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 ...
With a real actor, a focused director, and fewer contrivances, this could have been a nice little indie
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Highly personal, confessional documentaries focusing on sexuality, insecurity and creativity were in vogue in the ’70s and ’80s. The touchstone for Japanese works in the genre is Kazuo Hara’s powerful Extreme Private Eros: Love Song (1974). Pyuupiru uses the same emphasis on sexual identity as a jumping off point for its exploration of the titular ...
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 ...
It seems that just about every Japanese film these days is based on a manga, so it’s no surprise that Kimio Yanagisawa’s comic Shimin Police 69 has been made into a live-action film. And as a film, it’s perfectly in line with the wacky blend of comedy, action, drama and surrealism that seems to be ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
It’s hard to argue with cinematic success, especially when the triumph is both artistic and commercial. That’s been the case with Yasuhiro Mase, who, it could be argued, is Japan’s leading producer. Mase is responsible for such hits as Himitsu (1999), which was remade by Hollywood; Kiraware Matsuko no Issho (“Memories of Matsuko,” 2006), which ...
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 ...
The Japanese media have repeatedly lamented the graying of the country’s population, portraying the trend in a negative light. So it’s refreshing to have a film that celebrates the community of senior citizens. Homecoming stars 64-year-old comedian and TV personality Junji Takada as a recent retiree who returns to his hometown, where the average age ...
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 ...
Taiheiyo no Kiseki is one of those movies whose source material is more interesting than the finished product. Based on Don Jones’ 1986 nonfiction book Oba, the Last Samurai: Saipan 1944-45, the film depicts a battle-decimated group of Japanese soldiers on Saipan. Instead of surrendering to the overwhelming force of the Americans, a few dozen ...
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 ...
Yuichi Kimura is one of the few comedians who has managed to cross over from slapstick gags to serious filmmaking. His 2009 directorial debut, Nisesatsu (“Counterfeit”), was competently made but almost completely overlooked. Wararaifu won’t suffer the same fate. This heart-rending look back at a childhood is about Shuichi (Jun Murakami), a sensitive and forgetful ...
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 ...
You’ll be sickened and outraged! You’ll rip your own head off and throw it at the screen! Gantz, the new sci-fi blockbuster from Toho and TBS, is so bad that Don Morton would be dumbfounded (that’s allota dumbfound). This cliché-riddled, overheated action-/sap-fest contains such evergreen gems as “I love you… don’t die!” and “Leave it ...
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 ...
The AV industry has been getting a lot of attention from mainstream Japanese filmmakers recently. 2010 saw the release of two features based on memoirs by porn actresses, and now we have this documentary about legendary pinku and AV director Tadashi Yoyogi. Director Masato Ishioka made the excellent, sex industry-themed Pain: Scout Man in 2000, ...
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 ...
Lovers of Japanese film have seen quite a few omnibus efforts over the years, with 2008’s Tokyo standing out as a particularly bizarre and interesting example. Yet this film, drawing together some of Japan’s best comedic directors, tops even that three-part work. Approaching the surrealism of its predecessor, Sabi Otoko Sabi Onna ties together four ...
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? ...
The idea of taking a TV drama and re-editing it into a feature film would be the kiss of death for most projects, so it’s surprising that Sono Machi no Kodomo turned out as well as it did. Judged solely as a feature film, however, it’s decidedly average. Originally airing on NHK last January, the ...
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 ...
One of the best-known anime franchises to older fans in Japan and around the world, Space Battleship Yamato first appeared as a TV series in 1974 and was followed by a hit film in 1977. Numerous other series and movies followed, including the erroneously titled Final Yamato in 1983. Now we get a big budget, ...
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 ...
Fuji TV’s enormously popular 2007 police series makes the transition to the big screen in the first of two films, directed by Takafumi Hatano. The story revolves around an elite unit of officers, the eponymous Special Police, who guard politicians and VIPs. Junichi Okada (Kisarazu Cat’s Eye) reprises his role as Inoue, a super cop ...
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 ...
Right from the start, this latest film from director Tomoyuki Takimoto (Ikigami) tries way too hard to create a charming atmosphere. What’s worse, it fails. Rui (Maki Sakai, Drop), a 35-year-old assistant librarian, has for her whole life been living in a huge country house with her Aunt Toba (Mariko Kaga, Love Letter). Out of ...
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 ...
The undead “action” moves to L.A. in this fourth sequel in Milla Jovovich’s little zombie series. Couldn’t be bothered.
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 ...
Ever found yourself wondering when (or if) the latest overseas blockbuster will hit theaters here in Japan? Well, we’ve got the answers. Here is our list of upcoming theater releases, continuously updated as we get new information. Postponed (due to the Mar 11 earthquake) Yogi Bear (dub only) Sanctum Countdown to Zero Exit Through the ...
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 ...
Action, drama and a socially conscious message—done not particularly well