The Jewish Exorcist mainly for horror buffs
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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With a real actor, a focused director, and fewer contrivances, this could have been a nice little indie
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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In this fun sci-fi romance, two people with obvious chemistry—played by two actors with obvious chemistry (Matt Damon and Emily Blunt)—are being kept apart by (mostly) unseen forces because their being together does not fit into some master “plan,” a plan being kept on track by unsmiling guys in fedoras (angels, perhaps?). Well, that’s just ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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. ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
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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) ...
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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 ...
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Fictionalized, “based on” potboiler about writer/con artist Clifford Irving’s audacious fake autobiography of Howard Hughes in the early ’70s. Irving (an antsy Richard Gere) and his researcher Dick Susskind (the always excellent Alfred Molina) almost pulled it off, convincing the McGraw Hill brass that their faked interviews with the reclusive billionaire industrialist had actually taken ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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”: ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
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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 ...
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A cinematic achievement that’s fresh and original