Velcro) Austrian fashionista who has come to America ...
I left the screening room in a sad mood. I’d never seen a Woody Allen movie I didn’t like—until I sat through this obvious, pseudo-noir, psycho-non-thriller. Two broke brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), one aspiring to invest in a California resort, the other a mechanic and a losing gambler, agree to murder for money ...
At least this Twilight for pre-teen boys has a sense of humor. But this toothless bit of revisionist vampire nonsense is so sure it’s going to have at least two sequels (when even one would surprise me), it leaves numerous loose ends and winds up simply being unsatisfying. It includes inane concepts like a war ...
Clumsy adaptation of the 1982 stage musical about a legendary but creatively blocked Italian film director seeking inspiration from the women who shaped his life and career. Daniel Day-Lewis is fine, but from him we expect more than “fine.” It’s really a series of extraneous and unmemorable songs by competing actresses that halt the already ...
It was through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s spellbinding stories about a cerebral, genius detective and his doctor sidekick that, as a boy, I discovered the joys of reading. So it was with some dismay that I watched the trailer for this film, which, with all the buggy chases and explosions, looked more like a buddy ...
I’m not sure whether this deranged love story is a funny drama or a moving comedy. But it’s certainly unique, and it left me both amused and a bit stunned. Jim Carrey, in his most complex role to date, plays an audacious and very gay fraud artist who, on one of his frequent visits to ...
It’s possible to make a good romantic comedy. (500) Days of Summer, for example. But this flaccid, by-the-numbers retread may be heading back to film school to provide the basis for “How Not to Make a Rom-Com 101.” Not a cliché is left unturned, no contrivance untried, zero chemistry between actors who can do way ...
It’s 700 years from now, see, and Mankind is battling The Machines (yawn) and mostly winning. But now the fighting has activated some infernal ancient key or something that takes captured human soldiers and turns them into super-soldiers called “necromutants” with these scimitar-like appendages instead of hands. A stereotypical band of soldiers must find the ...
It is my usual practice to ignore torture-porn movies in the admittedly futile hope that low ticket sales will somehow discourage the continuation of the genre. But you really need to be warned about this repellent piece of crap. It’s based on the real-life torture, rape and killing of a 14-year-old Indiana girl by her ...
I was beginning to think it wasn’t possible: a full-bore, suspense-filled action movie that doesn’t insult your intelligence, and remains grounded in reality. This instant classic from director Kathryn Bigelow (James Cameron’s ex) will be remembered as the definitive film about the war in Iraq. The technique is austere (no fast-edit nonsense or other tricks), ...
OK, people who pay money to see a movie so named are not expecting great art, but this ultraviolence-for-its-own-sake gore-fest takes the pink potato. A rogue former member of an evil, child-abducting, contract-killing ninja clan seeks revenge, yada yada, and engages in endless acrobatic but unmemorable one-against-dozens battles. Heads roll, limbs are severed, bodies are ...
Disney returns to its roots with this old-style, hand-drawn animation and, amid so many empty, SFX-driven offerings these days, that’s kind of nice. As is the fact that it features Disney’s first black princess. It would have been even nicer, though, had it included an ounce of originality. Let’s go down the checklist: plucky heroine, ...
This inspirational, rags-to-riches sports drama from writer-director John Lee Hancock (The Rookie, Remember the Titans) is the slightly sanitized story of Michael Oher (well played by newcomer Quinton Aaron), a huge, homeless high-school kid who, with the help and love of a dedicated society matron (Sandra Bullock) and her family, found a home, improved his ...
Faced with a bewildering plethora of new movie releases this Golden Week, self-indulgent Metropolis film critic Don Morton interviews himself.
Read more »Find out why one local expat traveled from London to Tokyo—by bicycle
Read more »An around-the-world biker makes a pit stop in Tokyo
Read more »Exceedingly unpleasant, humorless satire
Read more »A romantic dramedy that flaunts formula. And is funny
Read more »A cinematic achievement that’s fresh and original
Read more »Script’s tight and surfing footage most excellent
Read more »The Jewish Exorcist mainly for horror buffs
Read more »Don’t call him a fashion photographer
Read more »It looks like it’s funny—but something’s missing
Read more »A credible Hawke holds it together
Read more »Must-see for designers
Read more »Everyone’s favorite Man in a Can is back in form
Read more »A fun, stylish and male-baffling documentary
Read more »Dim-witted celebration of righteous bloodshed
Read more »Pretty good Bad Movie potential
Read more »Gedding too auld for dis
Read more »Cancer weeper made less mawkish by Dakota Fanning’s sassy turn
Read more »Sideways look at the daily business of being a hood
Read more »Soon-to-be-adults chatter and flatter in flick that grows on you
Read more »Vibrant story of sexual progress
Read more »Joyful, challenging and life-affirming
Read more »No History Channel biopic
Read more »Succeeds more on its stars’ charisma
Read more »Disappointing adaptation of a pretentious novel
Read more »Loach lightens up with a caper comedy
Read more »Recommendation: rent the 1960 film first
Read more »Brilliantly alive
Read more »Decidedly less inspiring
Read more »No literary feigning necessary
Read more »Cult fave in the making
Read more »Toy Story for GenXers
Read more »Slow kids will find it diverting
Read more »Tense and believable, keeps you guessing and involved
Read more »No fun
Read more »You’ll be glad you did
Read more »Tight and believable, but pay attention
Read more »Only for those not yet suffering from found-footage fatigue
Read more »Don gushes
Read more »Wicked smart movie that subverts cliché
Read more »Stone should know better
Read more »Relegated to forgettable hokum
Read more »Pattinson inexplicably getting work
Read more »Not a shot fired, but one of the best war movies you’re likely to see
Read more »SFX dazzle-over-substance extravaganza
Read more »Tarantino unchained
Read more »A comedy of bad manners
Read more »Made watchable by a good young actress
Read more »Best depiction of alcoholism since 1963
Read more »Gets it all right
Read more »The glaring drawback is the face
Read more »Bleeds authenticity to a fault
Read more »Will shake you up and then follow you home
Read more »Not a very scary tiger
Read more »Three self-absorbed, boozing, coke-snorting shrews
Read more »Excellent date movie
Read more »Cross-dressing comic actor Tyler Perry may not be the best choice for a cinematic reboot of formulaic author James Patterson’s forensic-psychologist super-detective franchise (Morgan Freeman has played Cross twice), but he certainly is the worst. Madea chasing bad guys would have been more believable, not to mention less painful to watch. This dismal, disjointed mess ...
Read more »Better than Sly’s 1995 version
Read more »Respects its audience’s intelligence
Read more »Implodes in the second half
Read more »Nova Scotia filmmaking at its finest
Read more »About as generic as creature features get
Read more »Statham remakes his movie—this time with J.Lo
Read more »Takes itself awfully seriously
Read more »Don’t be thinking Boogie Nights
Read more »This cast could make the phone book riveting
Read more »Drink your blood from a boot
Read more »Went direct to DVD for several good reasons
Read more »Enchanting as well as ambitious
Read more »Gets much right
Read more »Walks the cusp of twee
Read more »Juvenile interspecies bromantic comedy
Read more »Not a comedy
Read more »McTeer’s exuberant performance a must-see
Read more »A facking fan toime
Read more »Doesn’t cheat
Read more »50 Cent making Steven Seagal look like Daniel Day-Lewis
Read more »A betting man would lose
Read more »...the cleaners
Read more »A celebration of a life well lived
Read more »A campy riot of screensaver SFX
Read more »Sounds a little nerdy—it’s anything but
Read more »Admirably ambitious and beautifully mounted
Read more »Insult, anger, or bore
Read more »So unfunny it’s sad
Read more »Torture porn with a culinary motif
Read more »Gentle, harsh, uplifting and wrenching
Read more »The book is non-fiction. The flick is non-entertainment
Read more »How do you turn one book into a nine-hour trilogy?
Read more »Impossible to dislike
Read more »Wes Anderson’s most accessible to date
Read more »Enjoyable if slightly soggy
Read more »Fifty more years, please
Read more »Comically unfrightening sci-fi slog
Read more »No particular reason
Read more »Surprisingly emotional
Read more »Ballet documentary uniformly moving
Read more »Keep your Saw movies
Read more »Woody Allen’s angst-ridden heart not in it
Read more »Whiffle ball that telegraphs every pitch
Read more »Entertaining poppycock
Read more »The bigger mystery is how...
Read more »Pile of pointless pretentiousness
Read more »Incompetent rip-off with one bright spot
Read more »Former actor Nicolas Cage dismantles his career further
Read more »Van Damme is still back
Read more »An enigma we’re fortunate to have
Read more »Too inured to being visually fooled?
Read more »Arduous rom-com ploy
Read more »Affleck’s best directorial effort
Read more »At least she’s not in it
Read more »Pure, simple—and pretentious—trash
Read more »You will not know where this is going
Read more »Merchandise
Read more »No mere fanboy love letter
Read more »Spanish found-footage horror kind of works
Read more »High concept
Read more »Literate, thoughtful, well-acted, and...
Read more »Smart and mannered. With spanking
Read more »’90s-style CG gore
Read more »How Not to Make an Action Thriller
Read more »Exhausting but thoroughly watchable
Read more »Vroom
Read more »What its target audience expects
Read more »Really a gay fantasy
Read more »A murderous cash machine would be more entertaining
Read more »Tone is random
Read more »Statham stays solid
Read more »Poe as an action hero?
Read more »A valid first step toward Mel’s return to form.
Read more »Bordering on torpid
Read more »Nicely complex and compellingly watchable
Read more »Padding blander than usual
Read more »A little precious
Read more »Soderbergh can do anything
Read more »Dynamite
Read more »Twilight it ain’t
Read more »Above-average if not quite inspired
Read more »Nazis on the moon
Read more »Nine annoying people trapped together
Read more »Docu-concert/inflated origin story
Read more »A courageous assertion of creative resistance
Read more »Far less clever
Read more »Overlong celebrity karaoke party
Read more »Cookie-cutter brain-eater
Read more »Doesn’t live up to sumptuous settings
Read more »Seriously silly good-bad movies are getting harder to find
Read more »Sly and witty
Read more »Discover Vancouver punk history
Read more »Yes, pretty inspiring
Read more »Bargain-basement Bourne
Read more »Quietly revelatory
Read more »Skimpy clothing and acrobatics
Read more »Fading to a flicker
Read more »Wisdom and perspective
Read more »Laughed some, but more often didn't
Read more »Laugh, cry, think
Read more »A superhuman juggling act
Read more »Poetic study of the will to live
Read more »Illuminating the issue of light pollution
Read more »BGV for surf bars
Read more »Total Redundancy
Read more »Bucks Hollywood formula
Read more »Leading auteur goes moronic
Read more »Live through it
Read more »I used to know a girl like that
Read more »Would have been engaging
Read more »Happy Meal
Read more »Wickedly hilarious
Read more »Frothy and pretentious
Read more »Spiritless sequel
Read more »Get it together, Pixar
Read more »Besson out of comfort zone?
Read more »Makes up in spunk
Read more »Rudderless, cast-attrition sharksploitation
Read more »Adroit adaptation of Connelly page-turner
Read more »Thinking family approved
Read more »Is your Spider sense tingling?
Read more »A great film about the end of the Hawaiian monarchy?
Read more »The tragedy that befell Manchester United's legendary 1958 squad
Read more »Scarier than The Omen?
Read more »Falls short of Lynchian aims
Read more »Hunter S. adaptation unfinished?
Read more »“I live. I love. I slay. I am content.”
Read more »How did they make three gifted comics so dull?
Read more »Inventiveness, rowdiness, and goofy social realism
Read more »Antidote to Nicholas Sparks
Read more »Don was not bored
Read more »Six very bad twenty-something actors
Read more »Creepy, dark, maudlin, humorless and a bit dull
Read more »Most of the dialogue is yelled
Read more »A compact LOTR
Read more »Cage continues career-destroying habit
Read more »Good for the board
Read more »Worst offender is the star
Read more »Mumblecore meander is wildly creative
Read more »Human beings might find it a tad contrived
Read more »It’ll make you smile
Read more »Medieval fanboys take note
Read more »Locked in a basement with an overacting Rosanna Arquette
Read more »Reason is unimportant in torture porn
Read more »It’s hard to criticize a movie about a one-armed surfer, but...
Read more »Go along on a great journey
Read more »A worthy adaptation by Cary Fukunaga of the Charlotte Brontë classic often considered to be one of the first examples of feminist Western literature. It focuses, as have most of its 27 filmed versions, on the time the young title governess spends at the gloomy Thornfield Hall, where things go bump in the night, and ...
Read more »Juvenile jumble of clunky clichés
Read more »Yet another “found footage” failure
Read more »Vacuous feature-length sitcom
Read more »What are the filmmaker$ up to?
Read more »Nostalgia is better than it used to be
Read more »Must see
Read more »Cheerful hagiography
Read more »Unique supernatural sex scene
Read more »Vinny D does pretty good
Read more »Mah na mah na!
Read more »Dorff is solid, but credibility erodes
Read more »Another freight train of a pro wrestler turns to the movies
Read more »Mean-spirited, obvious and flaccid
Read more »The most unpleasant 82 minutes of blunt trauma you’ll ever...
Read more »Hopelessly bland
Read more »Another Payneian insight on the human condition
Read more »Not bad if you like this sort of thing
Read more »Tedious and profoundly ridiculous
Read more »What makes people...
Read more »Arty ping pong but do we care?
Read more »Will appeal mostly to fans
Read more »Can’t wait to see what he does next
Read more »Pop songs in choir robes
Read more »Even moving
Read more »Okay, I took some flak recently for going easy on a couple of rom-coms. (I just can’t help it—sniffle—they’re so fulfilling!) Well, it gets worse, because here comes an endorsement of a chick flick. As you might surmise, this distaff Hangover is about a wedding; more specifically about the mismatched mess of misfits chosen by ...
Read more »Consider yourself a thinking grownup?
Read more »You’ll leave the theater spitting.
Read more »There’s a lot to be said for lowered expectations
Read more »Impressive debut from Ken Loach’s son Jim
Read more »Scary because it’s true
Read more »For $350 million you’d expect something more than “not terrible”
Read more »Best eight-meter crocodile thriller ever
Read more »The true horror sets in...
Read more »Big snore unless you’re 10
Read more »Sergio Leone meets Federico Fellini
Read more »It’s everything they say it is
Read more »Pulp Fiction rip-off that never leaves the diner scene
Read more »Delightful, star-studded—if somewhat formulaic—doc
Read more »Few surprises
Read more »Mostly Italians and Japanese complaining
Read more »Minimalist and mesmerizing
Read more »Stylish noir-actioner for thinking people
Read more »Deeply cynical and disturbingly truthful
Read more »Loach always worth a look
Read more »Rewarding crowd-pleaser
Read more »Moronic cobbling
Read more »Coherent, gorgeous, and all without CGI
Read more »Beautiful and insightful
Read more »Original, enigmatic movie
Read more »Clever, kinetic, and cute as hell
Read more »A vampire Hitler can't save this one
Read more »Oscar-winning performance surrounded by movie-like substances
Read more »Will stay with you
Read more »Compared to what Conan Doyle wrote more than a century ago...
Read more »Predictable, repetitive and dull as dirt
Read more »Grating geek gripes at times hilarious
Read more »Imagine yourself at the play
Read more »Two-dimensional
Read more »Good, old-fashioned movie magic
Read more »A fine substitute for never getting in there
Read more »Drink a lot and laugh at with friends
Read more »A reminder of why we go to the movies
Read more »Outdated Cold War potboiler
Read more »What was the rea$on the saga was split in two?
Read more »Oily villain performance worth your ticket price
Read more »Well worth your time
Read more »Save your money by putting your head in a metal wastebasket
Read more »Fiennes does assured Shakespeare in his directorial debut
Read more »Are you willing to pay 109 minutes?
Read more »Inaccessible yet compulsively watchable filmmaker + disaster genre
Read more »Cathartic, illuminating and honestly (mostly) moving
Read more »Bright spot a drunken priest
Read more »Preposterous predicament
Read more »The book’s still better
Read more »Don never thought he’d enjoy a spatter flick
Read more »Action, drama and a socially conscious message—done not particularly well
Read more »Honest tale of both romantic and filial love
Read more »Way better than Don’s making it sound
Read more »Lives up to its name
Read more »Kind of works as a screwball caper comedy
Read more »A sensitive handling of a complex character
Read more »Scarier-than-most effort from Guillermo del Toro
Read more »Pointless, half-baked psychodrama
Read more »Imagine George Romero in the deserts of Africa
Read more »Al Pacino needs a new agent
Read more »Sporadically funny and not entirely terrible
Read more »Brutally unsentimental Australian Goodfellas
Read more »Enigmatic and haunting hall of mirrors
Read more »An antidote to Twilight
Read more »Coppolla's still got it
Read more »One that will stay with you
Read more »More of a fond homage than a straight spoof
Read more »A bit twee, self-conscious and morbidly cute
Read more »Uncle Don’s tips for improving your New Year’s Eve
Read more »You want a cancer comedy? Go see 50/50
Read more »Um, why?
Read more »Someone blows up the Kremlin and frames the IMF, resulting in the activation of the title protocol, shutting down the entire organization and leaving Ethan (Tom Cruise) and co. (Paula Patton, Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner) to save the world and clear the group’s name, all without support. It’s the best M:I flick of the ...
Read more »All the ingredients but no glue
Read more »A cinematic recreation of Bruegel’s 1564 The Way to Calvary
Read more »It’s got heart
Read more »Impossible to dislike
Read more »Walking the cancer/comedy cusp is a slick trick
Read more »A very well done video game
Read more »Comedy about pizza boy fails to deliver
Read more »Unwatchable, neo-grindhouse hyper-violence
Read more »With a real actor, a focused director, and fewer contrivances, this could have been a nice little indie
Read more »Believable and engaging
Read more »Iraq War corpse runs rampage with ensuing hilarity
Read more »A 1970 film about 1968 student anti-war protestors
Read more »Fails.
Read more »Forgettable B-movie
Read more »Leave the theater feeling well and truly entertained
Read more »The most soulful statistics-based movie you're going to see
Read more »A convincing and realistic scenario of a lethal epidemic
Read more »Shouted dialog, funny hats, and 3-D
Read more »Ponderous, anti-erotic, softcore porn flick
Read more »Depends on the audience’s continuing tolerance
Read more »Finely observed story adapted from Pulitzer-winning play
Read more »A wonderfully wise, multilayered film about happiness
Read more »Shriekquel, screamake, whatever
Read more »Profane, juvenile, and pretty good
Read more »One of the best thrillers you’re likely to see this year
Read more »Dumas is spinning in his grave
Read more »Well-done doc on the charming pianist
Read more »Unreal plot. Real tension
Read more »No mere left-wing rant
Read more »The humble reviewer is not impressed
Read more »A crossbreed that will surprise followers of both genres. Or not
Read more »A sophisticated, wonderfully weird computer animation for smart people
Read more »Not-as-bad-as-some example of superhero genre
Read more »Rainy-day London cop movie
Read more »Pity that CG tech teams are not eligible for Best Actor Oscars
Read more »Another low-budget Blair Witch “found-film” chiller
Read more »Doc about self-congratulatory wonk especially irritating for being right
Read more »Pseudo-SF, paranoid thriller is a briskly-paced, fun head trip
Read more »Unspeakably lame
Read more »An interesting skewer on the FD theme
Read more »Can you withstand a volley of pulpy war clichés?
Read more »The likeable leads' chemistry make a formulaic rom com work
Read more »The most grounded of the Fast and Furious flicks
Read more »Flawed-but-solid entertainment
Read more »Excellent performances almost save it
Read more »A horror film for corporate climbers
Read more »Gauzy romantic drama for swoony moviegoers
Read more »Campy fun if you have a few drinks first
Read more »A competently filmed man-against-nature flick
Read more »The movie Sucker Punch wanted to be
Read more »Good-naturedly tongue-in-cheek green-screen flick
Read more »Adorably cloying
Read more »Butts-in-seats $uperhero formula
Read more »An unconventional approach to what makes rock… rock
Read more »An earnest plea for nuclear disarmament
Read more »The bear is back
Read more »A smooth, gimmick-free, Hitchcockian thriller for grownups
Read more »Makes up in “boo!” moments for what it lacks in originality
Read more »Indie doc is mainly for Britpop cognoscenti
Read more »Cool concert doc about David Byrne's all singin'-all dancin' tour
Read more »Soft-core campy remake of 1978’s Piranha, itself a rip-off of Jaws
Read more »High-tech action plus deep mystery
Read more »One of the best movies you've never heard of
Read more »Wahlberg makes the perfect foil for Ferrell in this skit-form film
Read more »Self-important, engorged romantic melodrama
Read more »Lame talking animal flick
Read more »An energetic, slightly darker continuation of the wonderful first movie
Read more »Family story imbued with a new perspective
Read more »Jason Statham's latest meathead movie
Read more »Ozzies on the open water
Read more »PBS doc on John & Yoko's antics in the Apple
Read more »An over-the-top homage to grindhouse supernatural revenge films
Read more »The invading Americans once banned anything related to traditional Hawaiian language and culture, but it is flourishing now, thanks to efforts such as the Kamehameha Schools Song Contest, in which thousands of students compete with songs written in the islands’ own language. The film follows a handful of “student directors,” as they prepare and rehearse ...
Read more »The sailboat carrying a quintet of thirtysomethings off for a jaunt through the Bermuda Triangle is overturned in a freak storm, but they manage nonetheless to board a passing Ghost Ship. Natch. They’re not the first ones there. Or more accurately, this is not the first time they’ve boarded it. Sisyphean story (think Groundhog Day ...
Read more »A geeky, often bullied 12-year-old (Kodi Smit-McPhee⎯The Road) is befriended and then defended by his mysterious young neighbor (Chloe Moretz⎯Kick-Ass) who only comes out at night and has unusual appetites. Call it an antidote to Twilight. This character-driven horror flick is a toned-down remake (by Matt Reeves⎯Cloverfield) of Sweden’s darker Let the Right One In, ...
Read more »Julian Schnabel’s controversial 50-year saga about four women and their influence on the Palestinian complexities, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Rula Jebreal, is a noble effort. But the director’s dogged adaptation (nearly a transcription) and flat storytelling results in something that’s more baffling than it is cathartic. Fine cast includes Hiam Abbass, Alexander Siddig ...
Read more »The transformation from loser to super hero... again
Read more »I read somewhere that poor judgment in investing is what’s forcing Nicolas Cage to appear in cheap hooey like this. Sad, but preferable to believing that it’s poor judgment in role selection. During the Crusades, Nic and Ron Perlman are tasked with delivering a young maybe-witch (a good Claire Foy) through a dark forest to ...
Read more »84-year-old Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge never got an education, having spent his youth as a Mau Mau fighting for Kenyan independence (for which he was awarded ten years in the camps). So when in 2002 Kenya declared free education for all, he shows up for school. On his side is a young schoolteacher (an excellent Naomie ...
Read more »I chuckle at those who gush that this vapid, morally idiotic, unabashedly mindless mess is the “best Transformers movie yet!” There was a good one? It does have a marginally more cohesive plot than T2 (hardly difficult), starting with the intriguing idea that one of the Apollo missions was actually to check out an alien ...
Read more »A vaguely Taliban man is captured and tortured by US forces, but escapes when the prison van taking him to an “advanced interrogation techniques” facility in wintertime Poland overturns. Starving and freezing, he wanders through the woods killing (lest he be killed) all he encounters to get food (mother’s milk at one point). Not everyone ...
Read more »A rusty Mel Gibson takes a break from drunken anti-Semitism to make this disappointing, less-than-thrilling revenge thriller (his first film in eight years), adapting (cramming) a six-hour BBC miniseries into a single gloomy, poorly paced movie. The twenty-something daughter of a Boston cop is shotgunned on his front porch. The shooters are initially thought to ...
Read more »Go for a ride with Pixar... and Don Morton
Read more »Don's take on the Rotter's eighth episode
Read more »An alien-invasion saga boasting a character-based, well-written narrative with adequate acting that reportedly cost less than $20,000 to make? Right. Apparently a NASA probe carrying samples back from the Jovian moon Europa crashed in Mexico, soon after which these giant squid-tree-thingies, kind of like LOTR’s Ents, except really mean when attacked, began to appear. The ...
Read more »Indifferently directed hokum produced and written by M. Night Shyamalan has five thinly drawn characters trapped in a stalled elevator. One of them is the title character, who injures or kills one of the others each time the lights go out (the movie’s most interesting moments). Little atmosphere or suspense for a stalled-elevator flick, it’s ...
Read more »L.A. Frenchman Thierry Guetta one day picked up a video camera and began to document the inherently impermanent street art movement. He traveled the world recording and frequently assisting the likes of Shepard Fairey, Invader, and the legendary anonymous Brit known only as Banksy. He said he was making a movie, but it turns out ...
Read more »A cop (Channing Tatum) is assigned to the same working-class Queens neighborhood where he grew up in the projects, and by the way killed a couple of crack addicts. The deaths were covered up by the police because his cop dad had just been killed in the line of duty. Now someone who Knows has ...
Read more »The reason this flashy, witless, Michael Bay-produced action/adventure/romance/sci-fi/teen drama/superhero/monster movie manages to cram in so much is that it’s cobbled together from the best bits of a dozen better movies. Mainly Twilight, substituting moody teenage aliens for moody teenage vampires. Yet still it fails. Mysterious hunk (of wood) Alex Pettyfer, the new guy in school, ...
Read more »The plot in this slow-burn, deliberately paced art house Euro-thriller is not new: A cold-blooded, soul-weary professional assassin preparing for One Last Job is inspired through his interactions with a priest and a hooker to re-examine his hollow life and begins the slow journey back to humanity. But (co-producer) George Clooney, acting against type, puts ...
Read more »A mad German scientist kidnaps three tourists, one a Japanese. He then offers them a quaint AV lecture on what he plans to do with them, namely join them, mouth-to-anus, to create the title creature. Then he does so. If this seems remotely entertaining to you, get some help. The outrageousness of the concept alone ...
Read more »Natalie Portman portrays Emilia, a woman mired in grief over the death of her baby daughter at the age of three days. She’s also having problems relating to her young stepson, which are not being helped by the machinations of her husband’s first wife. Yes, Emilia is a home wrecker, the other woman, and is ...
Read more »A ham-fisted editing together of the first few episodes of Steven Seagal’s low-rent TV show, a formulaic cop opera imitating far better programs. You know, the ones with the wise, middle-aged team leader (usually an over-the-hill movie actor) guiding his/her band of young but talented undercover cops. There’s little cohesion (or logic, or intelligence), and ...
Read more »Concert footage from the 1981 Rolling Stones tour, directed for some reason by Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude; Being There; Shampoo). The brief, soundless glimpses backstage only served to make me wish I were watching a documentary, perhaps on the state of the “Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World” at that time, already ...
Read more »Hotheaded and, it has to be said, gullible god of thunder (Chris Hemsworth) reignites an ancient war in Asgard, whereupon his dad, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), strips him of his powers and cast him down to live among the mortals of New Mexico, one of whom is this cute scientist (Natalie Portman). Being SFX-driven “entertainment,” expect ...
Read more »A mixed quintet of squabbling city/country kids is descended upon by the title witch/nanny (writer Emma Thompson) and, as in the first film, are taught the values of good behavior (while engaging in plentiful poo jokes). We’ve seen this before, and it would not especially impress were it not for the good writing, acting (Thompson, ...
Read more »The problem with being a sequel to a film better than anyone thought it would be is being revealed as the film they expected in the first place. But though it lacks the surprise factor, this sloppy seconds raunch-fest remake does what it set out to do. Gross you out. The sleaze level is cranked ...
Read more »Now, I realize that films take a while to get to Japanese screens, but 1948? Kidding. It’s being shown here now to capitalize on the wild success of Black Swan, for which it was a major inspiration. And that’s a good idea. It deals with a fictitious ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale ...
Read more »Director J.J. Abrams’s (Mission Impossible III, Star Trek, lots of TV) new film conjures up memories of Steven Spielberg’s early works, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or ET (but without the cute). In fact, you’d call it a Spielberg rip-off if Spielberg himself weren’t the producer. It’s 1979. Six young kids having a ...
Read more »A father and son (Rainn Wilson & Devin Brochu) paralyzed with grief at the recent loss of Mom are descended upon by the title character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an antisocial headbanger whose unconventional manners and anarchic antics eventually (somehow) pull them out of their life-threatening funk. Kind of like a violent, foul-mouthed, pothead Nanny McPhee with ...
Read more »Documentary for the rock cognoscenti about the title band, its personnel changes, its successes, its brief lapses (just one non-fatal OD) and eventual maturation. The band began with the sudden end of Nirvana, when drummer Dave Grohl picked up a guitar and decided to become the front man of a new group. Since he was ...
Read more »Aron Ralston, a cocky rock climber (James Franco) heads out for a solo crawl through the canyons of Utah, neglects to tell anyone where he’s going, and then…oops! He falls down a crevasse and gets his hand trapped under a boulder. He then spends the title time period trying to get out, ultimately Doing What’s ...
Read more »A young man struggling to pay his dad’s medical bills assumes the identity of an OD victim he had overheard talking about a lucrative business deal. But he’s a tad dismayed to learn upon arriving at the appointed gothic mansion that he has apparently signed up to participate in an elaborate, circular game of Russian ...
Read more »Bunch of cheesy alien space ships start slurping up the citizens of Los Angeles while a group of extraordinarily hollow nobodies in a penthouse tries to avoid being ingested. This impossibly derivative alien-invasion mess is from Greg and Colin Strause, the former SFX wonks who brought us Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. You’d think they could ...
Read more »It’s a welcome thing in this age of overproduced CG pirates, werewolves, vampires, mutants and robots to come across a compact little indie film that generates palpable dread, escalating suspense and even a few dark chuckles with only three actors, basically one set and a tight script. Short-film director J. Blakeson’s assured debut feature, an ...
Read more »No one ever accused stage and screen director Julie Taymor of lacking inventiveness or boldness. (Titus, stunning; Across the Universe, gag.) But perhaps The Tempest, Shakespeare’s contemplative farewell play, could have used a bit less bombast. That said, this is worth seeing for the cast alone. In a brilliant move, Taymor has pulled a gender ...
Read more »Prequels and “origin” movies are what you make when you’ve run out of ideas but are told by the accounting office to do something—anything—to reboot a profitable franchise. This one examines the origins of Magneto and Professor X, with Michael Fassbender playing the young Erik Lehnsherr and James McAvoy the young Charles Francis Xavier. Kevin ...
Read more »When a movie is this rotten on so many levels it’s difficult to decide where to start. Catherine Hardwicke, who inflicted upon us Twilight, brings her interspecies dating problems to the Grimm Brothers’ classic tale, making the wolf a werewolf, creating a love triangle among the title character (Amanda Seyfried) and a pair of hunky ...
Read more »If this smart and effective comedy/drama is anything to go by, perhaps no longer being an A-list movie star has given Michael Douglas greater opportunities to practice the craft of acting. In it he plays a divorced, formerly rich and famous owner of a car dealership empire, a 60-year-old charmer who has since been indicted ...
Read more »You have to wonder about anyone who would want to make a flick this despicable, let alone remake one (Roger Ebert famously awarded the 1978 original zero stars). Comely female writer renting a backwoods cabin is raped and beaten by a quintet of local knuckle-draggers, but later returns to wreak upon them some arguably worse ...
Read more »As near as I can figure, this is Iceland showing that it can make splatter flicks as crappy as Hollywood’s. Or maybe it’s an attempt to sabotage tourism. A boat carrying a group of stereotypical tourists is disabled at sea. Rescuers appear in the form of an inbred family of fishbilly whalers. “Rescuers” apparently the ...
Read more »A quintet of noted documentarians brings the 2005 bestseller to the screen, with predictably mixed results. Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me) does the chapter “A Roshanda by Any Other Name,” about whether one’s name has any bearing on success in life. A tad facetious. Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) takes on “Pure Corruption,” about ...
Read more »An Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) near-miss that’s nonetheless an intriguing sit, at least until the Hollywood-ish third act. Up to that point, it’s an interesting examination of deception, perception and jealousy. A Toronto woman (Julianne Moore) suspects her admittedly flirty husband (Liam Neeson) of cheating, and hires a call girl (Amanda Seyfried) to ...
Read more »This ruminative, conceptual documentary by Danish director Michael Madsen on storing nuclear waste is essentially a string of questions; appropriately so, considering the mind-boggling, physical, moral and philosophical conundra it addresses. How do you store tons (250,000 so far) of radioactive material that will remain lethal for 100,000 years? If you bury it, do you ...
Read more »This movie will make you mad. Okay, madder. It’s as though James Bond was this time cruelly defeated and the greedy, warped villains won, taking over Wall Street and governments as well as financial rating and regulatory agencies, and even corrupting academia in order to attain untold wealth while remaining beyond the law. I don‘t ...
Read more »It’s hard to make one of the most feared warriors in the history of airborne combat seem boring, but this dreary, Hollywood-ish, English-language, German-made melodrama takes a pretty good rat-a-tat at it. This lifeless movie attempts to return some humanity to the lethal ace (played by a callow Matthias Schweighofer) by disingenuously portraying him as ...
Read more »You know, they’re going to make these things as long as you keep buying tickets. The first movie—inspired by a Disneyland ride—surprised everyone, and a $equel was inevitable. But the SFX-fuelled yo-ho-ho is wearing a bit thin, creativity-wise, in this fourth installment. Consists of about a half-dozen witless set pieces strung together, and there’s a ...
Read more »Title notwithstanding, this is more a moody revenge melodrama with a few car chases and knife fights than it is an action thriller. Dwayne Johnson (referred to only as “Driver”) winds up ten in the pen, hops into a vintage muscle car (cool) and purposefully goes after his brother’s murderers. Billy Bob Thornton (“Cop”) is ...
Read more »An examination of the real effects of globalization by people on six continents who advocate a halt to the ongoing multinationalization of the planet and a move toward more human-scale efforts, stressing localization instead. The filmmakers (who should probably have hired a narrator) point out that the explosion in big business and international banking has ...
Read more »Title refers to a rare condition called “anesthetic awareness,” which causes sufferers to appear unconscious but remain aware while enjoying surgical procedures. In this suspense-free medical thriller, Hayden Christensen, who is arguably more interesting zonked out than awake, does a lot of scenery chewing through flashbacks, and Jessica Alba frets prettily in the waiting room. ...
Read more »TV Tokyo and later Reuters “reporter” Kyoko Gasha turned her back on job and husband and fled to New York City to free herself of Japan’s sexist, seniority-based employment system—making a minor name for herself in the Big Apple. Now she calls herself a “documentary filmmaker,” and offers this film to support that claim, despite ...
Read more »A young woman (the ubiquitous Amanda Seyfried) discovers hidden in a wall in Verona below what’s purportedly (Romeo and) Juliet’s balcony a 50-year-old letter from a lovesick teenager. She answers it and subsequently meets the now-elderly woman (an inevitable Vanessa Redgrave). They and the woman’s priggish grandson then set out to locate her love once ...
Read more »It’s a rare film that can mesmerize you with beauty while it fills you with dread. Darren Aronofsky’s intellectually intriguing, superbly twisted, high-art companion piece to his low-art The Wrestler shows that while the hermetic world of ballet may be a lot prettier than pro wrestling, it’s not a bit less brutal. This psycho-horror-drama is ...
Read more »Formulaic horror flick has six one-dimensional twentysomethings venturing into an Australian jungle and getting serially possessed/infected/eaten by a pointy-toothed evil entity that turns them into fast, strong and hungry zombies. You’d think the bloody-fanged bunny rabbit they caught the first night might have tipped them off. Don’t these kids ever go to splatter flicks? Necks ...
Read more »With the cops breathing down his neck, an injured bank robber (Clayne Crawford) charmingly lies his way into the home of a mild-mannered man (David Hyde Pierce) preparing for a dinner party, but before long he’s looking at jail time as a reasonable alternative. This smart, twist-ridden little indie then becomes a tense cat-and-mouse game, ...
Read more »An American professor in Berlin for a biotechnology conference is involved in an auto accident. When he emerges from a coma four days later, his wife doesn’t recognize him and worse, there’s a guy at the hotel with her who says he’s him and can prove it. I guess Liam Neeson liked being an action/suspense ...
Read more »I like it that music documentaries teach me stuff I didn’t know. Usually. I realize it’s churlish to criticize a nice, modestly talented kid, but I feel obliged to try. Because this fake movie is pure marketing, aimed solely at his squealing fans, from awww-inspiring baby pix to his grassroots “discovery.” His Youtube-fueled rise to ...
Read more »When a pair of teenage half-siblings conceived through the artificial insemination of their married (to each other) mothers using sperm from the same donor seek to meet their birth father, the dynamics in their functional-as-any, upper-middle-class household are shifted. Mother Nic (Annette Bening), a doctor and the alpha female, resents it when the guy (Mark ...
Read more »Fans of experimental cinema that have a spare 2:19 might want to absorb this gorgeously filmed, intricately detailed effort by Belgian filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael. Others, well… It’s nothing if not all-inclusive, invoking concepts from the butterfly effect to quantum physics, parallel worlds, alternate realities, divergences within divergences, and the Cartesian concept that choosing not ...
Read more »Okay, I get what writer/director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) was trying to do. His masterful send-up of ’90s comic books and video games is fast-moving, visually arresting, bizarre, outlandish and absurd, and it takes place in a reality governed by the laws of Nintendo. But to enjoy a satire, any satire, ...
Read more »A wheelchair-bound club scratcher and skid-row denizen street-named Delicious D (Christopher Thornton) discovers one day that he can heal the sick by the laying on of hands. Naturally he blows off the soup-kitchen priest (Mark Ruffalo) who wants to use his gift for the church and instead joins an evil punk-rock band named “Healapalooza” (really) ...
Read more »Ordinary documentary about an extraordinary high-school basketball team, the Fighting Irish of St. Vincent-St. Mary in Akron, Ohio. Kristopher Belman’s filmmaking may be pedestrian, but his insight and timing couldn’t be better. He caught on to the skills of a quintet of kid B-ball players while they were still in the eighth grade, one of ...
Read more »In 1944, in an attempt to fool the Red Cross and convince the outside world that the death camps were just a rumor, the Nazis made a film about how nice it was to live at Theresienstadt, their show camp for “Jews who would be missed.” Inmates attended concerts and the theater, strolled about, played ...
Read more »Natalie, Natalie, Natalie. Don’t you realize that after you win a Best Actress Oscar (for Black Swan), you no longer have to appear in these lame romantic comedies opposite vacuous pretty boys like Ashton Kutcher? Two attractive people who have known each other since childhood agree to become “friends with benefits,” and just have sex ...
Read more »A lonely eight-year-old Australian girl named Mary Dinkle one day randomly writes to Max Horovitz, an obese, 44-year-old Jewish New Yorker with social issues, asking to be pen pals, thus beginning a unique 20-year friendship. This hilarious and heartbreaking claymation by the Oscar-winning Adam Elliot touches on such atypical subjects as death, suicide, alcoholism, and ...
Read more »If you’re as tired as I am with happily-ever-after rom-coms, this unflinching autopsy of a decaying marriage will seem like a breath of if not exactly fresh, then refreshingly real air. Director Derek Cianfrance’s debut film is not a whole lot of fun, but every frame feels genuine. Nothing unusual happens, and that’s what makes ...
Read more »Apparently, through the eons, the inhabitants of Mars have somehow forgotten how to parent, assigning the task to “nanny-bots.” But these machines just can’t get the TLC part right, so the dystopian matriarchy that now runs the planet has taken to kidnapping good mothers from Earth and extracting their “mom-ness,” with which they program their ...
Read more »Zach Snyder, who has previously inflicted upon us 300 and Watchmen, this time works from his own script, ripping off filmmakers too numerous to mention in his efforts to cram in every possible geeky fanboy fantasy without a single storytelling thread to bind them together. A young woman is committed by her evil guardian to ...
Read more »I’m not sure Michael Winterbottom was the best director to bring this bleak pulp novel by Jim Thompson to the screen. It’s about a ’50s west Texas deputy sheriff—a polite, soft-spoken, even intellectual guy—who happens to be a psychopath. Not only does he kill, but he kills those he loves, without guilt or conscience, and ...
Read more »As I’ve asked before, why can’t films aimed at entertaining little kiddies include even the slightest degree of educational value? The only thing this crappy waste of celluloid has to do with the classic 18th-century social satire by Jonathan Swift, who must be spinning in his grave like a break-dancer, is a big guy (an ...
Read more »This direct-to-DVD Bruce Willis flick might have been viewed as a mildly clever blending of the high-school-angst and noir genres if this had not been done before, and with far greater style and wit, in 2005’s Brick. A nerdy aspiring scribe for the school paper writes an article about the student body president that amounts ...
Read more »One might wonder why Julien Temple (The Filth and the Fury Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten; Glastonbury) would choose the obscure ’70s pre-punk band Dr. Feelgood as the subject of his next rock doc. The band comprised four ne’er-do-wells (including songwriter/guitarist Wilko Johnson and lead singer Lee Brilleaux) from refinery-infested Canvey Island in the ...
Read more »Movie postponed until further notice. LA-based Frenchman Thierry Guetta picked up a video camera one day and began to document the inherently impermanent street art movement. He traveled the world recording and frequently assisting the likes of Shepard Fairey, Space Invader and the legendary anonymous Brit known only as Banksy. He said he was making ...
Read more »What is it about Japanese directors working in English? Does the high level of traditional nonverbal communication among Japanese people make for lousy actors and, by extension, an inability in directors to recognize good acting from bad? Because this happens time and time again. (I’m not talking about the separate “cute” problem here.) Some ambitious ...
Read more »Fans of Sofia Coppola will find this graceful but static portrait of an unimaginative and unmoored movie star (Stephen Dorff) to be thoughtful and accurate, but its languid pace and level of pretention will bore the socks off everyone else. I realize what she’s doing, but couldn’t find it in myself to care about the ...
Read more »Movie postponed until further notice. Big, stupid, loud and lazy alien-invasion piece of crap has Aaron Eckhart (who should know better) leading a squad of Marines in the defense of the title city against computer-generated alien spaceships and warrior thingies. The story’s not difficult to follow, since it basically doesn’t exist. (So why does it ...
Read more »Mark Wahlberg is excellent as the title pugilist in this based-on-real-people story. He plays a promising boxer named Micky whose hopes for a title fight are constantly frustrated by his self-involved mother’s poor management and his ex-pug, cokehead brother’s poor training. This barely functioning status quo is disrupted when his sweet, tough-talking new girlfriend encourages ...
Read more »What if mankind “solved” the problem of disease and aging by raising clones of each person in orphanage-like farms for the purpose of future organ transplants? This is the premise of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, which dips in and out of the short lives of three such “donors” approaching with resignation and melancholy their “harvest” time ...
Read more »Movie postponed until further notice. Letter to Katherine Heigl: Knocked Up was a hit, but enough with the bland rom-coms. You have shown signs you can act, but people are starting to have difficulty envisioning you as anything but a plucky blonde with a great smile in cloying, annoying fluff like this. Thank you. “Plot”: ...
Read more »Movie postponed until further notice. I believe I said this about the first two Jackass movies: if this film fails to offend you even once, I don’t ever want to meet you. Johnny Knoxville and his mob of moronic, masochistic man-boys are back with a new bunch of sanity-defying stunts aimed at causing themselves maximum ...
Read more »In 1982, Jacques Tati’s daughter inherited the screenplay for what the late great French comedic actor intended to be his final film. Eventually she made the very wise decision to give it to Sylvain Chomet, animator of the marvelous The Triplets of Belleville, who has brilliantly recreated Tati, right down to the too-short pants and ...
Read more »The eclectic Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited) applies his dryly humorous, visually arresting style to the field of animation with this smart little stop-motion jewel from a story by Roald Dahl. The title fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a retired chicken thief, now a ...
Read more »In this lightweight yet insightful road movie for grown-ups by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road), a newly pregnant couple (played with genuine chemistry by The Office’s John Krasinski and SNL’s Maya Rudolph) are musing upon what kind of world they want for their child. They visit a crude former co-worker in Arizona (Allison Janney), ...
Read more »The creator of an online chat room is, unbeknownst to the other four members he allows in, a suicide-obsessed teen sociopath intent on manipulating one of them into, um, logging off. It’s a mildly interesting premise if that’s what floats your boat, but director Hideo Nakata (Ringu), probably envisioning filming in London and in English ...
Read more »The Coen Brothers’ remake of the 1969 John Wayne epic is superior in every way: stronger acting, greater attention to period detail, more faithful to the 1968 novel by Charles Portis, a tighter script and more humor (though the last is so low-key you’ll have to watch for it). The real pleasure here is the ...
Read more »Movie postponed until further notice. As this is supposedly based on the true-life experiences of a California priest sent to the Vatican to study with a master exorcist, you’re not going to get any green projectile vomiting or spinning heads. But you’re not going to get much else, either, save for watching Anthony Hopkins trot ...
Read more »This is a somewhat sanitized (but still suitably raunchy) account of the rise and disintegration of the pioneering mid-’70s all-girl rock band noted for launching the career of Joan Jett (played by Kristen Stewart, who can actually act when not working opposite shirtless vampires and werewolves). The main character, however, is not Jett but lead ...
Read more »Disney applies its formidable history of watering down traditional fairy tales (they say it’s the last) to the story of Rapunzel, a plucky young lass held captive in a tower by a witch whose youth is preserved by the girl’s magical (and, at 25 meters, plentiful) hair. It is not until Rapunzel’s 18th birthday and ...
Read more »If you’re looking for a conventional swords-and-sandals epic, keep looking. But for thinking moviegoers, this film by Alejandro Amenabar (The Sea Inside, Abre Los Ojos), about the historical development of ideas and the age-old struggle between science and superstition, plays better than Troy. The story revolves around Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), a female philosopher, mathematician and ...
Read more »It’s an admirable thing in this age of megabuck blockbusters to be able to make a movie on a shoestring budget (this one was supposedly made for £45). Basically it’s a few days in the life of the freshly minted title zombie, as he shambles around London looking for people to eat. But low-budget moviemaking ...
Read more »On a picturesque Venice-bound train, a mild-mannered American schoolteacher (Johnny Depp) meets “by chance” a femme fatale (Angelina Jolie) trying to elude both the cops and the mob. Through endless plot machinations, she sets him up as a fall guy. Or not. Now, I like a good mystery. I enjoy picking up on dropped clues ...
Read more »This story of the struggle to end Britain’s participation in the slave trade spans a period between 1782, when idealistic MP William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) first introduced a bill to that effect, and 1807, when the abolitionists finally won out. It’s a noble theme, and though the storytelling is choppy in spots, the movie is ...
Read more »If you’ve been under a rock for the last month and immune to the buzz this life-affirming film has been generating, here’s the story: King George VI of England (Colin Firth) ascended to the throne only reluctantly when his brother abdicated in 1936 to marry an American divorcee. George Albert (“Bertie”) and his wife (Helena ...
Read more »Two “interviews” with Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring challenged for the first time the use of untested toxic pesticides in the US. The quote marks are because Carson, who has been called the patron saint of the modern environmental movement, died of breast cancer in 1964, and this is a recreation by writer ...
Read more »Young, relentlessly cheerful producer (Rachel McAdams) hires out-to-pasture veteran newsman Harrison Ford to co-anchor (with Diane Keaton) a fourth-rated morning TV show. But his disdain for senseless banter is evident, and ratings continue to drop. Then Rachel starts to chip away at his irascibility and gets creative. Good chemistry among the cast, and it doesn’t ...
Read more »The Coen Brothers continue to defy categorization, this time applying their profound philosophical inquiry to a comedy of discomfort about Jewish Midwestern life in the ’60s. Physics professor Larry Gropnik’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) hopes for tenure are being sabotaged, his wife is leaving him for a friend, his babe neighbor has taken to nude sunbathing, and ...
Read more »Though few would agree with Denmark’s Lars Von Trier’s self-assessment that he is the greatest director of all time, he is undoubtedly one of the most innovative working today (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark). So it’s sad to watch him go so completely off the rails with crap like this. It’s a shame ...
Read more »I should recuse myself from reviewing any more Narnia flicks (although after this bomb, it’s unlikely any more of the seven C.S. Lewis books will reach the screen). I blame this on an extreme case of not giving a horse’s patootie. I also object to heavy-handed religious proselytizing couched in stories for children (yes, yes, ...
Read more »If you don’t know who Hunter S. Thompson was, you need to see this artfully assembled bio-doc. If you do, you still need to see it. This gun-toting, drug-crazed inebriate was also a patriot and a dynamic political writer who made up his own set of rules, filtering reality through an innovative kind of participatory ...
Read more »Movie postponed until further notice. Clint Eastwood continues his refusal to cater to the multiplex crowd with this intelligent and haunting (and non-religious—no easy feat) look at what might await us after we shuffle off this mortal coil. The film centers on three individuals—a French TV journalist who almost died in the Indian Ocean tsunami ...
Read more »Adrian Grenier, who’s famous for playing a guy who’s famous for being famous on TV’s Entourage, noticed that one of the paparazzi stalking him was just a kid, 13-year-old Austin Visschedyk. So he turned the tables, as well as his own camera, on the boy to fashion this fascinating look at the uneasy if symbiotic ...
Read more »The original was a nice application of the amateur-video Blair Witch technique to the haunted house genre. It was basically a string of “Boo!” moments, and the ending was scary. But you could replace the “2” here with “more of,” as this is closer to a remake than a sequel. (BTW, it’s a prequel, too—don’t ...
Read more »A-listers Reese Witherspoon (a pro softball player), Paul Rudd (a financial fall guy about to be federally indicted) and Owen Wilson (a Washington Nationals ace pitcher and king of the one-night stand) help writer/director James L. Brooks (The Simpsons, Terms of Endearment, As Good As It Gets) elevate this amiable if unremarkable love triangle to ...
Read more »I’ve never much cared for Ben Affleck’s acting, but he has apparently paid attention to what was going on behind the camera, and is emerging as a competent director (Gone Baby Gone). His clear, fluid style focuses on character, and he can create tension. Consider the squirm-inducing scene involving a tattoo and three people having ...
Read more »Incredibly cheesy take on the old devil-at-the-gates theme, in which a small, eclectic band of people in a house/saloon/shopping center fight off monsters/zombies/aliens/dark forces that have already eaten/turned/abducted the rest of the town/country/planet. This one’s probably worse than most for starring Hayden Christensen as the hero. The bad thingies this time are these Dark People ...
Read more »The leader of a struggling rock ’n’ roll band (writer/director Rob Stefaniuk) is unnerved by the fact that his musicians, starting with babe bassist Jessica Paré (outstanding), are turning into vampires—but delighted by the resultant charisma boost. This, however, attracts the attention of vampire killer Eddie Van Helsing (a nearly inevitable Malcolm McDowell). Good imagery, ...
Read more »Some iconic movie characters should stay in retirement or, in Gordon Gekko’s case, prison. In this sequel to Wall Street, Gekko (Michael Douglas) has done his time for the crime, and has come back to the Street to preach to us about the 2008 crash. He’s a watered-down version of the 1987 Gekko we loved ...
Read more »This is not so much a movie as it is one of those “opportunities” to watch A-list actors, in this case aging ones, having fun at work. Kind of a geriatric Ocean’s Eleven. Or Space Cowboys with spies. Or The Expendables with good acting. The plot is simple: a quartet of retired CIA black operatives ...
Read more »A working-class British woman’s (Michelle Williams) husband and young son are killed in a massive terrorist attack on a soccer stadium while she is at home in the arms of a neighbor (Ewan McGregor) in this thriller/romance/psychological portrait. The movie doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, and ends up collapsing under the ...
Read more »If Super Size Me caused you to give up eating in fast-food joints, this activist documentary may make you give up eating altogether. It’s informative, entertaining and scarier than any horror flick. Did you know that the vast majority of the “choices” we find in our supermarkets are provided by four monstrous agribusiness corporations? (USA; ...
Read more »Certified bohemian Jeff Johnson works his way south on a sailboat, hooks up with Easter Island’s first female surfer, and takes her to Chile, where they retrace the 1968 ascent of the treacherous Corcovado—the mountain’s sole summiting. To say Jeff’s a free spirit doesn’t even begin to describe this shoestring adventurer. This beautifully filmed (cinematography ...
Read more »An angry father takes matters into his own hands when his family’s killer is let off easy. Snore. As the plot becomes increasingly unfocused and the disbelief suspension more difficult, sleazeballs start getting bumped off in a variety of manners bordering on torture porn. But the probable killer, the father (a colossally unconvincing Gerard Butler), ...
Read more »After the first ten minutes, my hopes for magic in the pairing of director Michel Gondry with actor/writer Seth Rogen were dashed by the crushing tedium of this patchy mishmash. It’s the dumbest superhero film since Catwoman. Or even Daredevil. Fanboys will not be pleased with this desecration of the TV series that introduced Bruce ...
Read more »I had hoped for better from costars Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis and director Todd Phillips (The Hangover) than this desperate, mildly amusing, odd-couple road trip. Uptight Downey loses all his ID and money in Atlanta and is forced to hitch a ride to LA with annoyingly friendly goofball Galifianakis. The problem is that ...
Read more »What? Is the overwrought horror-thriller some kind of station of the cross for declining movie stars? A newly single father (Kevin Costner) for no discernable reason moves his two kids to a big old house in the country. Mainly I guess because that’s where movies like this happen. Daughter (Ivana Baquero—Pan’s Labyrinth) discovers an Indian ...
Read more »The biggest question surrounding Time’s Person of the Year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is how such an antisocial wonk was able to create this phenomenal new social milieu. Ah, but the fact that he didn’t quite do it alone is the crux of this fascinating, frightening, funny (and fictionalized) film. The subject matter is inherently ...
Read more »OK, it’s not about the music. It’s about the backstage logistical, legal, social and personal obstacles that Bethel, NY, town president Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) had to overcome to bring this generation-defining concert to his town. Make that “background,” as “backstage” implies actually hearing some music. A problem is that while Martin is a gifted ...
Read more »Rodrigo Garcia (Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Nine Lives) explores with compassion, insight and heartrending realism the lives and complex emotions of three women (Naomi Watts, Annette Bening and Kerry Washington, all excellent) affected in one way or another by the impact of adoption. The three tales eventually connect, for a ...
Read more »A guy (Vince Vaughn) espies the wife (Winona Ryder) of his best friend/business partner (Kevin James) canoodling with another man, but hesitates to tell him because the two guys are at a crucial stage in the development of their product (an electric engine that makes sounds like a muscle car). Really. So where’s the dilemma? ...
Read more »Not since Speed have I seen a film so effectively put the motion into a motion picture. A pair of railroad men, a veteran and a rookie (Denzel Washington and Chris Pine), are tasked with catching up to and stopping a driverless 800-meter train barreling along at 110kph before it hits a curve in a ...
Read more »A neurotic film director who gets visions takes a crew to Transylvania to recreate, in the same locations, an unfinished film from the ’20s about a cursed gypsy, the cast and crew of which mysteriously disappeared. Odd, mostly derivative things start happening on the set. Members of the crew go violently insane; others die progressively ...
Read more »In this almost serious approach to the ethical questions raised by corporate-funded gene-splicing, a pair of brilliant but impatient bio-engineers (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) illegally mix a little human DNA with that of several animals, and produce a rapidly maturing, vaguely humanoid, not-quite-cute thingy that they come to look upon as a daughter (not ...
Read more »I don’t think this kind of direct-to-video horror-thriller crap is what Sarah Michelle Gellar had in mind when she quit TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer in order to seek more interesting projects. A woman blissfully married to a perfect husband must share their home with husband’s seriously bad-ass parolee brother. A freak but picturesque head-on ...
Read more »Eric Bishop (a spot-on Steve Evets) is a disillusioned middle-aged Manchester postal worker who has inflicted upon himself more than the usual share of life’s hardships. His two teenage stepsons are on the cusp of criminality, and he still feels guilty about the wife he abandoned years ago (Stephanie Bishop). His friends try to cheer ...
Read more »Somali supermodel Waris Dirie (played by Ethiopian supermodel Liya Kebede) had a hard time getting to where she is. Circumcised at 3, sold at 13, a teen street urchin in London. She was eventually discovered by a fashion photographer and catapulted to the big time, and has since become a celebrity activist and UN ambassador ...
Read more »If you were to go wading through the plot of this two-hour Christina Aguilera music video, you wouldn’t get your toenails wet. And the storyline was old before they invented talkies. Aguilera plays a small-town Iowa girl who heads for El Lay to make it in the singing and dancing biz. She wheedles a job ...
Read more »This is a hard one to call. An average teen (Aaron Johnson) decides to costume up and fight injustice, and finds allies of a like mind (Chloe Moretz as “Hit Girl” is a young actress to watch). This morally murky mayhem has a decidedly non-comic-book, ultra-violent edge to it that some will relish but others ...
Read more »The title phenom went from starving teenage graffiti artist to world-renowned millionaire painter in just a few years. He always knew he’d be famous; he just didn’t realize that it would devour him, and he flamed out with a heroin overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. This compelling tribute combines informal interviews (shelved ...
Read more »The dazzling first few minutes of this sequel to the cultish, not-that-great 1982 CG groundbreaker almost changed my attitude toward 3D. Almost. Then it settled down to a lot of repetitious Frisbee-throwing and motorbike racing. It’s interesting that Jeff Bridges plays opposite a facial performance-capture version of himself 28 years earlier. For a while. Then ...
Read more »A Stanford-bound young man (Zac Efron) drops out of society after a car accident that kills his younger brother, and takes a job at the cemetery so he can play catch with the boy’s ghost each evening at twilight. He himself was flatlined for a few seconds, see, and he can see dead people. Omigod! ...
Read more »Our family-friendly ogre, unhappy with not being scary anymore, is tricked by the impish Rumple-stiltskin into entering an alternate universe, one in which he has never met Fiona or Donkey, and where Rumpel is the ruler (like Back to the Future, only not funny). Only a true love’s kiss can put things right, but in ...
Read more »Woody Allen returns to Manhattan and his angst-ridden roots with this fun farce about happiness and accepting it when it comes. The main character is a 60-ish misanthrope named Boris Yellnikoff, a brilliant nuclear physicist once “almost nominated for a Nobel Prize.” Boris is played by Larry David (creator of Seinfeld and the writer/star of ...
Read more »Apparently, the witty and carefree forest-dwelling thief we know and love, who flirted with Maid Marion and amusingly confounded the Nottingham Sheriff, didn’t buckle his swash sufficiently or something for director Ridley Scott. So instead we have this turgid, joyless, big-deal “prequel” to the myth of the main merry man, in which a lowly archer ...
Read more »Jeez, Steven, if you insist on continuing to make (and write) movies, even direct-to-video ones, couldn’t you exert the tiniest effort to make a new one? Or use your own voice? This ultra-cheapie throwaway, again filmed in Romania but this time taking place there, is so generic-Seagal that I have no idea what it’s about, ...
Read more »This delightful bit of elderly escapism is a tour de force for Joan Plowright (77 when this was made in 2005). Dame Joan plays an elderly woman seeking a bit of independence from her daughter in Scotland. She books, sight unseen, a room in a rundown London residential hotel for people at a certain stage ...
Read more »Latest effort by the tasteful guys who gave us the Crank movies explores a degenerate world that has merged porn and punishment into a lethal online game, delicately titled Slayer, that involves avatars of death-row convicts, controlled by brain implants, killing to win their freedom (with the most successful gaining acclaim from a bloodthirsty, pay-per-view ...
Read more »In this direct-to-video American remake of a 2001 German flick, volunteers for a sociological experiment are divided into two groups, prisoners and guards, and placed in a prison environment. All they have to do to earn $14,000 each is abide by a set of rules for two weeks. Pacifist Adrien Brody falls into the first ...
Read more »This slightly jumpy and vaguely hagiographic documentary about legendary Motörhead frontman and bassist Lemmy Kilmister, an unapologetic drinker, drug user and womanizer, reveals (gasp!) that he’s a pretty sweet guy. He is who he is, and anyway doesn’t care what you or anyone thinks, even about his collection of Nazi memorabilia (which includes a tank). ...
Read more »Brain-dead my-husband’s-a-hitman rom-com shoot-’em-up stars a smarmy Ashton Kutcher as a CIA superspy, and if you buy that, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona I’d like you to look at. Katherine “get a new agent” Heigl’s the clueless blonde he falls in love with and marries but keeps in the dark about his violent ...
Read more »One would wonder why the pointy-toothed undead in countless vampire movies never foresaw the little complication upon which this speculative B-movie nightmare is built: what happens when the bloodsuckers have been so successful in “turning” humans that almost everyone’s a vampire and there’s no one left to drink? (A visually diverting subplot graphically demonstrates how ...
Read more »Aviatrix Amelia Earhart was one of the most exciting people of the 20th century. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, a pioneering feminist and a Depression-era inspiration. So a greater mystery than her disappearance over the South Pacific in 1937 is how talented director Mira Nair could have turned out ...
Read more »This is a lesson to all actors: pay your income taxes or you’ll have to star in crap like this to get out of the hole. Wesley Snipes is a disillusioned CIA assassin protecting a bad guy from badder guys. I don’t know why. Three quarters of the film is a shootout in a hospital, ...
Read more »This first half of the seventh Harry Potter installment is about what it needs to be. Fans will dig it, and newcomers will be entertained, if not exactly enthralled. It is of course darker and, like its three protagonists, more grown up, and that seems fitting. Fans of this ten-year franchise, perhaps children when Harry ...
Read more »Early 20th-century educator, editor and journalist Leonie Gilmour (Emily Mortimer) was instrumental in nurturing the talents of her son, Isamu Noguchi, who would become the world-renowned sculptor and architect. There are interesting scenes of her time as a kind of proto-gaijin in Japan in this well made film, which is a cut above most things ...
Read more »During the first few minutes of what seemed a perfunctory documentary about an elderly pair of art collectors, I was formulating in my mind a perfunctory review. (I know squat about art.) But not far in, I began to get interested, then fascinated, and finally moved. Herb and Dorothy Vogel, a postal worker and a ...
Read more »To stand out these days, zombie movies have to be parodies (like Shawn of the Dead or Zombieland) or seriously different and scary (28 Days Later). Hardcore zombie buffs will find all the right ingredients in this admittedly well-crafted but completely unnecessary and tame remake of a 1973 George Romero flick. But even the most ...
Read more »Mexploitation maestro Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Spy Kids, Sin City) applies his finely honed grindhouse skills and razor-sharp wit to this sharply written, cutting self-parody, and makes a few acute political points in the process. Danny Trejo plays the title ex-Federale with a gruff, straight face (“Machete don’t text”). Michelle Rodriguez is a taco-truck girl who ...
Read more »The undeadly dull walk on the mild side continues in this gloppy third installment. “Vegetarian” vampire Robert Pattinson and buff werewolf Taylor Lautner, evidently too poor to afford a shirt, are still vying for the attentions of Kristen Stewart, oblivious to the fact that she’s clearly a tease. This time the bloodsuckers and lycanthropes must ...
Read more »Two British schoolboy misfits in the ’80s (Bill Milner and Will Poulter), a habitual troublemaker and a sheltered kid from a religious fundamentalist family, pool their fertile imaginations to film their own version of Rambo: First Blood. The project leads to popularity and greater acceptance, as well as Life Lessons Learned. Pity, though, that the ...
Read more »The mere concept of being buried alive is enough to cause many people to pass on this brutally intense little squirm-fest from Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés, but that would be a mistake. A kidnapped civilian truck driver in Iraq (a very good Ryan Reynolds) awakes inside a buried coffin. He finds in there a cigarette ...
Read more »An intelligent if not constantly riveting examination of how the emotional turmoil of John Lennon’s formative years led to the almost mystical mix of joy and sadness we find in many of his lyrics. It’s not about The Beatles. The cocky but impressionable John (Aaron Johnson) was raised by his unsmiling Aunt Mimi (a spot-on ...
Read more »Don’t even begin to think you know where this little character-driven psycho-duel is heading; it’s just playing on your expectations. Nor should you take what the three main characters are saying at face value; you’re going to have to read between the lines. It’s hard to say who puts in the most convincing performance. Robert ...
Read more »Many have claimed over the years that Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s books are unfilmable, but it’s taken director Robert Logevall and screenwriter Scott Coffey to prove it. The central character is this preposterously well-endowed, moody young man named Kengo (dialogue: “God gave me this huge cock”), played by Jason Lew with a total lack of ...
Read more »Melodramatic, violent and often overheated cop opera from Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) follows the lives of three morally compromised officers in the toughest precinct of the title borough. Ethan Hawke needs cash for his huge and growing family; Don Cheadle is so completely embedded in a drug ring that he sometimes forgets who he is; ...
Read more »A megalomaniacal criminal mastermind (oddly voiced by Steve Carell) who aspires to become the Greatest Villain of All Time cynically uses a cute trio of cookie-peddling orphans in a nefarious plan to steal the moon. If their eventual melting of his cold, evil heart comes as a surprise to you, you really need to get ...
Read more »If you didn’t dig the 1991 Oliver Stone biopic, Tom DiCillo has now made a documentary for you. Or more correctly, he has assembled a bunch of clichéd film clips from the late ’60s, persuaded Johnny Depp to do a banal voiceover, and called it a documentary. Initially, it’s mildly interesting, as it takes a ...
Read more »I don’t usually feature Japanese films here, but occasionally one comes along like this delight by writer/director/producer Atsushi Ogata that is subtitled in English and charming enough to warrant a look. It’s about a perpetual supporting actor (Toru Matsuoka) whose current role is a uniformed patrolman in a terebi cop opera. The only thing he’s ...
Read more »New Zealand’s Niki Caro, who delighted the world with the moving Whale Rider, has clearly made a misstep with this overly ambitious and clumsy adaptation of a fantasy drama by Elizabeth Knox. A young French peasant aspires to make great wines but is frustrated at having to work for a mediocre chateau. Then a homoerotic ...
Read more »Less irritating than usual rom-com thanks to crisp direction by Nanette Burstein, likable leads Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, and the fact that the required second-act complication takes the form of a 3,000-mile gap between domiciles rather than some made-up jealousy or misunderstanding. The turn-off for me was the constant and gratuitous profanity. The screenwriters ...
Read more »If this grindhouse boobs-and-bullets chick-sploitation movie fails, it won’t be for lack of energy. Three luscious babes—a corporate type, a stripper and a drug dealer—arrive at an abandoned desert gas station in search of buried diamonds. There’s a backtracking storyline, some bone-crushing catfights, and some original if overcooked wordplay. You have to admire, at least ...
Read more »“The Disposables” might be a better title. Writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone (a concept scary in itself) has assembled an impressive crew of aged beef for this desperate, self-conscious, preposterone-fueled romp. Sly is joined by Rocky’s old nemesis Dolph Lundgren, who has reportedly been indicted on charges of aggravated overacting. Then there’s Jet Li, whose character’s name ...
Read more »The multiplex crowd won’t at all enjoy this period romance adapted by director Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen) from a novel by Colette. And I mean that in the best possible way. Michelle Pfeiffer, who at 52 is still getting better, plays a legendary belle epoque courtesan of a certain age who dallies with ...
Read more »A clueless woman (Cameron Diaz) bumps into a charming man (Tom Cruise) in an airport. Twice. This Meet Cute is no accident. Turns out he’s a MacGuffin-toting spy on the run, and she’s soon swept up in the intrigue. Why? Because, silly, it wouldn’t be much of a star-driven romantic action flick if she wasn’t. ...
Read more »George (an Oscar-nominated Colin Firth in a career best) hasn’t enjoyed much of anything in his life since long-time partner Jim died in a car accident eight months ago, so today he has decided to blow his brains out. But he’s English, so it will have to be done in an orderly manner. He goes ...
Read more »A pair of astronauts (Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid) awake from long-term hyper-slumber aboard this kind of giant Noah’s Ark spacecraft on its way to populate a new planet, with only a vague idea of who or where they are and what they’re supposed to do. (During this time, you will be trying to figure ...
Read more »The undead “action” moves to L.A. in this fourth sequel in Milla Jovovich’s little zombie series. Couldn’t be bothered.
Read more »A high-powered New York lawyer, haunted by a near-death experience as a child, as well as by the SIDS death of his toddler son and subsequent separation from his wife, is approached by a spooky man known only as Dr. Kay, who claims to have the psychic ability to spot those who are not long ...
Read more »Jeez, the title of this me-first memoir by journalist Elizabeth Gilbert made me gag when it was on the bookshelves! A colossally self-absorbed woman (Julia Roberts) dumps her devoted husband (Billy Crudup) for reasons undefined in order to “find herself.” She takes up with a young actor (James Franco), but dumps him too and heads ...
Read more »If you’re hungry for a spot of middlebrow literary historical fiction, served by a superb cast, you could do far worse than this adaptation by writer/director Michael Hoffman of Jay Parini’s novel on Leo Tolstoy’s final year. By 1910, at age 82, Tolstoy’s writings had become considerably more political, giving rise to the “Tolstoyan” movement, ...
Read more »Formulaic, gory Euro-thriller from Dario Argento, the once-great Italian master of horror. A moody American cop (an extremely slumming Adrien Brody) is trying to catch Giallo, a serial torture-killer of beautiful women (Brody again, in rubbery, prosthetic makeup, and billed as the anagrammatical “Byron Deidra”) in a Turin where everyone, even the bad guys, speak ...
Read more »It’s nice to see a documentary on the perceived inconsistencies and outright conspiracy theories surrounding the official 9/11 report that’s told from a fresh angle, in this case Italian. Or it would be if it offered anything new. Or didn’t depend on the emotional opinions and outright whackery—did you know that there are two Osama ...
Read more »The satire in this send-up by Barry Levinson (Wag the Dog) of the Hollywood film machine is constant and sly. So sly, however, that those not directly involved in the “movie business” may miss most of it. I loved it, but I can understand how it could seem a tad tedious to cinematic outsiders. Central ...
Read more »Jersey auteur Kevin Smith’s latest and most juvenile film is this flaccid buddy-cop opera starring Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis (zilch chemistry) that thinks it’s way funnier than it is. In this homage to a genre that no one ever really liked, two disgraced cops slog through a forest of bodily function jokes to retrieve ...
Read more »Bruce Beresford’s (Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy) adaptation of the autobiography of Chinese ballet star Li Cunxin is kind of an Asian Billy Elliot, and just as heartwarming. Li was plucked at the age of 11 from his home and family in Shandong Province and taken to Beijing to be trained in classical ballet. Years ...
Read more »Japanese directors periodically and wisely shake off the bonds of Japan’s “creative” system and go off to study filmmaking overseas, usually with the dream of becoming a “breakthrough,” cross-cultural phenom. Then in the end they merely shoehorn some half-assed gaijin actors into Japanese stereotypes, write a lame, self-indulgent story around them, include an oddball or ...
Read more »The plot barely exists, the dialogue’s dumb, the characters are shallow, the action’s pointless, and it lacks the smallest trace of intellectual stimulation. Hey—it’s Sex and the City for males! This mildly entertaining two hours of preposterone-fuelled, compacted trash is based, of course, on the cheeseball ’80s TV show starring George Peppard and Mr. T. ...
Read more »The original movie, a 2001 CG-lips-on-talking-animals flick, was so forgettable that I recently watched the entire thing on DVD, thinking it was this charmless sequel, and not a single frame rang a bell. This ain’t no Babe. I’m not even going to go into the plot, since there’s nothing here for adults save numerous 007 ...
Read more »Pretty good as remakes go, even with the old fish-out-of-water storyline that was hackneyed 26 years ago (underdog New Kid in School finds Wise Mentor who helps him go up against Big Bully in Final Sporting Event). In this darker but more grounded version, the action has moved to China, Ralph Macchio is now Will ...
Read more »Fun, gloriously bizarre George Clooney military-satire vehicle about what we are told was a covert US Army psychological-warfare unit in the ’70s called the “New Earth Army,” which trained “psychic spies” to utilize New Age peace-love-dope techniques to influence the enemy. It becomes apparent not far in that this is a one-joke movie, and it ...
Read more »The latest product of Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney, an evil collaboration bent on dazzling preteen boys out of their allowances, is this uninspired fantasy (is that an oxymoron?), a shameless and utterly predictable SFX-driven Harry Potter rip-off. Disney apparently even saw fit to throw into the profit pit its own classic title scene from Fantasia, ...
Read more »This latest effort by Dreamworks Animation, which gave us Shrek but since then mostly a lot of kids’ stuff, is about a boy named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), the slightly nerdy son of the chief of a medieval, vaguely Viking village (where people of course speak English with Scottish accents). His village devotes most ...
Read more »Three generic and charmlessly written college kids find themselves stranded on a ski lift, at night, too high to jump, with the resort closed for the next five days. The film undoubtedly sees itself as a winter version of the successful Open Water, but a ski lift is not the open sea, primal-terror wise, and ...
Read more »In this wonderfully absurd distaff Bourne flick, a decorated CIA operative (Angelina Jolie) is fingered by a Russian defector as a deep undercover agent, planted as a child during the Soviet era in order to carry out a nefarious plan to bring down the United States by causing it to nuke Mecca or something. Out ...
Read more »Surprisingly, and a little sadly, this awful flick about a flesh-eating, projectile-vomiting, demonically possessed teen queen was scripted by Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody. But I don’t think even Ellen Page could have saved this amateurish shot at comedy/horror. The Body of the title belongs to Megan Fox (both Transformers), who attempts to add (literal) ...
Read more »If I told you the ending, it wouldn’t make a spot of sense. Writer/director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia, The Dark Knight) spent ten years crafting this smart, labyrinthine and original mind-messer, and you’ll have to pay attention and use your intellect. A corporate espionage expert (Leonardo DiCaprio) specializing in infiltrating his quarries’ minds to steal ...
Read more »Most zombie movies today have fallen back on humor, usually dark, usually lame. They’re neither scary nor funny. So it’s good to see one come along that just runs with it, and uses a sharp script to get the laughs. It’s downright infectious! Jesse Eisenberg plays a nerdy pandemic survivor who has remained healthy by ...
Read more »The father (Brendan Fraser) of a pair of kids suffering from a rare genetic disorder convinces a curmudgeonly researcher (Harrison Ford) who’s close to a cure to let him help raise funds for the remaining research. This is one of those inspired-by-true-events flicks, which means it’s 90 percent made up by screenwriters. Ford is in ...
Read more »Geez, I hope so. Note to readers: the other two movies opening this week are both better, but I thought this drab and dingy disaster would be more fun to write about. The film calls attention to one of the greatest mysteries in Hollywood today: why do people continue to give M. Night Shyamalan perfectly ...
Read more »Eight ambitious candidates for the job of assistant to the secretive CEO of a major biotech firm file into a claustrophobic exam room for their final hurdle. After receiving terse, precisely worded instructions (only one question, and one answer) and told to begin, they immediately get their first surprise. There’ll be more. Though fierce rivals, ...
Read more »Another Steven Soderbergh “experiment,” this bare-bones, true-to-life murder mystery involves three workers at a doll factory, which is kind of a creepy setting to begin with. It plays more like a documentary and doesn’t have much of a plot, but succeeds largely on character development. Refreshing, that. Its deliberate pacing will bore some but hypnotize ...
Read more »Would that all film studios were like Pixar. They’ve never made a bad movie, and even their sequels stand on their own, probably because they don’t start production until they have a strong and original story. This time they throw in a little bittersweet reality and go deeper emotionally. And the emotions are earned; no ...
Read more »The aim of this film school-level documentary is to get you closer to the people who populate islands threatened by global warming, namely Tuvalu, Venice and the Arctic isle of Shishmaref. And that’s all fine. It’s hard to criticize noble ambitions, but this is a film column, and this self-indulgent, amateurish attempt by Tokyo’s Tomoko ...
Read more »A down-on-his-luck bounty hunter is delighted to learn that his next quarry is his ex-wife, a bail-jumping investigative reporter. This unnecessary and tiresome mishmash simultaneously and blithely gets wrong the romance, comedy and action genres, offering generic dialogue, off-the-shelf adventure sequences and coasting, zero-chemistry stars (Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston can do way better). Not ...
Read more »This is one of those lewd, crude and rude frat-boy comedies that I never expected to like. Three guys (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis) wake up with pounding headaches in a wrecked $4,200/night Las Vegas hotel suite after a bachelor party of epic proportions; they’re unable to remember anything they did the night before. ...
Read more »In the future, artificial organ transplants are commonplace. But they’re still pricey, so you can pay on the installment plan. The fine print, however, stipulates that if you can’t make the payments, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker will show up and, well, see title. Clearly before health care reform. But then Jude suffers a catastrophic ...
Read more »Steven Soderbergh, whose typical style is best described as atypical (Che; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Ocean’s Eleven), checks in with this artful, cryptically structured, voyeuristic character study of a $2,000/hr call girl (played with cold eyes by real-life porn star Sasha Grey). Her services include sex, of course, but her forte is understanding what her ...
Read more »A man and a boy (superbly played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) trudge across a namelessly devastated America, searching for food while avoiding becoming same for roaming gangs of cannibals. Probably the best of the recent spate of post-Apocalyptic movies, this one gets the atmosphere right and the characters, too. But that said, it’s ...
Read more »In this latest bomb remake of a far superior horror classic (see the recent Halloween and Friday the 13th abominations; or better yet, don’t), several sleep-deprived, soon-to-be-dead teenagers scream a lot while falling victim to Freddy Krueger’s one-liners and those (snicker-snack) disemboweling knife thingies he has for hands. (I wonder what qualities they were looking ...
Read more »You probably know the details about this Oscar-winning agit-prop doc. It’s shocking and clever, and plays like a caper flick. But let me see if I’ve got this all straight: 28 fishermen in a little village in Wakayama catch dolphins for the purposes of (1) selling the best into dreary performance captivity in marine-mammal gulags ...
Read more »It’s nice, in a nostalgic sense, to see a pair of ’80s action icons give it one more slam-bam shot. And I can truthfully say that the acting by Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren is every bit as good as it ever was. This gleefully violent, direct-to-video retread by Peter’s kid John Hyams is ...
Read more »Three emotionally shaky drifters travel through Katrina-devastated Louisiana. Brett (William Hurt, who can do anything) is a fresh ex-con wondering if he should continue to plague the life of his woman (Maria Bello in flashbacks). The runaway Martine is given unexpected depth by Twilight’s Kristen Stewart, and the Eton-educated Eddie Redmayne puts in an annoyingly ...
Read more »In the mood for a religion-themed, post-apocalyptic samurai/western/superhero thriller starring Denzel Washington? Look no further. Denzel’s this guy who’s been walking across America for 30 years carrying what we are led to believe is the last known copy of the Bible and defending it from the usual Mad Max cast of roadside hijackers, thieves and ...
Read more »Dear Rob Zombie: OK, we get it. We understand your fascination with ’70s splatter flicks. Now please rent several dozen of them, get some beer, and go home and stop bothering us with your repellent, ego-driven remakes. Repetitive brutal killings of trailer trash and copious gore do not a Halloween movie make, and you’ve made ...
Read more »Jackie Chan is a Chinese CIA agent (lots of those) who retires to be with his neighbor girlfriend and her three exceptionally annoying kids. The kids hate him until they all get together and fight off some Home Alone bad guys with Boris-and-Natasha accents while Jackie falls down a lot. If this sounds entertaining, you’re ...
Read more »“Bad” Blake was long ago a major C&W singer-songwriter, with fans filling arenas to watch his shows. But alcoholism and bad choices have reduced him to playing bowling alleys, and he plays them because, well, he needs the money and, besides, what else would he do? A chance at redemption arrives with the love of ...
Read more »The theme of a three-night concert dovetailing with the 1974 Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” (beautifully chronicled in the 1996 Oscar-winner When We Were Kings) was black musicians from around the world returning to their African roots, as it were. Such absolute luminaries as James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, Bill Withers and Celia Cruz ...
Read more »Sometimes I think George Romero just sits around thinking up new ways to re-kill zombies. Then, when he’s jotted down a dozen or so original and/or amusing ones, he spends up to an hour writing a screenplay, hires a few actors and makeup artists, and crunches out a new zombie flick. Because that’s what his, ...
Read more »Boy, that Tony Stark. What a self-aggrandizing jerk. Ah, but it’s all just a cover—it’s not easy being Iron Man. That thingy in his chest is slowly poisoning him, the Pentagon wants control of the suit, a whiny Sam Rockwell is a wannabe rival manufacturer, and a growling, vindictive Mickey Rourke comes out of nowhere ...
Read more »OK, I wasn’t looking for art going in to this Disney package adapted from a weepie by Nicholas Sparks (who—gag—considers himself a better writer than Cormac McCarthy!) and starring Miley Cyrus (don’t toss that blonde wig just yet, hon), but I didn’t expect anything this toxic. Or so badly out of tune. Miley is a ...
Read more »This witless wad of fake, flabby fashionista feminism may actually be worse than the first (not easy). Shouldn’t gender equality mean more than merely being as repulsive as men? Our four self-absorbed, whiny commodity fetishists abandon the City (and any pretense at taste) to take the Sex to Abu Dhabi, apparently in order to set ...
Read more »Jim Sheridan’s (My Left Foot, In America) remake of the 2004 Danish film Brodre by Susanne Bier illustrates without cliché the dehumanizing effects of war (any war; no politics here). Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is an upright, responsible Marine captain bound for Afghanistan. He is looked upon with favor by his father (Sam Shepard) and ...
Read more »Jane Campion’s Austen-ish drama about the last few years in the life of the great romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw—Perfume), who died in 1821 at 25, and on his unlikely and probably platonic love affair with his fashionista neighbor (and muse), Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish—Candy). It’s an intricate, intelligent movie that can’t have been ...
Read more »In an imagined ancient Persia, a plucky street urchin is adopted by the king and raised as a prince, to eventually become a buffed-up, acrobatic Jake Gyllenhaal. (Jake, Jake, Jake. You’re an exceptional actor. You don’t have to do this moronic Matthew McConaughey-level stuff. Not even to round out the old resume. And what’s with ...
Read more »A small-town Texas girl desperate to escape her smothering, pageant-obsessed stage mom (Marcia Gay Harden) and her understanding but TV sports-crazed father discovers life’s meaning in the sport(?) of women’s roller derby. Small but fast and fairly vicious, she adopts the rink name of Babe Ruthless, and joins Maggie Mayhem, Smashley Simpson, Eva Destruction, Iron ...
Read more »Jeez, where to start? A half-American salaryman (Eric Bossick) whose father was a biochemist begins to turn into a cheesy anti-flesh collection of lethal firearms when he gets angry. And he gets really angry when someone purposefully and repeatedly drives a car over his young son. Shinya Tsukamoto’s third telling (1989 and 1992) of his ...
Read more »Egomaniacal goombah filmmaker Troy Duffy is back ten years later with what amounts to a remake of his only film, a colossally juvenile flop that inexplicably became a cult fave once it got to DVD. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think auds were champing at the bit for more Boston Catholic vigilante ...
Read more »You may have seen the trailers with frightening images of a befanged old lady climbing the walls and a freaky stretch-jawed man, and you are presumably supposed to think there’s more such cool scary stuff to come. There isn’t. I don’t know about you, but Armageddon tired of all these fake end-of-days movies, and this ...
Read more »Paul Greengrass imbues this fictional story about the chaotic days after the fall of Baghdad with some strong nonfictional elements, putting forward one of the more credible conspiracy theories. It focuses on the neocons’ second worst decision (after starting the war in the first place), of disbanding the Iraqi Army, which could conceivably have helped ...
Read more »A gaijin drug dealer is killed in Tokyo, but comes back to fulfill a childhood vow to watch over his slutty sister (Paz de la Huerta). Apparently, after death people have a lot of explicit sex. This film is certainly audacious, but pretentious French director Gaspar Noe, who has clearly started believing his own press ...
Read more »Producer Luc Besson checks in with his latest Euro-trash retread involving much shooting of people, chasing of cars and blowing up of things, and apparently can’t decide whether it’s a mindless action comedy or a mindless action drama. An apparatchik at the American Embassy (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) accomplishes his dream of getting promoted to the CIA, ...
Read more »In this “atmospheric” (read: “dreary”) genre piece by Hong Kong action auteur Johnny To, a vaguely menacing French chef travels to Macao and Hong Kong to avenge the murders of his daughter and her family by a trio of hit men. He hires an interchangeable trio of hit men to help him find them, and ...
Read more »Director Mimi Leder clearly thought that the star power of Morgan Freeman and Antonio Banderas would propel this dogged heist flick to success, and couldn’t be bothered with things like plot, dialogue or originality. Went direct to DVD Stateside. Nothing much is explained, but that’s OK—you’ve seen this chestnut so many times it doesn’t really ...
Read more »A financially struggling young couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) is presented with a mysterious box by a dignified, horribly disfigured (struck by lightning) and clearly very rich man (Frank Langella), and told that if they simply push the little red button on the top of the box within 24 hours, they will receive, tax-free, ...
Read more »Post-apocalyptic puppet show for pre-teens (too dark for little kids) about nine little rag-doll robots on a no-more-humans Earth doing battle against a larger and more menacing robot that wants their souls. Souls? It’s visually creative—techno and fantasy fans will love it—but the emphasis is on action, and opportunities to explore the intriguing, hinted-at philosophical ...
Read more »The annual Homeless World Cup in Cape Town is an event that fairly cries out for a documentary. This perfunctory effort focuses on a half dozen individuals with troubled backgrounds from Ireland, Spain, Russia, Kenya, Afghanistan and the US of A. It follows them through team selection and training, and listens as they tell how ...
Read more »Let’s make no mistake here. This retelling (or reimagining, or whatever) of the legend of Perseus in crappier-than-usual 3D is fairly lame. But it’s kind of supposed to be (look at the title), and if you’re not expecting great cinema, this creature feature on steroids can provide some amusing mythological mayhem. I had fun. The ...
Read more »Clareece “Precious” Jones’ 16 years on this planet have not been an unalloyed pleasure. She’s dangerously obese, taciturn, nearly illiterate, and pregnant with her second child by her rapist father (the first has Down’s syndrome). She’s forced to wait on her detestable, domineering, poisonously angry welfare mother (comedienne Mo’Nique, in a shattering portrayal that won ...
Read more »It’s 1998. A quintet of geeks, one of whom is dying of cancer, get it into their heads to drive to California, break into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, and steal a copy of the as-yet-unreleased Star Wars, Episode One. There’s nothing remotely original about this genial road movie, and it appears to have been edited ...
Read more »This bleak vision of a post-pandemic world is fairly effective, as far as it goes. It follows the wanderings of four uninfected young people (Lou Taylor Pucci, Chris Pine, Piper Perabo and Emily Van Camp) through a deserted Southwest, scavenging what they can. This is not a zombie movie; the infected don’t bite or even ...
Read more »Luc Besson’s incomprehensible sequel to his incomprehensible Arthur and the Minimoys has Arthur (Freddie Highmore) again passing through a reversed telescope to this little enchanted place in his garden where everyone’s a 5mm, vaguely disturbing Smurf, to romance some babe he met last time. These movies are adapted from stories written by Besson for his ...
Read more »The violence and gore inherent in today’s mega-movies don’t really mix with good old gothic storytelling, and when you try, you get, well, this. It will not rate high on Benicio Del Toro’s filmography. Plus, Joe Johnson, the SFX-heavy director responsible for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, forgot to make it scary. His cartoonish attempts ...
Read more »This exhilarating trek through the crazed mind of philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek uses clips from 43 movies to illustrate his ideas on sexuality and notions of reality vs. fantasy, often imaginatively presented from the very places where the films were shot. He concentrates on Hitchcock, Kubrick and Lynch, but includes the Marx Brothers and ...
Read more »If Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are going to be in movies together, they should choose better scripts (and directors; Jon Avnet perpetrated 88 Minutes). In this lackluster police procedural, two veteran cops, one angry and intense, the other laid-back, are trying to track down a vigilante serial killer targeting obviously guilty creeps sprung ...
Read more »It’s always fascinating to witness the birth of a new star. This coming-of-age tale, based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, is well acted, ably screen-written by Nick Hornby, and deftly directed by Lone Scherfig. Worthy credentials. But what makes it click is actress Carey Mulligan, and comparisons being made to Audrey Hepburn ...
Read more »Shooting Dogs or Hotel Rwanda without the nice. There are few things more heartrending than the children forced into rebel armies in Africa and trained to kill with an intensity that would make a Marine look away. And few films will give you a more intimate look at this societal aberration than this French-made effort ...
Read more »The last thing I expected from Tim Burton was a dumbing down for the multiplex crowd. And since when did he ever need that annoying 3D? It’s “Burton does Disney” rather than Disney releasing Burton. This “reimagining” of the classic tale works for a while. But then it starts adding other Lewis Carroll stuff, reduces ...
Read more »To stretch the cliché to its limits, all is not what it seems in this dark and devious, A-list B-movie from Martin Scorsese. In 1954, a federal marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives at an island hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient. But his thinking becomes increasingly muddled as the investigation ...
Read more »Well, maybe if you’re allergic to brow-furrowing. Steven Seagal’s latest remake of the same direct-to-video movie he’s been doing for a decade (OK, the zombie movie was a departure) features lines like, “I’m gonna f**k you up ugly”; several actors even worse than the Great Glaring One (starting with hottie of the month Marlaina Mah); ...
Read more »As (a very good) Sam Rockwell nears the end of his three-year hitch as the lone human operator at an automated lunar mining base, strange things begin to happen. He seems to be hallucinating, and his health is inexplicably deteriorating. His only companion is an obsequious robot (an open and unambiguous nod to 2001’s HAL, ...
Read more »When aliens finally arrive on Earth, they are neither planet-busting monsters nor cuties trying to phone home. They are not little or green and certainly not men (more resembling grumpy, two-meter lobsters). There are several thousand of them and they’re destitute and dying in a gargantuan spaceship stalled over Johannesburg. Our initial, humanitarian response is ...
Read more »I’ve always thought one of the green movement’s best tag lines was, “Be a better ancestor.” Well, this sarcastically titled film by Franny Armstrong posits that if we don’t each smarten up and reduce our carbon footprints—and soon—we won’t even have any descendents to be ancestors to. Pete Postlethwaite, circa 2055, is the curator of ...
Read more »Julianne Moore is one the top actresses working today, so if she chooses to appear in a psycho-thriller, it’s likely to be good and scary. (OK, she did Hannibal, but everyone makes mistakes). This is a scary one. I’m talking Silence of the Lambs scary. She plays a forensic psychiatrist who specializes in disproving the ...
Read more »It may be possible to make a less inspired heist-gone-wrong flick, but I don’t know how. Surprising that it comes from Nimrod Antal, who did the tight motel-from-hell number, Vacancy. Bunch of squandered actors (Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, even Laurence Fishburne) dutifully play armored truck guards planning to rip off $42 million. They ...
Read more »Martin Landau plays a pushing-80 bachelor who finds love late in life, in the form of new neighbor Ellen Burstyn. It’s kind of nice, don’t you think, that these two veterans still have a crack at leading roles, and Landau in particular puts in a nuanced, multi-layered performance. Then a third-act revelation necessitates a reexamination ...
Read more »It’s a rare movie that’s both funny and sad, cynical and moving, romantic and grounded in reality, and on top of all that, taps into the zeitgeist of our recession-hit times. None of this is easy to do, but director Jason Reitman (Juno) makes it look effortless. The plot has to do with a corporate ...
Read more »Sacha Baron Cohen returns to the US with his confrontational, culturally anarchic brand of guerrilla comedy, this time to skewer the New American Dream, which is to be hugely famous for no apparent reason. His latest title character is a monstrously gay, disgraced (had to do with Velcro) Austrian fashionista who has come to America ...
Read more »I left the screening room in a sad mood. I’d never seen a Woody Allen movie I didn’t like—until I sat through this obvious, pseudo-noir, psycho-non-thriller. Two broke brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), one aspiring to invest in a California resort, the other a mechanic and a losing gambler, agree to murder for money ...
Read more »At least this Twilight for pre-teen boys has a sense of humor. But this toothless bit of revisionist vampire nonsense is so sure it’s going to have at least two sequels (when even one would surprise me), it leaves numerous loose ends and winds up simply being unsatisfying. It includes inane concepts like a war ...
Read more »Clumsy adaptation of the 1982 stage musical about a legendary but creatively blocked Italian film director seeking inspiration from the women who shaped his life and career. Daniel Day-Lewis is fine, but from him we expect more than “fine.” It’s really a series of extraneous and unmemorable songs by competing actresses that halt the already ...
Read more »It was through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s spellbinding stories about a cerebral, genius detective and his doctor sidekick that, as a boy, I discovered the joys of reading. So it was with some dismay that I watched the trailer for this film, which, with all the buggy chases and explosions, looked more like a buddy ...
Read more »I’m not sure whether this deranged love story is a funny drama or a moving comedy. But it’s certainly unique, and it left me both amused and a bit stunned. Jim Carrey, in his most complex role to date, plays an audacious and very gay fraud artist who, on one of his frequent visits to ...
Read more »It’s possible to make a good romantic comedy. (500) Days of Summer, for example. But this flaccid, by-the-numbers retread may be heading back to film school to provide the basis for “How Not to Make a Rom-Com 101.” Not a cliché is left unturned, no contrivance untried, zero chemistry between actors who can do way ...
Read more »It’s 700 years from now, see, and Mankind is battling The Machines (yawn) and mostly winning. But now the fighting has activated some infernal ancient key or something that takes captured human soldiers and turns them into super-soldiers called “necromutants” with these scimitar-like appendages instead of hands. A stereotypical band of soldiers must find the ...
Read more »It is my usual practice to ignore torture-porn movies in the admittedly futile hope that low ticket sales will somehow discourage the continuation of the genre. But you really need to be warned about this repellent piece of crap. It’s based on the real-life torture, rape and killing of a 14-year-old Indiana girl by her ...
Read more »I was beginning to think it wasn’t possible: a full-bore, suspense-filled action movie that doesn’t insult your intelligence, and remains grounded in reality. This instant classic from director Kathryn Bigelow (James Cameron’s ex) will be remembered as the definitive film about the war in Iraq. The technique is austere (no fast-edit nonsense or other tricks), ...
Read more »OK, people who pay money to see a movie so named are not expecting great art, but this ultraviolence-for-its-own-sake gore-fest takes the pink potato. A rogue former member of an evil, child-abducting, contract-killing ninja clan seeks revenge, yada yada, and engages in endless acrobatic but unmemorable one-against-dozens battles. Heads roll, limbs are severed, bodies are ...
Read more »Disney returns to its roots with this old-style, hand-drawn animation and, amid so many empty, SFX-driven offerings these days, that’s kind of nice. As is the fact that it features Disney’s first black princess. It would have been even nicer, though, had it included an ounce of originality. Let’s go down the checklist: plucky heroine, ...
Read more »This inspirational, rags-to-riches sports drama from writer-director John Lee Hancock (The Rookie, Remember the Titans) is the slightly sanitized story of Michael Oher (well played by newcomer Quinton Aaron), a huge, homeless high-school kid who, with the help and love of a dedicated society matron (Sandra Bullock) and her family, found a home, improved his ...
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