Why did Robert Rodriguez bother giving Rosa Salazar the CG Margaret Keane treatment when Hollywood already had tumescently-eyed young actresses like Anya Taylor-Joy or Bel Powley eager to report for duty? It’s Ex Machina for teenagers when a futuristic sawbones (Christoph Waltz in cruise control) fuses together the upper-torso of …
What could Tim Burton have possibly seen in the story of a monotonous, marginally talented, yet enormously successful “artist"? Something of himself, perhaps? Another one of the director’s triumphs of production design over storytelling, as structurally spiritless as the ocular-enhanced, Children of the Damned urchins generally associated with the paintings …
A crafty, good-looking Roman Polanski film of a facile but entertainingly bitchy play by Yasmina Reza, sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? funneling into Who’s Afraid of Neil Simon? Two married couples (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) fume, spar, and rip apart their …
Quentin Tarantino fails to do for slave owners what he did for Nazis in this, his long-awaited western (southern?) follow-up to the epic war comedy Inglourious Basterds. Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz returns to the Tarantino fold as Dr. King, a German dentist-cum-bounty hunter hot on the trail of a pair of …
Remarkable: a sequel that actually scales down from its predecessor. The high concept — workers of the world, kill your boss! — dispensed with, our working class heroes Nick, Kurt, and Dale (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day, clearly enjoying themselves and each other) can relax and get down …
Quentin Tarantino takes no more than the risible title from Enzo G.Castellari's Dirty Dozen knockoff of 1978, and respells, misspells, that. (Did he ponder Basturds as possibly funnier?) Much of the movie, a revisionist revisitation of the French theater of operations in the Second World War, is unapologetically, unsanctimoniously silly. …
At one point in David Yates’ lush depiction of Lord John Greystoke’s reluctant return to Africa, plucky damsel in distress Jane (Margot Robbie) taunts wicked schemer Leon (Christoph Waltz) by telling him that his moustache is a trifle lower on one side than the other. But the really remarkable thing …
The series peaked with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the bean-counters at EON Productions considered it Ian Fleming’s red-headed stepchild. The producers faulted George Lazenby, the first post-Connery 007, for the film’s initial lack of grosses and canned him after one outing. The commonality between that film and this …
In his fourth outing, Daniel Craig's iteration of superspy James Bond takes his undersized suits, hangdog expression, and psychological damage on an epic, eye-popping, worldwide hunt for...closure? (The personal and political are pretty much identical here, and a spectre is, of course, a ghost — the sort of things that …
Not quite Dumas, but no dummy. The brash new Muskies: Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans), Porthos (Ray Stevenson), plus D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) like a 17th-century mall dude. Add saucy, athletic Milady (Milla Jovovich), haughty Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom), cruel Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen), and not-very-Catholic Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz): …
Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl) tries his hand at another period drama, this one set 17th century Amsterdam and starring Alicia Vikander as a young woman trapped in an arranged marriage who falls for a struggling painter her own age. Christoph Waltz and Dane DeHaan star as the husband …
Hal Holbrook doesn’t quite steal the show as the old-man-remembering version of pretty Robert Pattinson in this love story set in the days when a traveling circus was still enough to inspire wonder. No, the real thief is Christoph Waltz, who gives a monster performance as the circus owner, ringleader, …
The Zero Theorem runs in a counter-parallel universe to Terry Gilliam’s masterwork, Brazil, a film he’s dedicated a career to remaking. Qohen (Christoph Waltz) is assigned the task of solving the titular hypothesis, an equation that by its very nature – everything adds up to nothing – is impossible to …