Hit & Run
Spinning Wheels: Dax Shepard’s charm highlights an otherwise lackluster chase flick in Hit & Run.
Dax Shepard’s sophomore directorial feature – following the awkwardly staged show-biz parody Brother’s Justice – is a bizarre mélange of earnest and romantic road movie, high-octane chase picture reminiscent of everything the mustachioed version of ...
The Imposter
Scary Switcheroo: The Imposter chronicles a real-life child disappearance, and the con-man who took the boy’s place.
Truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes vice versa. But when the elements of a mystery become so impossibly obscured by the sheer emotional drama of a crime – a crime that actually might not ...
The Intouchables
Buddy System: An unlikely friendship blossoms with dignity in award-winner from France, The Intouchables.
Nominated for nine César Awards in its native France, it’s telling that The Intouchable’s only win went to its Senegelese co-star, Omar Sy. In between its mix of comedy and a very French strain of ...
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Peppy Puppy: Beasts of the Southern Wild merely manages to nail the meaning of life.
Not since Victor Erice’s 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive has there been such a dreamily accurate depiction of what it must be like to be a child caught fast in events of tremendous ...
Ted
Ted Conference: Seth McFarlane’s teddy bear pic has Family Guy fun, but still feels like it’s been done.
In a lesser universe, this story of the misadventures of a miraculous, talking teddy bear and his human, 35-year-old best friend forever might have featured Adam Sandler (as the voice of the bear) and Jim ...
Safety Not Guarenteed
Eye Opener: Safety Not Guaranteed rides two breakout stars to greatness.
It’s easy, I suppose, to sing the praises of Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation; the web series Troopers). Here, as Darius, an intern working for a glossy, trendy Seattle magazine, she’s droll, melancholy and transcendent ...
In Darkness
Life Underground: Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness portrays the dark terror of the hunt for Jews in WWII Poland.
Based on actual events, this claustrophobic epic is as emotional as they come: a Holocaust story shot through with a layer of darkness both literal and figurative. Set mainly beneath the streets of Lvov, Poland, ...
We Need To Talk About Kevin
The Kid is Not Alright: Questions of innate evil and disastrous parenting collide in We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Nature, nurture or just plain evil? That’s the question at the heart of this savage and sorrowful portrait of a mother attempting to survive after her teenage son goes on a premeditated killing spree at ...
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
Inane Island: Journey 2: The Mysterious Island smears steampunk legacies; shines dimly with CGI creatures.
Every time the Rock (Dwayne Johnson) stars in a film nominally based on the writings of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Lewis Stevenson – or any combination thereof – somewhere a steampunk baby dies. That ...
Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol
Mission: Impossible gets an action-packed fourth installment, but it’s all been done before.
Perhaps it’s the fact that I just finished reading Jaron Lanier’s counterintuitive but deeply persuasive polemic You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, or maybe I’m just suffering from sequelitis, but my reaction to Ethan ...
Blackthorn
Butch Cassidy and the Great What If: Mateo Gil takes the iconic character into old age in the Bolivian backcountry.
What if Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hadn’t died at the end of George Roy Hill’s genre-redefining 1969 classic, but instead lived on – one of them, anyway – in the Bolivian backcountry? That’s ...
Apocalypse Nuts
Bellflower feels devoutly bad ass and almost nauseatingly unique.
As I write this, London is burning, Japan is irradiated and Rick Perry is on the verge of formally announcing his presidential intentions. In short, the Apocalypse—or something more secular, and therefore worse—is ramping up ...
Transformers - Dark of the Moon
The newest Transformers soars over low expectations.
Former film director Michael Bay isn’t known for his subtlety, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon has about as much of it as a phased-plasma rifle to the back of the head. I say former ...
Skateland
Weighty Eighties 'Skateland' unspools a tender and nuanced understanding of a time in Texas.
“The future’s open wide,” sang Modern English’s Robbie Grey on the band’s 1982 single “I Melt With You.” For a time, if you were coming of age but maybe not trying so hard to grow ...
Shotguns and Knives
Osio debuts a Hobo With a Shotgun and Forks Over Knives.
This Hobo started life as one of the faux trailers in the underloved Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez mash-up Grindhouse, and it’s to be commended for truth in advertising, since the bluntly accurate title pretty ...
Everything Must Go
Will Hunting: Funnyman Will Ferrell searches for right dramatic touch in Everything Must Go.
Recall, if you will, Adam Sandler’s impressive dramatic turn in Punch Drunk Love. Like that film, Everything Must Go is a drama starring a comic who is an alumnus of Saturday Night Live in a ...
Scream 4
For Screaming Out Loud: 'Scream 4' leaves us Craven more than self-referential bloodshed.
Too self-referential for its own good by half, Scream 4 attempts to reboot the by-now-completely-overworked slasher franchise after an 11-year hiatus. It’s not a total embarrassment (that was Scream 3), but it’s also a film ...
Soul Surfer
Despite the harrowing true-life story it’s based on, Soul Surfer fails to make waves.
Based on the true story of Bethany Hamilton, who lost her left arm to a shark at the age of 13 before going on to become one of surfing’s all-time legends, Soul Surfer is faith-based ...
Cedar Rapids
Small Town, Big Laughs, Bigger Heart: Cedar Rapids treads tricky directorial territory to hilarious and affecting results.
Although the ads pitch it as being somewhere between The Office and The Hangover, Cedar Rapids is actually a semisweet charmer of a movie that fluxes between edgy comedy and palpable pathos. Its depiction of ...
The Dilemma
Good Problem to Have: The Dilemma surprises with weightiness and Vince Vaughn.
Being lifelong friends can be difficult. Relationships, especially those that have been committed (as the singles say), are tough, lovely work. Marriages are even more fraught, unequally primed for passion or peril or plain, old, ...
Fair Game
Doug Liman’s
Were it not for the fact that Sean Penn and Naomi Watts turn in a pair of top-notch performances as columnist/politico Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA field operative, Fair Game ...
Jack Goes Boating
Philip Seymour Hoffman stays afloat for his directorial debut.
Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s directorial debut, Jack Goes Boating, is adapted from a play by Bob Glaudini, who also penned the screenplay. Despite a quartet of interesting, if overly familiar, New York characters, Hoffman’s ...
Exorcisim
The devil is in the details of a Blair Witch Project knock-off that has its own kind of eerie style.
Every generation gets the devil it deserves, and this faux documentary pulls few punches in its nihilistic depiction of religious belief versus religious disbelief amid the Spanish moss and ramshackle, moldering manses of southern Louisiana. ...
Life During Wartime
Todd Solondz’s latest film revisits his previous themes, with chilling portraits of pain.
Todd Solondz’s breakthrough feature, 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse was so lacerating in its depiction of humanity as a clot of pitiless predators and doomed prey that it practically required a field dressing upon exiting ...
Cats&Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
Mediocre Menagerie:
Although it’s great fun for the under-8 set and for those of us monitoring the chaos theory that is Nick Nolte’s career of late, Cats&Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore is otherwise mediocre and features ...
Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
Mediocre Menagerie: Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore is a spoof that lacks the talented Pixar touch.
Although it’s great fun for the under-8 set and for those of us monitoring the chaos theory that is Nick Nolte’s career of late, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore is otherwise mediocre ...
The Square
Crime Story: The Square combines a noir narrative with strong performances in a gripping tale about heavy duty evildoers.
This vicious little Australian suspenser debuted at the South By Southwest Film Festival ’09 and then failed to materialize on U.S. screens, a disappointment that’s thankfully been rectified by indie distributor Apparition (the company also ...
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Paint It Black: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo combines noir sensibilities with a complex crime story.
The past is a charnel pit whose perversities and systemic rituals continue to foul the air of the present like a pall; no one escapes untainted in this grimly fiendish adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling ...
The Runaways
Rock Steady: Raunchy, realistic portrayal of The Runaways has Jett power.
The Runaways opens with a drop-dead perfect shot and a fittingly revolutionary battle cry, courtesy of ‘70s rock icon Suzi Quatro: “All my life I’ve wanted to be somebody and here I am/I know what ...
Crazy Heart
Boozy Blues: Jeff Bridges gives the performance of his life as a haggard country singer in 'Crazy Heart.'
You’d never guess that Crazy Heart is the work of a first-time filmmaker, but it is, and while the story is as old and true as the broken-down country and western balladeer at the heart ...
A Single Man
Tour de Ford: 'A Single Man' is a perfectly rendered adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel about love and loss.
George Falconer (Colin Firth) is a middle-aged, British expat teaching at university in sunny southern California in 1962. A closeted homosexual by cultural necessity, he’s possessed of monumental outward conformity. Inside, however, beats the heart ...
The Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day
Saints Protect Us: This Tarantino-style Boston mobster knock-off fails to deliver except as a campy exercise in style over content.
Director Troy Duffy’s wickedly bloodthirsty and strangely humorous The Boondock Saints was a cult hit waiting to happen that somehow didn’t. As a post-post-Quentin-Tarantino hipster-shoot-’em-up, it seemed oddly dated back when it received a micro-release ...
Antichrist
Devil in the Flesh: Lars von Trier’s 'Antichrist 'is a horror film for adults that Hieronymus Bosch might admire.
Possibly the best argument against couples therapy ever, Antichrist is a tour-de-force trip inside the mind of a dangerously depressed man. That man is Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, who conceived and executed Antichrist in ...
Zombieland
(Un)dead Funny: Zombies and comedy can’t go wrong.
No spoilers here, but first things first: Zombieland (which had its world premiere during Fantastic Fest) has the single most outrageously entertaining and unexpected celebrity cameo of any film – genre or otherwise – this ...
Thirst
Blood of the Damned: Chan-wook Park’s Thirst leaves you feeling parched for more context.
Have you heard the one about the priest, the girl, and the mother-in-law? Would you like to? It goes like this: A humble, selfless priest enters into a supremely dangerous scientific study with the aim ...
Ready to Rock
The director of An Inconvenient Truth makes an inconsequential doc.
It’s a testament to how far White Striper Jack White has come in the rock & roll world since the release of the first White Stripes album 10 years back that he’s now the most ...
9
Burton’s Burden: 9 remake has moments, but doesn’t live up to original.
Co-produced by, among others, Nightwatch/Daywatch director Timur Bekmambetov and Tim Burton, 9 is a beautifully animated (in CGI) but narratively compromised fable about – sort of – societal cooperation and the virtues of steampunk stitchery ...
Ponyo
My Little Ponyo: Japanese director Miyazaki shows up Western animators.
What I want to know is this: What was Oscar-winning director Hayao Miyazaki like as a kid? I have only his lengthy string of wildly imaginative and often downright weird (in a good way, to ...
Inglourious Basterds
The Reich Stuff: Tarantino mashes up war, vengeance and film smarts in Inglourious Basterds.
As with puppies and nudity, you can never go wrong by sprinkling a whole mess of dead Nazis in your film, a truism that Quentin Tarantino takes to heart (and, via Louisville Slugger, head) in ...
The Collector
Horror Show: The Collector’s “torture porn’’ provides gore, not genuine surprises.
Co-written by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton with an eye toward the crimson-drenched ultra violence of the Saw films, The Collector gets off to what appears at first to be a whole new tack on ...
Tyson
Iron Unmanned: James Toback documentary chronicles the tragic rise and fall of Mike Tyson
Professional boxing fascinates and enthralls like no other sport. It always has. From London-born Queensbury Rules to the nasal whine of Howard Cosell and the 20th century’s greatest bouts and fighters, boxing speaks to the ...
12
Russian Maladies: A courtroom remake as contemporary as the headlines.
The film 12 is essentially a Russianized version of Sidney Lumet’s masterful 1957 courtroom drama 12 Angry Men, which was itself a remake of a live television production written by screenwriter Reginald Rose and directed ...
Alien Trespass
Forgive Us Our Trespasses: Sci-fi tribute is in a league (and planet) of its own.
Taking its cues from several classic 1950s sci-fi films – the superlative, eerie It Came From Outer Space chief among them – Alien Trespass is a deeply affectionate homage to the halcyon Red Scare era ...
Valkyrie
Time Bomb: The World War II thriller Valkyrie fizzles rather than exploding.
We all know how it ends, and that foreknowledge dooms director Bryan Singer’s hotly anticipated and much troubled account of the attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life by his own officers in June of 1944. It’s ...
Bolt
Pet Project: Disney takes some tips from Pixar in its latest animated offering.
Bolt, the first offering from Walt Disney Animation Studios to be entirely overseen by Pixar’s John Lasseter (who receives an executive producer credit), opens with the kind of action sequence usually reserved for Michael Bay ...
Encounters At the End of the World
Bottom’s Up: Werner Herzog’s latest doc brings Antartica to the fore.
I have an idea for a terrific new board game– for kids of all ages! It’s called Where in the World Is Werner Herzog? Players will roll spherical dice (I’m thinking of making them the ...
stuck
Body Blow: Stuck revisits a gruesome traffic accident and its aftermath.
Had the horrific events detailed in Stuck not already been a matter of public record, no one in his or her right mind could have plotted them without agents and spouses fearing for the filmmaker’s ...
Speed Racer
Game Theory: Video games have more emotion than the Wachowski brothers’ dizzying big screen version of Speed Racer.
There’s more story, heart, and – cutting to the chase, the quick and the dead – pure, unadulterated fun contained within a scant five minutes of Rockstar Games’ new Grand Theft Auto IV video game ...
Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day.
Frances McDormand and Amy Adams each play a different type of woman in Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day.
The Blitz was not all chip rationing and stiff upper lipness for the Londoners who endured it—there was also the West End, gin, and the promise of non-Nazi-induced blackouts and sasstacular American movie stars, or ...
Starting Out in the Evening.
A graduate student pursues an elderly writer in the finely observed Starting Out in the Evening.
At first glance, Starting Out in the Evening appears to be one of those hoary May-December romances set in the rarefield literary environs of New York’s Upper West Side in which Woody Allen used to ...
Prev Next
