The latest overinflated stretch of chase scenes stitched together to fabricate a feature from Michael Bay runs almost an hour longer than the 80 minute Danish thriller of the same name upon which it was based. Unable to get satisfaction from the VA, war hero Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) …
Here's fulfillment of any desire for a homosexual cowboy movie, superseding all those inadmissible innuendos as to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the Cisco Kid and Pancho, et al. It fills out and plumps up a sketchy, skinny, yet ample short story by E. Annie …
Jim Sheridan’s Hollywood do-over of Susanne Bier’s Danish original is a wartime soap opera served up as kitchen-sink realism, photographed by Frederick Elmes with a clear and cold albeit clichéd eye for Middle American mundanity. The Good Brother (Tobey Maguire) is off to war in Afghanistan, currently the Good War, …
Doomsday science fiction -- emphasis, as is only fit and proper, on fiction at the expense of science -- about how global warming brings on a new Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, and in consequence a southward migration that reverses the flow of illegals across the Mexican border. (That …
When it comes to overstrung, antisocial characters, Jake Gyllenhaal sure knows how to pick (and breathe new life into) them. We all grieve in our own way, and after surviving a car crash that claims the life of his wife, Davis Mitchell (Gyllenhaal), a beastly investment banker at the top …
Dark comedy, photographically as much as temperamentally, about a disturbed adolescent (Jake Gyllenhaal of October Sky) who has an imaginary friend in a demonic bunny suit giving him mischief-making orders. (The bunny's end-of-the-world forecast, however, carries little weight when the action is set in the thick of Dukakis's run for …
David Ayer, the screenwriter behind Training Day and Dark Blue, sets out to make his Life and Times of a Police Officer in South Central, complete with opening manifesto in voiceover. ("If you cut me, I bleed.") But he winds up with Cops for the younger generation. (Cops Jr.? Copz?) …
The opening text lets you know that prior to 1996, no one had died during a commercial expedition to the world's highest peak. So now you know what's coming. The first part of Baltasar Kormakur's version of the events recounted in John Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air serves to introduce …
The opening text lets you know that prior to 1996, no one had died during a commercial expedition to the world's highest peak. So now you know what's coming. The first part of Baltasar Kormakur's version of the events recounted in John Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air serves to introduce …
Condescending gaze at low-rent Texans, principally the employees of a discount department store named Retail Rodeo. (A Southern accent continues to be condescension's favorite weapon.) A useful proving ground, nonetheless, for the unspoiled talent of Jennifer Aniston, underplaying the discontented wife of a pothead housepainter and the secret lover of …
Remember the first First Blood movie? You know, the one in which America was shown to be rotten for how it treated its returning vets, but hot damn, America sure did produce some badass military heroes like John Rambo. This is a bit like that: America signed up a whole …
Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal play two attractive people who enjoy having sex. But it turns out that while both are nice to look at, neither is particularly appealing. She’s sick and getting sicker, coping with the pain by diagnosing everyone else. He’s an aspiration-addled jerk who’s never said “I …
Women's-issues forum on body image, sexuality, maternal instinct, career, the whole can of worms. Issues, it would be fair to say, in search of a movie, if not in search of characters. Brenda Blethyn is the middle-aged mother whose two biological daughters have flown the nest, though not as far …