Hope lives! Hayden Christensen (Jumper) and Kate Bosworth (Homefront) star in a story about the power of prayer. A man gets into a car wreck and dies. But then he comes back with the news that in the interim, he was in heaven. And then he must recover himself, physically …
Morbid remembrance of the blip-like rise and fall of Edie Sedgwick, tricked out with pseudodocumentary gimmicks by the sometime documentarist George Hickenlooper. Andy Warhol, well mimicked by Guy Pearce, is not hard to make into a compelling figure. But Sedgwick -- elevator heiress, socialite, art groupie, temporary "it" girl, drug …
Flashy adolescent fantasy about a bullied nerd who spontaneously acquires the supercool superpower of teleportation: the face of Big Ben one minute, surfing in Fiji the next, the head of the Sphinx the next. Hardly has this power been established, and hardly has the awkward teen morphed into Hayden Christensen, …
Dying man's last wish: to build his dream house and at the same time bond with his nihilistic, incommunicative, pierced and glue-sniffing son. A feel-gooey movie, deftly photographed (by Vilmos Zsigmond) but brutally, maulingly manipulative. With Kevin Kline, Hayden Christensen, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jena Malone, and Mary Steenburgen; directed by …
Paris, Je T'Aime crosses the pond. A multi-director box on bonbons, undeveloped little vignettes of male-female relations in the Big Apple. The ghostly segment by Shekhar Kapur stands out from the rest for stylistic reasons, the pallid palette, the persnickety compositions, the oval mirror frame within the frame. Natalie Portman, …
The re-enacted downfall of up-and-coming journalist Stephen Glass, twenty-seven of whose forty-one pieces for The New Republic in the mid-Nineties turned out to have been fabricated in whole or in part. No great shakes as a movie, clumping along in the talking-heads style of a TV docudrama, the writing and …
The saga grinds on, in state-of-the-art digital video: crisp and detailed yet somewhat overcast, monotoned, seemingly covered in a sort of pinkish-complected skin, like an unboiled wiener. The particulars -- the diminished role of the reviled Jar-Jar Binks; the teen romance between Queen Padmé (now known as Senator Amidala) and …
George Lucas closes the circle: the last of the three prequels, evenly spaced out at three-year intervals. (The filmmaker's latter-day visual style comes back to us in a twinkling: the flatness of the humans and the overfertilized fluorescence of their computer-generated surroundings, something like sticks of wood in a stop-motion …
Elementary heist thriller rendered unwatchable by director John Luessenhop’s hopped-up visuals, the cameraman so excited (often over nothing) that he can’t hold his instrument steady, pressing in so close as to lose sight of what we’re supposed to be looking at, always a step behind the action, a telephoto lens …
Four souls gather in Sonny’s bar and try to hold off the encroaching dark. And, boy, does it encroach, with victims disappearing in an instant, leaving only their clothes behind. Director Brad Anderson manages to produce a spooky mood but not much more, and there are enough non sequiturs to …