Nearly three million square miles of tripe. A Ferber-esque epic of a “delicate English rose” who takes over her late husband’s cattle ranch in rugged northern Australia on the eve of World War II, a Cimarron Down Under, with a sprinkle of Aboriginal magic, and a thick coat of high-gloss …
Director Neill Blomkamp goes back to the single-city, small-scale sci-fi of District 9, but keeps the super-sized ambition of Elysium in this story of a busted police droid who becomes the world's first sentient robot, thanks to nerd God Dev Patel. The result is frequently messy to the point of …
Superhero movie fans of a certain age may recall a moment at the end of Avengers: Infinity War when big baddie Thanos snapped his gauntleted fingers and so ended half of the universe’s living things — including folks like Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange. For one brief darkling moment, …
Shaky suspense film premised on a mousy accountant tumbling into an exclusive Manhattan sex club, anonymous one-nighters with uniformly beautiful career women: “It’s intimacy without intricacy.” Shakier as it goes. With Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Natasha Henstridge, and Charlotte Rampling; directed by Marcel Langenegger.
A fairy tale based on the true story of Eddie Edwards, a bespectacled, milk-swilling loser who sets out to win the 1988 Winter Olympics by refusing to let various unpleasant realities have any bearing on his pure, shatter-proof dream of simply competing in the Games. (A few samples: a naysaying …
Animation from the Aardman Studios, not claymation, like their signature Wallace and Gromit series (and not Nick Park directing), but instead compliant, acquiescent computer animation, and a compliantly, acquiescently crasser and cruder sense of humor to go along with it. (Traces of which began to creep into the feature-length Wallace …
Loopy science fiction in orbit around the dream of life and love everlasting. It unfolds in three different time zones, that of the Spanish Inquisition, the present day, and some indeterminate future inside a floating bubble in outer space. These three spheres are tied together by the presence in each …
The lighter-than-air unbroken take that opens the picture is director Jason Reitman’s way of demonstrating that he’s inventive enough to do something with his camera other than dangling it before his cast’s faces, which is precisely and unfortunately the main mode of expression he leans on through the rest of …
Director Michael Gracey sprinkles age-defying pixie dust all over song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman to produce a modern musical version of the PT Barnum story that transforms the Great American Flimflammer into Saint Circus, patron of the outcast and unwanted (but also profitable). It turns out that rounding up freaks and …
Director Michael Gracey sprinkles age-defying pixie dust all over song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman to produce a modern musical version of the PT Barnum story that transforms the Great American Flimflammer into Saint Circus, patron of the outcast and unwanted (but also profitable). It turns out that rounding up freaks and …
Computer-animated message movie about the pressure of conformity and (separate message) the plunder of nature, more specifically about a species of pop-song-singing penguins, into whose midst is born a "different," an aberrant, tap-dancing penguin (try, if you can, to put the pudgy trudging birds of March of the Penguins out …
Time-travel romance (or in the words of the whiz-kid Cupid who makes it happen, "a 4-D pretzel of kismetic inevitability") uniting a Type-A Manhattan career woman and a 19th-century British duke, who tumbles through a time-portal into the present day. The matching of Meg Ryan -- tossing around and peering …
Sincere story of answered prayers, mostly those of one Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), an ex-con who tastes mercy and tries to break free from his criminal past (he stole a loaf of bread). But the reformed man is pursued by Javert (Russell Crowe), a lawman who does not believe reform …
Director and co-writer James Mangold takes another stab at the adamantium-clawed superhero (after 2013’s Japanese noir The Wolverine), this time turning him into an ailing Western hero tasked with transporting a very special youngster to safety, and winds up making the best superhero movie in years. It helps that the …
Hugh Jackman has testicles where his Adam's apple should be. Richard Gere attempts to finger-bang a robot. Halle Berry dips a giant, unsheathed latex breast into a vat of guacamole. A cartoon kitty uses Elizabeth Banks's face to mark its territory. Movie 43 has gag potential, just not in the …