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 ...
Bruce Beresford’s (Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy) adaptation of the autobiography of Chinese ballet star Li Cunxin is kind of an Asian Billy Elliot, and just as heartwarming. Li was plucked at the age of 11 from his home and family in Shandong Province and taken to Beijing to be trained in classical ballet. Years ...
Japanese directors periodically and wisely shake off the bonds of Japan’s “creative” system and go off to study filmmaking overseas, usually with the dream of becoming a “breakthrough,” cross-cultural phenom. Then in the end they merely shoehorn some half-assed gaijin actors into Japanese stereotypes, write a lame, self-indulgent story around them, include an oddball or ...
The plot barely exists, the dialogue’s dumb, the characters are shallow, the action’s pointless, and it lacks the smallest trace of intellectual stimulation. Hey—it’s Sex and the City for males! This mildly entertaining two hours of preposterone-fuelled, compacted trash is based, of course, on the cheeseball ’80s TV show starring George Peppard and Mr. T. ...
The original movie, a 2001 CG-lips-on-talking-animals flick, was so forgettable that I recently watched the entire thing on DVD, thinking it was this charmless sequel, and not a single frame rang a bell. This ain’t no Babe. I’m not even going to go into the plot, since there’s nothing here for adults save numerous 007 ...
Pretty good as remakes go, even with the old fish-out-of-water storyline that was hackneyed 26 years ago (underdog New Kid in School finds Wise Mentor who helps him go up against Big Bully in Final Sporting Event). In this darker but more grounded version, the action has moved to China, Ralph Macchio is now Will ...
Fun, gloriously bizarre George Clooney military-satire vehicle about what we are told was a covert US Army psychological-warfare unit in the ’70s called the “New Earth Army,” which trained “psychic spies” to utilize New Age peace-love-dope techniques to influence the enemy. It becomes apparent not far in that this is a one-joke movie, and it ...
The latest product of Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney, an evil collaboration bent on dazzling preteen boys out of their allowances, is this uninspired fantasy (is that an oxymoron?), a shameless and utterly predictable SFX-driven Harry Potter rip-off. Disney apparently even saw fit to throw into the profit pit its own classic title scene from Fantasia, ...
This latest effort by Dreamworks Animation, which gave us Shrek but since then mostly a lot of kids’ stuff, is about a boy named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), the slightly nerdy son of the chief of a medieval, vaguely Viking village (where people of course speak English with Scottish accents). His village devotes most ...
Three generic and charmlessly written college kids find themselves stranded on a ski lift, at night, too high to jump, with the resort closed for the next five days. The film undoubtedly sees itself as a winter version of the successful Open Water, but a ski lift is not the open sea, primal-terror wise, and ...
In this wonderfully absurd distaff Bourne flick, a decorated CIA operative (Angelina Jolie) is fingered by a Russian defector as a deep undercover agent, planted as a child during the Soviet era in order to carry out a nefarious plan to bring down the United States by causing it to nuke Mecca or something. Out ...
Surprisingly, and a little sadly, this awful flick about a flesh-eating, projectile-vomiting, demonically possessed teen queen was scripted by Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody. But I don’t think even Ellen Page could have saved this amateurish shot at comedy/horror. The Body of the title belongs to Megan Fox (both Transformers), who attempts to add (literal) ...
If I told you the ending, it wouldn’t make a spot of sense. Writer/director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia, The Dark Knight) spent ten years crafting this smart, labyrinthine and original mind-messer, and you’ll have to pay attention and use your intellect. A corporate espionage expert (Leonardo DiCaprio) specializing in infiltrating his quarries’ minds to steal ...
Most zombie movies today have fallen back on humor, usually dark, usually lame. They’re neither scary nor funny. So it’s good to see one come along that just runs with it, and uses a sharp script to get the laughs. It’s downright infectious! Jesse Eisenberg plays a nerdy pandemic survivor who has remained healthy by ...
The father (Brendan Fraser) of a pair of kids suffering from a rare genetic disorder convinces a curmudgeonly researcher (Harrison Ford) who’s close to a cure to let him help raise funds for the remaining research. This is one of those inspired-by-true-events flicks, which means it’s 90 percent made up by screenwriters. Ford is in ...
Geez, I hope so. Note to readers: the other two movies opening this week are both better, but I thought this drab and dingy disaster would be more fun to write about. The film calls attention to one of the greatest mysteries in Hollywood today: why do people continue to give M. Night Shyamalan perfectly ...
Eight ambitious candidates for the job of assistant to the secretive CEO of a major biotech firm file into a claustrophobic exam room for their final hurdle. After receiving terse, precisely worded instructions (only one question, and one answer) and told to begin, they immediately get their first surprise. There’ll be more. Though fierce rivals, ...
Another Steven Soderbergh “experiment,” this bare-bones, true-to-life murder mystery involves three workers at a doll factory, which is kind of a creepy setting to begin with. It plays more like a documentary and doesn’t have much of a plot, but succeeds largely on character development. Refreshing, that. Its deliberate pacing will bore some but hypnotize ...
Would that all film studios were like Pixar. They’ve never made a bad movie, and even their sequels stand on their own, probably because they don’t start production until they have a strong and original story. This time they throw in a little bittersweet reality and go deeper emotionally. And the emotions are earned; no ...
The aim of this film school-level documentary is to get you closer to the people who populate islands threatened by global warming, namely Tuvalu, Venice and the Arctic isle of Shishmaref. And that’s all fine. It’s hard to criticize noble ambitions, but this is a film column, and this self-indulgent, amateurish attempt by Tokyo’s Tomoko ...
A down-on-his-luck bounty hunter is delighted to learn that his next quarry is his ex-wife, a bail-jumping investigative reporter. This unnecessary and tiresome mishmash simultaneously and blithely gets wrong the romance, comedy and action genres, offering generic dialogue, off-the-shelf adventure sequences and coasting, zero-chemistry stars (Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston can do way better). Not ...
This is one of those lewd, crude and rude frat-boy comedies that I never expected to like. Three guys (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis) wake up with pounding headaches in a wrecked $4,200/night Las Vegas hotel suite after a bachelor party of epic proportions; they’re unable to remember anything they did the night before. ...
In the future, artificial organ transplants are commonplace. But they’re still pricey, so you can pay on the installment plan. The fine print, however, stipulates that if you can’t make the payments, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker will show up and, well, see title. Clearly before health care reform. But then Jude suffers a catastrophic ...
Steven Soderbergh, whose typical style is best described as atypical (Che; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Ocean’s Eleven), checks in with this artful, cryptically structured, voyeuristic character study of a $2,000/hr call girl (played with cold eyes by real-life porn star Sasha Grey). Her services include sex, of course, but her forte is understanding what her ...
A man and a boy (superbly played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) trudge across a namelessly devastated America, searching for food while avoiding becoming same for roaming gangs of cannibals. Probably the best of the recent spate of post-Apocalyptic movies, this one gets the atmosphere right and the characters, too. But that said, it’s ...
In this latest bomb remake of a far superior horror classic (see the recent Halloween and Friday the 13th abominations; or better yet, don’t), several sleep-deprived, soon-to-be-dead teenagers scream a lot while falling victim to Freddy Krueger’s one-liners and those (snicker-snack) disemboweling knife thingies he has for hands. (I wonder what qualities they were looking ...
You probably know the details about this Oscar-winning agit-prop doc. It’s shocking and clever, and plays like a caper flick. But let me see if I’ve got this all straight: 28 fishermen in a little village in Wakayama catch dolphins for the purposes of (1) selling the best into dreary performance captivity in marine-mammal gulags ...
It’s nice, in a nostalgic sense, to see a pair of ’80s action icons give it one more slam-bam shot. And I can truthfully say that the acting by Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren is every bit as good as it ever was. This gleefully violent, direct-to-video retread by Peter’s kid John Hyams is ...
Three emotionally shaky drifters travel through Katrina-devastated Louisiana. Brett (William Hurt, who can do anything) is a fresh ex-con wondering if he should continue to plague the life of his woman (Maria Bello in flashbacks). The runaway Martine is given unexpected depth by Twilight’s Kristen Stewart, and the Eton-educated Eddie Redmayne puts in an annoyingly ...
In the mood for a religion-themed, post-apocalyptic samurai/western/superhero thriller starring Denzel Washington? Look no further. Denzel’s this guy who’s been walking across America for 30 years carrying what we are led to believe is the last known copy of the Bible and defending it from the usual Mad Max cast of roadside hijackers, thieves and ...
Dear Rob Zombie: OK, we get it. We understand your fascination with ’70s splatter flicks. Now please rent several dozen of them, get some beer, and go home and stop bothering us with your repellent, ego-driven remakes. Repetitive brutal killings of trailer trash and copious gore do not a Halloween movie make, and you’ve made ...
Jackie Chan is a Chinese CIA agent (lots of those) who retires to be with his neighbor girlfriend and her three exceptionally annoying kids. The kids hate him until they all get together and fight off some Home Alone bad guys with Boris-and-Natasha accents while Jackie falls down a lot. If this sounds entertaining, you’re ...
“Bad” Blake was long ago a major C&W singer-songwriter, with fans filling arenas to watch his shows. But alcoholism and bad choices have reduced him to playing bowling alleys, and he plays them because, well, he needs the money and, besides, what else would he do? A chance at redemption arrives with the love of ...
The theme of a three-night concert dovetailing with the 1974 Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” (beautifully chronicled in the 1996 Oscar-winner When We Were Kings) was black musicians from around the world returning to their African roots, as it were. Such absolute luminaries as James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, Bill Withers and Celia Cruz ...
Sometimes I think George Romero just sits around thinking up new ways to re-kill zombies. Then, when he’s jotted down a dozen or so original and/or amusing ones, he spends up to an hour writing a screenplay, hires a few actors and makeup artists, and crunches out a new zombie flick. Because that’s what his, ...
Boy, that Tony Stark. What a self-aggrandizing jerk. Ah, but it’s all just a cover—it’s not easy being Iron Man. That thingy in his chest is slowly poisoning him, the Pentagon wants control of the suit, a whiny Sam Rockwell is a wannabe rival manufacturer, and a growling, vindictive Mickey Rourke comes out of nowhere ...
OK, I wasn’t looking for art going in to this Disney package adapted from a weepie by Nicholas Sparks (who—gag—considers himself a better writer than Cormac McCarthy!) and starring Miley Cyrus (don’t toss that blonde wig just yet, hon), but I didn’t expect anything this toxic. Or so badly out of tune. Miley is a ...
This witless wad of fake, flabby fashionista feminism may actually be worse than the first (not easy). Shouldn’t gender equality mean more than merely being as repulsive as men? Our four self-absorbed, whiny commodity fetishists abandon the City (and any pretense at taste) to take the Sex to Abu Dhabi, apparently in order to set ...
Jim Sheridan’s (My Left Foot, In America) remake of the 2004 Danish film Brodre by Susanne Bier illustrates without cliché the dehumanizing effects of war (any war; no politics here). Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is an upright, responsible Marine captain bound for Afghanistan. He is looked upon with favor by his father (Sam Shepard) and ...
Jane Campion’s Austen-ish drama about the last few years in the life of the great romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw—Perfume), who died in 1821 at 25, and on his unlikely and probably platonic love affair with his fashionista neighbor (and muse), Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish—Candy). It’s an intricate, intelligent movie that can’t have been ...
In an imagined ancient Persia, a plucky street urchin is adopted by the king and raised as a prince, to eventually become a buffed-up, acrobatic Jake Gyllenhaal. (Jake, Jake, Jake. You’re an exceptional actor. You don’t have to do this moronic Matthew McConaughey-level stuff. Not even to round out the old resume. And what’s with ...
A small-town Texas girl desperate to escape her smothering, pageant-obsessed stage mom (Marcia Gay Harden) and her understanding but TV sports-crazed father discovers life’s meaning in the sport(?) of women’s roller derby. Small but fast and fairly vicious, she adopts the rink name of Babe Ruthless, and joins Maggie Mayhem, Smashley Simpson, Eva Destruction, Iron ...
Jeez, where to start? A half-American salaryman (Eric Bossick) whose father was a biochemist begins to turn into a cheesy anti-flesh collection of lethal firearms when he gets angry. And he gets really angry when someone purposefully and repeatedly drives a car over his young son. Shinya Tsukamoto’s third telling (1989 and 1992) of his ...
Egomaniacal goombah filmmaker Troy Duffy is back ten years later with what amounts to a remake of his only film, a colossally juvenile flop that inexplicably became a cult fave once it got to DVD. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think auds were champing at the bit for more Boston Catholic vigilante ...
You may have seen the trailers with frightening images of a befanged old lady climbing the walls and a freaky stretch-jawed man, and you are presumably supposed to think there’s more such cool scary stuff to come. There isn’t. I don’t know about you, but Armageddon tired of all these fake end-of-days movies, and this ...
Paul Greengrass imbues this fictional story about the chaotic days after the fall of Baghdad with some strong nonfictional elements, putting forward one of the more credible conspiracy theories. It focuses on the neocons’ second worst decision (after starting the war in the first place), of disbanding the Iraqi Army, which could conceivably have helped ...
A gaijin drug dealer is killed in Tokyo, but comes back to fulfill a childhood vow to watch over his slutty sister (Paz de la Huerta). Apparently, after death people have a lot of explicit sex. This film is certainly audacious, but pretentious French director Gaspar Noe, who has clearly started believing his own press ...
Producer Luc Besson checks in with his latest Euro-trash retread involving much shooting of people, chasing of cars and blowing up of things, and apparently can’t decide whether it’s a mindless action comedy or a mindless action drama. An apparatchik at the American Embassy (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) accomplishes his dream of getting promoted to the CIA, ...
In this “atmospheric” (read: “dreary”) genre piece by Hong Kong action auteur Johnny To, a vaguely menacing French chef travels to Macao and Hong Kong to avenge the murders of his daughter and her family by a trio of hit men. He hires an interchangeable trio of hit men to help him find them, and ...
Director Mimi Leder clearly thought that the star power of Morgan Freeman and Antonio Banderas would propel this dogged heist flick to success, and couldn’t be bothered with things like plot, dialogue or originality. Went direct to DVD Stateside. Nothing much is explained, but that’s OK—you’ve seen this chestnut so many times it doesn’t really ...
A financially struggling young couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) is presented with a mysterious box by a dignified, horribly disfigured (struck by lightning) and clearly very rich man (Frank Langella), and told that if they simply push the little red button on the top of the box within 24 hours, they will receive, tax-free, ...
Post-apocalyptic puppet show for pre-teens (too dark for little kids) about nine little rag-doll robots on a no-more-humans Earth doing battle against a larger and more menacing robot that wants their souls. Souls? It’s visually creative—techno and fantasy fans will love it—but the emphasis is on action, and opportunities to explore the intriguing, hinted-at philosophical ...
The annual Homeless World Cup in Cape Town is an event that fairly cries out for a documentary. This perfunctory effort focuses on a half dozen individuals with troubled backgrounds from Ireland, Spain, Russia, Kenya, Afghanistan and the US of A. It follows them through team selection and training, and listens as they tell how ...
Let’s make no mistake here. This retelling (or reimagining, or whatever) of the legend of Perseus in crappier-than-usual 3D is fairly lame. But it’s kind of supposed to be (look at the title), and if you’re not expecting great cinema, this creature feature on steroids can provide some amusing mythological mayhem. I had fun. The ...
Clareece “Precious” Jones’ 16 years on this planet have not been an unalloyed pleasure. She’s dangerously obese, taciturn, nearly illiterate, and pregnant with her second child by her rapist father (the first has Down’s syndrome). She’s forced to wait on her detestable, domineering, poisonously angry welfare mother (comedienne Mo’Nique, in a shattering portrayal that won ...
It’s 1998. A quintet of geeks, one of whom is dying of cancer, get it into their heads to drive to California, break into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, and steal a copy of the as-yet-unreleased Star Wars, Episode One. There’s nothing remotely original about this genial road movie, and it appears to have been edited ...
This bleak vision of a post-pandemic world is fairly effective, as far as it goes. It follows the wanderings of four uninfected young people (Lou Taylor Pucci, Chris Pine, Piper Perabo and Emily Van Camp) through a deserted Southwest, scavenging what they can. This is not a zombie movie; the infected don’t bite or even ...
Luc Besson’s incomprehensible sequel to his incomprehensible Arthur and the Minimoys has Arthur (Freddie Highmore) again passing through a reversed telescope to this little enchanted place in his garden where everyone’s a 5mm, vaguely disturbing Smurf, to romance some babe he met last time. These movies are adapted from stories written by Besson for his ...
The violence and gore inherent in today’s mega-movies don’t really mix with good old gothic storytelling, and when you try, you get, well, this. It will not rate high on Benicio Del Toro’s filmography. Plus, Joe Johnson, the SFX-heavy director responsible for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, forgot to make it scary. His cartoonish attempts ...
This exhilarating trek through the crazed mind of philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek uses clips from 43 movies to illustrate his ideas on sexuality and notions of reality vs. fantasy, often imaginatively presented from the very places where the films were shot. He concentrates on Hitchcock, Kubrick and Lynch, but includes the Marx Brothers and ...
If Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are going to be in movies together, they should choose better scripts (and directors; Jon Avnet perpetrated 88 Minutes). In this lackluster police procedural, two veteran cops, one angry and intense, the other laid-back, are trying to track down a vigilante serial killer targeting obviously guilty creeps sprung ...
It’s always fascinating to witness the birth of a new star. This coming-of-age tale, based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, is well acted, ably screen-written by Nick Hornby, and deftly directed by Lone Scherfig. Worthy credentials. But what makes it click is actress Carey Mulligan, and comparisons being made to Audrey Hepburn ...
Shooting Dogs or Hotel Rwanda without the nice. There are few things more heartrending than the children forced into rebel armies in Africa and trained to kill with an intensity that would make a Marine look away. And few films will give you a more intimate look at this societal aberration than this French-made effort ...
The last thing I expected from Tim Burton was a dumbing down for the multiplex crowd. And since when did he ever need that annoying 3D? It’s “Burton does Disney” rather than Disney releasing Burton. This “reimagining” of the classic tale works for a while. But then it starts adding other Lewis Carroll stuff, reduces ...
To stretch the cliché to its limits, all is not what it seems in this dark and devious, A-list B-movie from Martin Scorsese. In 1954, a federal marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives at an island hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient. But his thinking becomes increasingly muddled as the investigation ...
Well, maybe if you’re allergic to brow-furrowing. Steven Seagal’s latest remake of the same direct-to-video movie he’s been doing for a decade (OK, the zombie movie was a departure) features lines like, “I’m gonna f**k you up ugly”; several actors even worse than the Great Glaring One (starting with hottie of the month Marlaina Mah); ...
As (a very good) Sam Rockwell nears the end of his three-year hitch as the lone human operator at an automated lunar mining base, strange things begin to happen. He seems to be hallucinating, and his health is inexplicably deteriorating. His only companion is an obsequious robot (an open and unambiguous nod to 2001’s HAL, ...
When aliens finally arrive on Earth, they are neither planet-busting monsters nor cuties trying to phone home. They are not little or green and certainly not men (more resembling grumpy, two-meter lobsters). There are several thousand of them and they’re destitute and dying in a gargantuan spaceship stalled over Johannesburg. Our initial, humanitarian response is ...
I’ve always thought one of the green movement’s best tag lines was, “Be a better ancestor.” Well, this sarcastically titled film by Franny Armstrong posits that if we don’t each smarten up and reduce our carbon footprints—and soon—we won’t even have any descendents to be ancestors to. Pete Postlethwaite, circa 2055, is the curator of ...
Julianne Moore is one the top actresses working today, so if she chooses to appear in a psycho-thriller, it’s likely to be good and scary. (OK, she did Hannibal, but everyone makes mistakes). This is a scary one. I’m talking Silence of the Lambs scary. She plays a forensic psychiatrist who specializes in disproving the ...
It may be possible to make a less inspired heist-gone-wrong flick, but I don’t know how. Surprising that it comes from Nimrod Antal, who did the tight motel-from-hell number, Vacancy. Bunch of squandered actors (Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, even Laurence Fishburne) dutifully play armored truck guards planning to rip off $42 million. They ...
Martin Landau plays a pushing-80 bachelor who finds love late in life, in the form of new neighbor Ellen Burstyn. It’s kind of nice, don’t you think, that these two veterans still have a crack at leading roles, and Landau in particular puts in a nuanced, multi-layered performance. Then a third-act revelation necessitates a reexamination ...
It’s a rare movie that’s both funny and sad, cynical and moving, romantic and grounded in reality, and on top of all that, taps into the zeitgeist of our recession-hit times. None of this is easy to do, but director Jason Reitman (Juno) makes it look effortless. The plot has to do with a ...
Sacha Baron Cohen returns to the US with his confrontational, culturally anarchic brand of guerrilla comedy, this time to skewer the New American Dream, which is to be hugely famous for no apparent reason. His latest title character is a monstrously gay, disgraced (had to do with Velcro) Austrian fashionista who has come to America ...
I left the screening room in a sad mood. I’d never seen a Woody Allen movie I didn’t like—until I sat through this obvious, pseudo-noir, psycho-non-thriller. Two broke brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), one aspiring to invest in a California resort, the other a mechanic and a losing gambler, agree to murder for money ...
At least this Twilight for pre-teen boys has a sense of humor. But this toothless bit of revisionist vampire nonsense is so sure it’s going to have at least two sequels (when even one would surprise me), it leaves numerous loose ends and winds up simply being unsatisfying. It includes inane concepts like a war ...
Clumsy adaptation of the 1982 stage musical about a legendary but creatively blocked Italian film director seeking inspiration from the women who shaped his life and career. Daniel Day-Lewis is fine, but from him we expect more than “fine.” It’s really a series of extraneous and unmemorable songs by competing actresses that halt the already ...
It was through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s spellbinding stories about a cerebral, genius detective and his doctor sidekick that, as a boy, I discovered the joys of reading. So it was with some dismay that I watched the trailer for this film, which, with all the buggy chases and explosions, looked more like a buddy ...
I’m not sure whether this deranged love story is a funny drama or a moving comedy. But it’s certainly unique, and it left me both amused and a bit stunned. Jim Carrey, in his most complex role to date, plays an audacious and very gay fraud artist who, on one of his frequent visits to ...
It’s possible to make a good romantic comedy. (500) Days of Summer, for example. But this flaccid, by-the-numbers retread may be heading back to film school to provide the basis for “How Not to Make a Rom-Com 101.” Not a cliché is left unturned, no contrivance untried, zero chemistry between actors who can do way ...
It’s 700 years from now, see, and Mankind is battling The Machines (yawn) and mostly winning. But now the fighting has activated some infernal ancient key or something that takes captured human soldiers and turns them into super-soldiers called “necromutants” with these scimitar-like appendages instead of hands. A stereotypical band of soldiers must find the ...
It is my usual practice to ignore torture-porn movies in the admittedly futile hope that low ticket sales will somehow discourage the continuation of the genre. But you really need to be warned about this repellent piece of crap. It’s based on the real-life torture, rape and killing of a 14-year-old Indiana girl by her ...
I was beginning to think it wasn’t possible: a full-bore, suspense-filled action movie that doesn’t insult your intelligence, and remains grounded in reality. This instant classic from director Kathryn Bigelow (James Cameron’s ex) will be remembered as the definitive film about the war in Iraq. The technique is austere (no fast-edit nonsense or other tricks), ...
OK, people who pay money to see a movie so named are not expecting great art, but this ultraviolence-for-its-own-sake gore-fest takes the pink potato. A rogue former member of an evil, child-abducting, contract-killing ninja clan seeks revenge, yada yada, and engages in endless acrobatic but unmemorable one-against-dozens battles. Heads roll, limbs are severed, bodies are ...
Disney returns to its roots with this old-style, hand-drawn animation and, amid so many empty, SFX-driven offerings these days, that’s kind of nice. As is the fact that it features Disney’s first black princess. It would have been even nicer, though, had it included an ounce of originality. Let’s go down the checklist: plucky heroine, ...
This inspirational, rags-to-riches sports drama from writer-director John Lee Hancock (The Rookie, Remember the Titans) is the slightly sanitized story of Michael Oher (well played by newcomer Quinton Aaron), a huge, homeless high-school kid who, with the help and love of a dedicated society matron (Sandra Bullock) and her family, found a home, improved his ...
This second in a series of city-centric cinematic pastiches that began in 2006 with Paris, Je t’aime (Rio de Janeiro is reportedly next) features ten sequences by ten directors (plus one more for “transitions”), each focusing on an aspect he or she considers definitive of the Big Apple. Each segment had to be shot in ...
It’s always nice to see Nicolas Cage take a break from those crappy action movies to do some of his ferocious, over-the-top acting. And he puts in a career best here in Werner Herzog’s pulpy remake of Abel Ferrara’s 1993 classic. He plays a magnificently unhinged NOPD cop just after Katrina. He’s a drug addict, ...
Call it a methadone fix for jonesing Harry Potter freaks. A chosen kid (Logan Lerman) has magical powers but is initially unaware of this. He’s got two similarly empowered sidekicks at a school (camp) for such kids, who are actually classified as “demigods,” being the offspring of randy Olympian deities and humans. Pierce Brosnan is ...
In this fantastical adaptation of the popular Neil Gaiman novel by stop-action master Harry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach), our blue-haired young title heroine (voice by Dakota Fanning) finds a magical secret passage in the 150-year-old Oregon mansion that she and her, in her opinion, less-than-perfect family have just moved ...
A long-divorced and soon-to-be empty-nester lady chef (Meryl Streep) hooks up with her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) at a wedding (the sex was always good), but at the same time, she’s drawn to the shy charms of a local architect (Steve Martin). This middle-aged rom-com by Nancy Myers, who worked a similar magic with Something’s Gotta ...
A sexy, amoral, and slightly dull LA gigolo (Ashton Kutcher) has for years used somewhat older, significantly richer women to get lodging in the Hollywood hills, Mercedes-level transportation and swank party pads. Then he falls for a female social counterpart and loses his mojo. This is the closest Kutcher has come to acting—maybe because it’s ...
This fluffy Hallmark card of a movie may not have everything you want in a romantic comedy, but it’s probably got everyone. It tries to be all things to all romantics, but with more than 20, whatchacallem, stars in the cast and a dozen or so plots and subplots, the only thing it really achieves ...
This is a wonderful movie. The acting’s flawless, the music’s original, memorable and meaningful, and the storyline is intriguing and keeps you guessing. If you’re NINE and a little GIRL and have been steeped in sanitized Disney PAP all your life. If you aren’t familiar with the TV show’s conceit, here you go: mild-mannered, down-to-earth, ...
A lonely American man (Dustin Hoffman) is rude to a British woman (Emma Thompson) at Heathrow, but when they meet later by chance he apologizes, and they spend most of the movie walking around London, talking and learning about one another. Mooshy middle-aged melodrama? Maybe. But it’s also unforced, warm and believable, at least when ...
In this highbrow chick flick, a people-pleasing, 50-ish housewife inching toward a nervous breakdown begins to reflect on how she got here. We flash back to meet her manic-depressive mom (Maria Bello), herself as a rebel teen (Blake Lively), and her 30-years-older-but-cool husband (Alan Arkin). While it’s always a treat to watch Robin Wright Penn’s ...
Jennifer Lynch (Boxing Helena) tries too hard to out-weird her dad, the illustrious David, and one of the lead actors (to name him would constitute a spoiler) tries too hard to be Dennis Hopper. A pair of FBI agents (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) is investigating the grisly murders of a vacationing family and a ...
The title is Latin for “unconquerable.” It was an uneasy time in South Africa when Nelson Mandela (a role absolutely nailed by Morgan Freeman) took office in 1994 to preside over a fragile truce between whites and blacks. Many in his government wanted to change the name of the Springboks, the nation’s rugby team, as ...
It’s no-frills chills time as The Blair Witch Project meets The Exorcist in this ingenious, genuinely scary take on Things That Go Bump in the Night. It demonstrates a principle clearly lost on the makers of many recent SFX-driven horror flicks: less is more. A tech-happy and self-centered would-be ghost debunker decides to document on ...
A single mother (Melissa Leo—21 Grams) living in poverty near the Mohawk reservation along the US-Canada border finds herself cooperating with an even poorer Native-American woman (Misty Upham) to smuggle aliens into the US, transporting them in the trunk of their car as they drive across the frozen St. Lawrence River. This heartrendingly elemental, near-flawless ...
In Peter Jackson’s latest hand-crafted effort, a 14-year-old girl (an excellent Saoirse Ronan—Atonement) explains at the outset that she has been murdered but is camping out in some kind of digitally beautiful (and slightly distracting) purgatory until her killer (a wonderfully creepy Stanley Tucci) is discovered. I liked it a lot, but apparently those who ...
In his best work in a decade, Terry Gilliam delivers his trademark visual panache, but with a discipline that’s as welcome as it is uncharacteristic. That’s not to say, however, that this is anything but a full-on three-ring circus. Overshadowing the entire film, of course, is Heath Ledger’s death halfway through shooting. Gilliam could have ...
How can the filmmakers of a spook story this flaccid claim that it’s “based on a true story”? How about “based on something that some extremely gullible people at one time may or may not have believed to be true”? It’s another retread of the old Amityville chestnut, in which a (real) family in the ...
Honeymooning Steve Zahn (a screenwriter, wink-wink) and Milla Jovovich, hiking on Kauai, are disconcerted by reports of the murders in Honolulu of, yes, a pair of honeymooners, reportedly by a man and a woman, still on the loose. Two couples they encounter (Chris Hemsworth & Marley Shelton; and Timothy Olyphant & Kiele Sanchez) arouse their ...
In a future world, people prefer staying at home in sloth and safety to actually doing things, and live through robotic (and better looking) surrogates. Bruce Willis, an FBI agent whose surrogate for some unexplained reason wears a comical toupee, is investigating a pair of murders in which the destruction of the surrogates have resulted ...
Finally, a thinking kid’s movie that may just edify the little ones while also fascinating them. And their parents. This little masterpiece is gorgeous, wondrous and a little scary. Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) expands considerably on Maurice Sendak’s 300-word children’s story to create as good an exploration of a child’s mind as we’re ...
Scary documentary analyzes the science and politics of how we use, misuse and pollute our meager supply of fresh water, and paints a dire picture of where we’re going with it. Small-scale water wars have already begun, and the film says a complete overhaul of the water distribution system must take place if we are ...
This is what happens when you toss out all the clichés and connivances that make most romantic comedies so tedious. There’s no happily-ever-after. We know this because it starts at the end of the 500-day romance between Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and explains, from his baffled viewpoint, how things went south. To ...
Pop-doc on b-boying, formerly known as break-dancing, and on how the energetic dance genre, while a bit passé in its country of origin, is approached elsewhere in the world. The film centers on an international competition in Germany called “Best of the Year,” which pits the best head-spinners from countries as varied as Israel, Japan, ...
Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée takes a novel approach to the period costume drama with this tale of the early years of Queen Victoria: historical accuracy. OK, I’m pretty sure the Queen and Prince Albert were not quite as attractive as (the very excellent) Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend, but the rest of this appealing and ...
The Fleischer Brothers, New York City’s answer to that pesky West Coast Disney gang, had already created Popeye and Betty Boop when they came out with this feature-length story told from a bug’s perspective. This, mind you, was 60 years before A Bug’s Life or Antz. It’s reputed to be the first animated feature based ...
My apologies, but since there have been no press previews for James Cameron’s latest thrill ride, I won’t have a review for you for a few weeks yet. But here’s what I’ve been able to glean: a wheelchair-bound soldier reluctantly accepts a mission to a spectacular but extremely hostile planet, made possible by transferring his ...
A deranged TV director devises an online, pay-per-view, super-snuff reality show that places ten badass death-row inmates from central casting (plus Vinnie Jones) on a camera-strewn island, with the last one standing winning freedom. (Didn’t Takeshi do this in 2000’s equally abhorrent Battle Royale?) Plenty of pummeling, puncturing, woman-beating and general mayhem ensues, as wrongly ...
1st kind: spotting UFOs; 2nd: evidence; 3rd: contact. This pseudo-intelligently presented malarkey awkwardly blends sci-fi and horror by alternating a story of alien abduction (4th kind) with fake documentary footage that we are ceaselessly and tiresomely reminded is real. Sometimes reenactments are presented alongside this footage in split-screen, which if anything lessens their impact and ...
Actually, the other two movies opening this week are better, but you’ll probably go see them anyway, and this stylish manga romp represents an opportunity to see a dynamic, English-language anime on the big screen that was only released on DVD overseas. It’s helpful, but not essential, to have seen the first movie, but only ...
Michael Mann’s beautifully made, factual demythologizing of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) examines the waning days of the legendary bank robber/folk hero’s career. The Chicago mob respectfully views him as a loose cannon, and Hoover’s gentlemanly FBI is beginning to take the gloves off. This drama (not a thriller) is a good but not great gangster ...
This thinking chick-flick intercuts the story of legendary TV chef Julia Child—who is credited with introducing edible food to American kitchens in the mid-20th century via her 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking—with the somewhat less interesting tale of a 21st-century woman who made a name for herself with a blog about cooking ...
One of the best things about Pixar animations is their refusal to pander to children. Or to talk down to them. Oh, there’s plenty of color and activity for the tykes to enjoy, but their movies remain anchored in the art of storytelling. They have substance. And this flyaway fantasy marries comedy and drama to ...
“I refuse to live in a country like this,” says Michael Moore in his most impassioned op-ed rave since 1989’s Roger and Me, “And I’m not leaving.” Here he posits that capitalism in its current form allows big business to collude with both red and blue politicians to screw the middle class. This is not ...
Steven Soderbergh’s take on the mostly true story of an erratic corporate whistleblower who’s hilariously unable to tell the truth, or even to stop talking, stars a slyly comic Matt Damon in a role very, very far removed from Jason Bourne. His running voiceover, usually a filmmaking crutch, is as indispensable here as it is ...
Dramatized fake doc on the life and death of Darby Crash, frontman for LA punk band The Germs, is more concerned with the lyricist’s fall than his rise, and fails to explain to non-fans like me why this group mattered. Still, for those that care, though it lacks insights, it’s well crafted and an authentic ...
This little comedy-horror creature feature is not a great movie. But I enjoyed it more than the ’tweener vampire installment, the Spanish slasher, or the lame romantic comedy that also open this week. Clearly made on a budget and edited with a chainsaw, Infestation still gets a lot of yucks for the bucks. If the ...
Bunch of paintballers sign on for an expensive European competition and have a bit of moronic fun until, inevitably because it’s a movie, they discover that someone out there is using real bullets. And that’s just the start of this sadistic Spanish slasher flick. It’s tedious until we learn why this is happening, after which ...
Though hard to find, there are some good romantic comedies out there. This is not one of them. It probably looked better on paper, and Catherine Zeta-Jones likely saw a challenge in the role of a single mother reluctantly hooking up with a much younger man (Justin Bartha). This aggressively unfunny waste of celluloid might ...
I’m at a distinct not-give-a-crap disadvantage with this juiceless, fun-free, mope-fest first sequel in a ’tweener “saga” that wanders somewhat more than the Aeneid. If this were the first movie, there wouldn’t be a second. Overlong and self-serious, this one declaws the werewolf mythos just as the first film defanged the vampires. The acting is ...
Quentin Tarantino blends the spaghetti western with the WWII action epic to create this swaggering, blissfully amoral action fantasy. It’s difficult to categorize, but the term “audacious” keeps cropping up. There are so many references, both blatant and subtle, to movies and to The Cinema in general that you’d have to call this a movie ...
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” said Bill Shakespeare. Meaning perhaps, in an updated sense, that we are all stars in our own movies. If Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, a dense series of reflections on art and death, were a novel, it would be called “unfilmable.” Intellectuals (a ...
Big, dumber-than-usual, SFX-driven orgy of destruction from big dumb filmmaker Roland Emmerich, who previously blessed us with The Day After Tomorrow and screwed up the American version of Godzilla by making the friggin’ lizard run, fer crissake. It actually contains the line, “The Earth’s crust is disintegrating; we have to evacuate!” And while I admit ...
Bah! Humbug! Oddly, all the big-deal, groundbreaking animation technologies utilized in Disney’s whiz-bang version of Charles Dickens’ classic yuletide tale of greed and redemption end up leaching all the emotion out of it. My enthusiasm began to wane with the first buggy chase scene. I’m pretty sure Dickens didn’t include any of these. And then ...
Four people (Nick Cannon, Timothy Hutton, Clea DuVall, Shea Whigham) answer an ad for subjects in a psychological study, and find themselves locked in a white room—kind of like Cube without the gadgets—where unpleasant things begin to happen. Conducting the study is the always creepy Peter Stormare, and we experience the proceedings through the eyes ...
Inventive director Sam Raimi, after getting all psycho-serious with A Simple Plan and honing his blockbuster skills with the Spiderman franchise (two out of three ain’t bad), returns to his visceral Evil Dead roots with this spot-on, perfectly executed and even joyous horror flick that will have you jumping out of your seat and laughing ...
Neil Marshall’s 2004 surprise hit The Descent had an all-female group of spelunkers set upon by a bunch of blind, voracious (and gradually revealed) monsters deep within an uncharted cave. It combined claustrophobic dread with blood-drenched panic and topped it off with a bit of moral ambiguity. The sequel, which begins two days after the ...
Jumanji hooks up with Final Destination to produce this patently ridiculous story about a bunch of kids who unearth a creepy board game called Mamba, apparently left over from the Spanish Inquisition. Right. Of course they have to play it. Each throws the dice, takes a card and reads its cryptic message (in English!), then ...
In this gritty, low-rent X-Men, mutants with powers like telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance and general mind-messing are being pursued through a photogenic Hong Kong (fine, moody cinematography by Peter Sova) by similar but nastier weirdoes who want to weaponize them. Yes, we’ve seen it all before, but though derivative, the relentless pacing, high energy and generally ...
Boiled down, Vogue magazine is a manifestation of Anna Wintour’s opinion. But pity the frustrated filmmaker of this fawning 2007 doc on the most powerful woman in fashion. Who knew that the inspiration for Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, could be so deadly dull? She’s undoubtedly a good editor, but aside from ...
Liberally fictionalized account of how young Jane Austen came to be the author of six of the most widely read novels in English. Casual fans of the writer’s work will delight in spotting formative personalities and experiences, but devotees may be put off by the sheer imaginative license taken. Austen’s headstrong heroines all had happier-ever-afters. ...
This Antarctic murder mystery could have been a moody psycho-thriller like, say, Insomnia at the other pole, but director Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in Sixty Seconds) doesn’t do moody. He does obvious. And then he explains it. Did you know that Antarctica is cold and inhospitable? US Marshall Kate Beckinsale has to find the killer ...
This is a sweet and funny rocumentary about an obscure Toronto heavy metal band whose two lead members swore when they were 14 that they were going to make it big. After one moderately successful album in the ’80s, well… Robb Reiner and Steve “Lips” Kudlow are now in their 50s and working on their ...
In the late ’70s, a nearly illiterate pussy hound named Steve Levinson opened Plato’s Retreat, a tacky nightclub for heterosexual swingers; a twisted extension of the free-love mindset of the era. Couples were encouraged to cast aside their inhibitions and, well, just screw (American Schwing?). Former patrons tell us how great the place was. ...
In the ’60s, the antediluvian BBC aired only a few hours of pop music a week. Not so humbly leaping into the breach were several ship-based radio stations anchored outside territorial waters. There’s a great movie here, but this mildly entertaining, infantile farce ain’t it. Yes, it’s fun to watch Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill ...
In this direct-to-DVD military sci-fi/horror flick, Cuba “Fluke Oscar” Gooding Jr. leads a band of stereotypical, tough-talking, kick-ass soldiers on a mission to rescue a valuable scientist from a top-secret underground laboratory where something has gone terribly wrong. Jeez, don’t these guys ever go to the movies? Cuba’s soon more than a little concerned that ...
In this rip-off of Se7en, a recently widowed detective (Dennis Quaid) works to track down a band of serial killers who suspend their victims from fishhooks and see themselves as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It’s grim and ridiculous, with some scenes approaching torture porn. Zhang Ziyi takes a stab at broadening her range ...
This is a movie for people who swallowed Benjamin Button, and it’s a big, absurd, melodramatic, slightly creepy bore. Eric Bana suffers from a genetic disorder that causes him to frequently dematerialize and pop up in a different timeline (naked, and usually flashing a little Bana-butt). Who thinks this stuff up? What would Darwin ...
It’s a sad state of affairs, not to mention a measure of the general mediocrity of the movies opening this week, that I am reduced to featuring in this space a Sandra Bullock romantic comedy. (The other releases are even worse, and The Final Destination is dubbed into Japanese!) Sandra plays a high-powered publishing executive ...
Second sequel to the 2004 Ashton Kutcher time-travel flick has this guy tripping into the past and violating The Rules (don’t do anything that will alter your own present) to prevent a girlfriend’s murder and ending up creating a serial killer and worsening his own present with each “jump.” Plus the police think he’s the ...
One of my few redeeming qualities is that I can cry at movies. However, being a hardened cynic, I am perhaps more resistant than most to emotional button-pushing. This one had me blubbering like a baby. Eleven-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin) was genetically engineered to serve as a spare-parts provider (not science fiction) for her leukemia-stricken ...
Squirm-inducing, “evil amongst us” chiller about a couple choosing for reasons unexplained (they already have two good kids) to adopt a Russian-accented 9-year-old (Isabelle Fuhrman) who dresses like Bo Peep and turns out to be somewhat less (or more) than advertised. Mom (Vera Farmiga) is a recovering alcoholic who spots the weirdness early, and dad ...
Perhaps they thought that getting Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster back together from 2001 would be enough for the franchise’s fans, and that plot, character and acting were unnecessary. The opening scene is cool (though preposterous), but the film injects its nitro too soon, and the rest of this car-culture cop ...
This Death Wish wannabe from Saw director James Wan stars Kevin Bacon as the father of a murdered son who, to his own severe detriment, becomes a gangbanger slayer. Wan’s noble message is that vengeance ultimately degrades the avenger. Fair enough. But at the same time he’s pandering shamelessly to revenge-flick fans, who by the ...
In this Hollywood origin story of Japan’s Atom Boy, a brilliant robotics scientist who recently lost a son creates a super-robot kid with all his son’s memories, but then spurns the final product as too emotionally upsetting. Maybe it’s all the hair gel. Rejected robokid, renamed Astro Boy for some reason, hangs with some human ...
Well, I’ve finally run out of rude things to say about Steven Seagal flicks. Actually, I don’t have anything at all to say about this latest waste of time because it’s so forgettable that I simply don’t remember anything. And I’ve still got 70 words to go! Steven does the squint thing, the soft-talking thing, ...
A Steven Seagal zombie movie. I’m not kidding. Sometimes I think Steven does stuff like this just to make my job more fun. Most of it is boring footage of survivors wandering through a deserted, post-apocalyptic hospital trying to stay out of the way of pointy-toothed flesh-eaters. This would be a crappy movie even without ...
Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga tries his hand at directing in the wake of his split with director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Together, the two made the excellent Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel. This film interweaves three narratives. The first involves the troubled sexaholic owner of an upscale restaurant (Charlize Theron in another strong performance). The second ...
A former high school football star takes his upscale college girlfriend back to his hick hometown, where former hick girlfriend remains obsessed with him and insanely jealous. Clearly having seen Misery way too many times, old flame kidnaps, sedates and tortures new squeeze while trying to re-attract the jock of her affections. Illogical, listlessly directed, ...
This is not over the top. Crank was over the top. This freak show can’t even remember passing the top. It’s absurd and outrageous, which is cool, but there are diminishing returns. In Crank, Jason Statham had to keep his adrenalin levels up to slow a poison. Here, he has a mechanical heart that needs ...
This ultra-minimalist effort is a bit of a disappointment from indie director Jim Jarmusch (Down By Law, Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers). A pokerfaced man, most likely a criminal (Isaach De Bankole), wanders through sunny Spain, ordering in cafes two espressos in two separate cups. He is contacted in each of half a dozen such places ...
Several interwoven plots battle for attention in this manipulative, socially conscious exploitation movie, constructed Crash-style, about the dream of US citizenship and the nightmare it can be to obtain. This clumsy film uses a sledgehammer to convince us of something we already agree on—that the country’s immigration system is broken—but fails to meaningfully address the ...
Take Outbreak, mate it with Road Warrior, toss in a little Gladiator, and season to taste with a dash of Escape from New York or maybe I Am Legend, leach out any residual originality, and this is what you’ll be having for dinner theater. A virus wipes out Scotland’s population and the country is quarantined. ...
Will Ferrell’s a funny guy. Except when he’s not. Like in this deeply mediocre mess based on a campy, barely remembered Saturday morning TV show from the ’70s. A “quantum paleontologist” (Ferrell), a pretty British physicist (Anna Friel) and a redneck survivalist (Danny McBride) are transported to an alternate world of dinosaurs, annoying ape-men and ...
It’s a given that romantic comedies are formulaic. You know where they’re going, so the only way to judge them is how they get there and how likable the leads are. This is a subjective thing, and I liked this one. It’s as cookie-cutter as the next one, but it’s well-paced and no dumber than ...
As if sequels and prequels weren’t bad enough, Hollywood has now latched on to yet another way to put fanboy butts in seats: the origin movie. Please, make it stop! This impersonal and joyless exercise in emptiness strives to clear up some of the barely interesting mysteries about how the charisma-free, badass title character got ...
Wesley Snipes comes out of retirement at the insistence of a government agency (most likely the IRS) to star in this direct-to-video, in-name-only sequel to his stylish-but-formulaic 2000 original. He plays a badass top-secret government agent coming out of retirement to become embroiled in an illogical, plodding and disjointed plot involving murder, arms dealing, government ...
When a gang of criminal types audaciously hijacks a New York subway train and takes hostages, a mild-mannered dispatcher must use his vast knowledge of the transit system to try to outwit the baddies. How are they going to make their getaway once the ransom is delivered? Tony Scott’s remake of the 1974 psychothriller updates ...
Emily seems to be in perpetual, desperate, unhappy motion. She and her husband are fading rock stars and heroin addicts. After he dies of an overdose and she does six months for possession, she realizes she has to change or die. The thing keeping her from spiraling ever downward is the hope of being reunited ...
Created over 11 years and playing more like a drifty film of devotion than a documentary, this movie hits on the ups and downs of the career of the beat poet, artist, political activist and godmother of punk, and touches on the personalities, from William S. Burroughs to Sam Shepard, that helped shape it. As ...
The daughter of an ex-CIA operative (Liam Neeson in full Jack Bauer mode) is kidnapped in Paris by Albanian sex-slavers, so dad jets off to the rescue, making use of a plethora of lethal skills and spy-tech connections to make the soon-to-be-dead kidnappers understand that they done messed with the wrong daughter. Like most Luc ...
Add the following code before the first paragraph of the review. This will display the sidebar with movie details: This documentary is not on the history or the future of surfing, but concentrates on the state of this most elemental of sports in the here and now (see title). It covers a lot of ground ...
I don’t know why vampires didn’t think of this earlier: the month-long period each winter without any of that pesky skin-charring sunlight in far-north towns like Barrow, Alaska. Taking a cue from 28 Days Later, these brilliantly designed bloodsuckers are fast, feral, famished and smart (Danny Huston’s great). Sorry, Anne, no tortured undead souls here—these ...
This low-budget, high-atmosphere wilderness psychodrama from Down Under features a steadily diminishing number of holidaymaking Aussie city folk clinging desperately to mangrove trees in a northern swamp after their boat is overturned and their guide eaten by a massive and crafty crocodile… who’s still hungry. The action starts straightaway, and the tension is nicely maintained ...
This ensemble film is based on the true story of Chicago’s Chess Records, from its founding in the mid ’50s through the mid ’70s, when Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody) got out of the business. It dramatizes, with varying degrees of success, the early careers (and of course problems—drink, dope, dames) of such luminaries as Muddy ...
In the twisted world of movie physics, is it possible for a franchise to go faster and at the same time lose momentum? The title chauffeur breaks most of his own personal rules, which were what made him cool in the first place, for the sake of spectacle. Again the “package” is a babe, this ...
My name is Don Morton and I hated this movie. The plot was as thin as washi, the acting as plastic as an otaku sex doll. I’ve lost many minutes of my life both watching this movie, and then having to actually write about it. What a waste. But hey, I’m getting paid. Do yourself ...
It’s Jamie Foxx’s turn to do the Rain Man thing in this true story about a Los Angeles Times columnist (Robert Downey Jr.) who befriends a homeless, schizophrenic musical savant and makes him famous. I was dutifully moved at times and even morally indignant, but possibly not as uplifted as I was intended to be. ...
The predominantly pink posters should be the only guide you need for this lazy, unsubtle and predictable romantic turkey from crap producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Shooting for a job at a top fashion mag, the title neurotic instead lands one with a business publication, where she uses her shopping smarts to craft a financial advice column ...
Live-action remake, in English, of the classic 2000 anime about an ass-kicking, supernatural samurai demon-killer named Saya who is possibly one of those cinematically convenient human-vampire hybrids. Disguised as a schoolgirl, complete with sailor suit, she is enrolled at a US military high school in Kanto in the ’70s to ferret out and slash to ...
Director J.J. Abrams’ mission is to boldly reboot a sagging franchise by starting at square one, and he manages the phenomenal cinematic feat of keeping Trekkies happy while being moderately entertaining to actual humans. Each of the core characters gets the genesis treatment, with, wisely, only a little reshaping. Did you know Spock and Uhura ...
Graphic novelist Frank Miller throws away all the points he gained for Sin City and 300 by trying to direct, resulting in this joyless, emotion-free extreme example of style over substance. The reborn title ex-cop, played with stunning blandness by Gabriel Macht, does endless battle for a loveless city with the villainous Octopus, played by ...
Or not. Aaron Eckhart dutifully but futilely dumbs down in this leaden screwball comedy, playing a self-doubting sad-sack stuck in a useless non-job at his father-in-law’s bank while his wife fools around with some blow-dried TV newsman. His life begins to change when he is roped into mentoring a self-assured high-school kid (Logan Lerman), and ...
And just about everything else, including technique, acting and taste. Consider this a warning. You might not even want to read the rest of this review. Story is about a woman with seven clitorises and a guy with an 80cm penis that is stronger-willed than his other head. It escapes. This is (thankfully) the first ...
Previously respected French-Vietnamese writer-director Anh Hung Tran (Cyclo, The Scent of Green Papaya) convinced some of Asia’s hottest teen heartthrobs (plus Yank Josh Hartnett) to appear in the same movie, and then inexplicably made this turgid, beyond-pretentious religious fable. We’ve got South Korea’s Byung-hun Lee, Hong Kong’s Shawn Yue, and Vietnam’s Tran Nu Yen Khe ...
Aging pro wrestler Randy (“The Ram”) Robinson is battered, broken and broke in this elemental character study by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), but he keeps on getting in the ring because it’s the only thing he knows how to do. It’s impossible to ignore the parallels here to actor Mickey Rourke’s own ...
Okay, it was cool when the first, Austrian-accented robot showed up in our theaters 25 years ago. There was a sense of wonder and discovery, at least in terms of summer blockbusters. It was fun. The 1991 sequel had some nice, scary liquid-metal effects, but by T3 in 2003, the franchise was definitely showing some ...
This oxymoronic Disney reality movie (jeez, that phrase hurts just to think) is a relentlessly upbeat adventure documentary about a group of squeaky-clean college-age kids who get the opportunity to compete in a 2,500-mile ocean sailing race. You’d have to be a major sailing enthusiast with a very high tolerance for bland wholesomeness to give ...
On August 7, 1974, French aerialist Philippe Petit tightrope-walked between the World Trade Center towers. Then he turned around and did it seven more times, even dancing on the wire and juggling. This in itself is pretty amazing. But the fact that he did it without permission is jaw-droppingly astounding. Think about it: he and ...
This multi-arc, rather perfunctory romantic comedy has four main plots, some slightly more interesting than others, and none that I have the space or any real desire to go into. This overlong belaboring of the obvious is one of those “get a bunch of good-looking names together and those ’tweeners out there will flock to ...
How do they say it? More of the same, only more. This bloated, accounting office-mandated, special effects-driven sequel to a fairly content-free original is bigger, louder, costlier and even emptier and more forgettable. Lame premise: the magic tablet that animates museum exhibits has now found its way to the world’s largest museum, and Ben Stiller ...
Though it’s unlikely that even the most nama of gaijin are unaware of Hachiko, a little background: this little Akita went to Shibuya station every day in the ’20s and ’30s to wait for his master to return, and kept doing so for ten years after his master’s death. Was he a paragon of loyalty ...
Unless you’re a fan of that little black dress and that famous perfume, this loopy, overlong hagiography is going to bore your socks off. A hugely miscast Shirley MacLaine plays the designer at 71, spouting riveting Coco-isms like “Dresses should both crawl and fly” (Huh?), and setting up flashbacks where she turns into Slovakian hottie ...
A Disney movie about the Holocaust? Yes, I know, but read on. The story is seen through the eyes of a naïve 8-year-old German boy (Asa Butterfield) whose dad (David Thewlis) happens to run Auschwitz. Lacking playmates, the boy makes friends, across an electrified fence, with a young prisoner (Jack Scanlon). The climax, which you ...
They don’t make many westerns these days, but this solid, emotionally complex reworking of the classic 1957 film (from an Elmore Leonard short story) makes you kind of wish they would. It pits charming-but-ruthless outlaw Russell Crowe against Christian Bale’s honest-but-poor rancher, and it’s a pleasure to watch these two work together. Dan Evans (Bale) ...
This documentary looks into a time of upheaval in the sport of surfing before it was even considered a sport, and its questionable transformation from laidback Hawaiian pastime to multi-billion-dollar global business. According to the movie, the catalyst was four suicidal dudes from Australia and South Africa who invaded Oahu’s north shore in the ’70s. ...
A pampered celebrity pooch has since birth played a fearless and indestructible TV superdog who rescues his mistress every week. More obsessive-compulsive than Hachiko, Bolt lives on-set and actually believes he has superpowers. Think Buzz Lightyear crossed with The Truman Show. But our hero encounters an existential predicament when one day he finds himself in ...
This dark British farce by off-kilter Yank director Frank Oz (In & Out, Bowfinger) starts out—what’s the word?—frightfully slowly. But have patience, because it’s just calmly introducing you to its characters and building up momentum for its manic, very funny conclusion. Think of every possible thing that could go wrong at an upper/middle-class, stiff-upper-lip funeral ...
Normally excellent director Spike Lee lets his passion get in the way of his filmmaking with this leaden, poorly focused, 2:40-long would-be epic about the 92nd Infantry, the “Buffalo Soldiers,” black men fighting in WWII. Lee was apparently loath to cut anything from screenwriter James McBride’s novel, resulting in a patchy melodrama with way too ...
The music’s irresistible; the story, another biopic about another superstar junkie, is not. Hector Lavoe was a legend who is credited with blending Latin, jazz and pure New York vibrancy to create salsa. He’s played by Marc Anthony, a gifted musician whose covers of Lavoe’s tunes are almost worth sitting through the rest of this ...
“Put some dinosaurs in it,” some Fox studio exec undoubtedly decreed for the second Ice Age sequel. Until now, these mildly diverting movies had done one thing right: they’ve remained within their stated historical era and animated only animals that existed back then. But, well, apparently historical accuracy now takes a back seat to putting ...
Dear Metropolis (specifically Don Morton), I am an 11-year-old boy and I am absolutely disgusted by the fact that your film reviewer can give a film (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) a bad review WITHOUT EVEN WATCHING THE FILM!!! Think about the film’s target audience Don, not your own intellectual prejudice. I AM going to see ...
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 ...