For his directorial debut, skilled deadpanner Jason Bateman (Horrible Bosses, Identity Thief) goes full sad clown. Here is my unalloyed pain; I dare you to laugh. Because nothing is funnier than someone else's suffering, right? To help matters, his character - a 40-year-old proofreader who has found a way to …
New Age relationship counseling in a tropical paradise, a stale, routinized, loveless marital comedy. With Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Jason Bateman, Malin Akerman, Kristin Davis, Kristen Bell, Faizon Love, Kali Hawk, and Jean Reno; directed by Peter Billingsley.
Mike Judge, the Office Space man, never mind the Beavis and Butt-head man, goes blue-collar at a food flavoring factory, where his fund of observations of workers on the job proves skimpier. The owner and central character comes close to a complete cipher, although Jason Bateman’s flat-tire facial expressions serve …
Why should parents sacrifice their art by having children when it’s just as easy to incorporate the kids into the act as involuntary performance artists? Jason Bateman stars in and directs this blackish comedy about a suffocating couple (Christoper Walken and Maryann Plunkett), whose guerilla-style exercises in video tomfoolery made …
A down on his luck publicist gets his lucky break when he discovers a man recently released from a mental health facility looks just like a method actor who refuses to leave his trailer. With the help of a powerful producer, the publicist helps the man become a huge star, …
From John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the team that crapped out the saddening remake of Vacation, comes something a bit more tolerable. As the competitive couple whose weekly game-playing ritual turns deadly after an even more cutthroat participant brings a corpse to the party, Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman …
For his directorial debut, Joel Edgerton weaves a subversive edge-of-your-seat suspenser that will knot stomachs tighter than a sack of White Castle hamburgers. Jason Bateman (assuredly cast against type as an arrogant Republican) and Rebecca Hall play a presumedly happily married couple who are hoping for a baby to make …
Two ideas prevail. The first may be summed up in the term “anti-superhero,” or if you prefer it, “super-antihero.” The hero, that is to say, possesses the full complement of comic-book superpowers, yet he boozes round the clock, goes days without shaving, dresses like a slob if not a bum …
Three regular guys decide to kill their three horrible bosses; hijinks ensue. There are hints of the kind of gleeful malice (on both sides of the employee-employer divide) that could make this kind of story into a wicked black comedy — Jennifer Aniston has the most fun of anyone as …
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 …
Don’t blame the Apatow connection for this one. Director Seth Gordon (Four Christmases, Horrible Bosses) steals a few chapters from the John Hughes playbook as he tries in vain to transform Melissa McCarthy into this generation's John Candy. Playing an alcoholic sociopath in a Bozo fright wig, she uses the …
High-concept comedy with and from Ricky Gervais, co-writing and co-directing with Matthew Robinson. It's set in an alternative universe where everyone by nature tells the brutal truth (even advertisers: "Pepsi, When They Don't Have Coke"), until the brutalized short portly hero, unable to make his rent, makes an evolutionary leap …
A remedial history lesson on U.S. -Saudi relations, behind the opening credits, introduces a hypothetical massacre of a hundred-plus American citizens at an oil-company picnic, the handiwork of an "Osama wannabe." Speedily onto the scene -- where were they on 9/11? -- comes an FBI response team (Jamie Foxx, the …