James Franco’s impish appeal as outdoorsman Aron Ralston is caught between a hard place and two rocks: the stone that pins down his right arm in a Utah canyon and the clobbering boulder of director Danny Boyle’s “art.” Complicating the simple story are flashbacks, visions, jokes, music, and the hero’s …
In the violent prologue, a ski-masked commando team of animal-rights activists storms the Cambridge Primate Research Center to liberate the experimental chimps, heedless of the attendant's warnings ("You've no idea!") that the chimps have been "infected" with rage. Sure enough, the chimps do not exactly embrace their liberators. Twenty-eight days …
Zombie recurrence in the U.K., under U.S. military occupation, and under Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (of Intacto) in place of Danny Boyle (of the original 28 Days Later). The scrappy, scruffy digital visuals are largely annoying (as if the zombies weren't bothersome enough), though there are some effective scenes, …
Present-day parable of Paradise Found and Paradise Lost: more precisely, a legendary island Shangri-La somewhere near Thailand (from the air it looks like Never-Never Land in Disney's Peter Pan, meaning, among other things, that it looks painted instead of photographed), home to a Hippie Commune cum Club Med, as well …
A smarty-pants comedy that outsmarts itself. It tells of your basic disgruntled ex-employee who storms the boss's office with a gun (ha-ha) to demand his job back, but who comes away instead with the boss's daughter as a hostage and without actually killing anyone. The bigger joke (ha-ha-ha) is, or …
The lighter side of Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, et al.), lighter even than A Life Less Ordinary, embracing not mere angels, but full-fledged saints. Two little Liverpudlian brothers happen to have a duffel of cash fall in their laps off a passing train. The younger boy, the "clever" …
Captured live in 2011 from the National Theatre stage in London, this thrilling, sold-out production became an international sensation, experienced by almost half a million people in cinemas around the world. Directed by Danny Boyle and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating between the roles of Victor Frankenstein …
Three youthy and self-congratulatory Glaswegians, two men, one woman, to a cocktail-shaker beat in the background, subject prospective flatmates to a torturous inquisition (a variation on the standard "audition" montage), leaving viewers wondering why anyone would want to move in with them. (Not to mention into the eye-fatiguing confines of …
Feverish daydream, partly amorous, partly avaricious, around an unschooled Bombay teenager who, hoping to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart, climbs toward the top prize on the Indian Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It breaks down into three time zones, shuffled together in a jumble: the game show itself, the …
Having treated the man who put life online — Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg — screenwriter Aaron Sorkin now turns his attention to the man who put it into the machine. (Not for nothing is the Apple co-founder so desperate to have the Mac say "Hello" at its unveiling.) Once again, …
Serious science fiction, rising at times to full ululation, about a dying sun and a desperate mission to rekindle it with a nuclear bomb. The seriousness survives some incomprehensible action, some illegible CGI, and (beneath cascades of sound effects and background music) some unintelligible dialogue. With Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, …
Unless the entire cast suddenly found it hard to make their mortgage payments, file this one under “unnecessary sequels.” The passage of 23 years finds Begbie (Robert Carlyle) on the lam, Spud (Ewen Bremner) a suicidal junkie, and Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) managing a questionable extortion ring — when he’s …
Danny Boyle's group portrait of young Edinburgh deadbeats bound together by their addiction to heroin — a junk bond, as it were. For all its visual flash and dash — all its distorting lenses, freeze frames, fast-motion, and so forth; all its head-first dives into the rabbit hole (or in …