Post-apocalyptic computer cartoon by Shane Acker, set in a rusty, dusty, color-deprived future. “But life,” intones the rumbling narrator at the outset, “must go on,” even if only in the form of Lilliputian cloth-doll automatons hounded by Brobdingnagian mechanized cutlery. The realistic graphic style displays an endless devotion to tactility …
Why did Robert Rodriguez bother giving Rosa Salazar the CG Margaret Keane treatment when Hollywood already had tumescently-eyed young actresses like Anya Taylor-Joy or Bel Powley eager to report for duty? It’s Ex Machina for teenagers when a futuristic sawbones (Christoph Waltz in cruise control) fuses together the upper-torso of …
Ewan McGregor's directorial debut (he also stars) takes on nothing less than the fragile impermanence of the American Dream — dreams, after all, being things up from which you must ultimately wake — even going so far as to imply that the seeds of its destruction are sown even as …
Laundered biography of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and madman, John Forbes Nash, Jr. It's his madness, of course, and not his math, that makes him a viable screen subject, and director Ron Howard nurtures it with care. (And with more taste and restraint than are his custom.) But between the …
Serviceable action-adventure despite frequent interruptions for sermonettes on human rights and capitalist wrongs. The ripped-from-the-headlines story (yesterday's headlines: civil war in Sierra Leone, 1999) features the stock figures of a self-interested soldier of fortune, in league with slaughterous rebels and unscrupulous jewellers, an engagé foreign correspondent, and a hapless native …
The town liar and the town tease (representing the two halves of writer John Hughes's artistic temperament) spend the night locked inside a Target discount store: they "open up" to one another, roller-skate through the aisles, confront burglars. The setting gives Hughes something besides his audience to feel superior to. …
Jeepers! A sweet young somnambulist who communicates with insects is a pleasantly ridiculous idea. But other ideas to come along are just ridiculous, or quite unpleasantly ridiculous (e.g., the razor-wielding monkey), and despite some flickering signs of imagination (a girls' school situated in Richard Wagner's Swiss estate), one has the …
Dark, without a doubt, and dank, and steamy, and simultaneously futuristic and antiquated, and currently in the grip of pasty aliens who can reshape reality at will. (At the will of the scriptwriters, that is, not at their own.) An impressive production to a certain degree; an oppressive one to …
Yet another American remake of a Japanese horror film, but not, please, "just another." This atmospheric ghost story is more coherent, more cohesive, more cogent, than any Ring, any Grudge, any at all. It has a palpable theme, motherhood, and an evocative visual motif, water, and these have been worked …
The 1951 s-f classic refashioned into a tolerable time-passer on a fast track to oblivion. The urgent mobilization of an ad hoc team of scientists and the descent of a UFO on Central Park get the movie off to a gripping start, once past the prolonged opening credits and 1928 …
Motor “visionary” and motormouth Vince Vaughn hedges about asking lover Jennifer Connelly to marry him and instead invades the privacy of his chum and biz-partner Kevin James, whose wife (Winona Ryder) has secret heat with a stud muffin (Channing Tatum). Shallow Chicago images, fill-in music, male bonding via sports and …
As an explanation of romantic incompatibility, the catchphrase title is stunningly unilluminating, no matter which of its six words is stressed. (On screen, the third one stands out in green from the white of the rest, but that seems an arbitrary reading.) Satisfied with the what and incurious about the …
The story comes from an early-Fifties novel by Charles Williams, a dead ringer for any number of direct translations or approximate paraphrases of the works of James M. Cain: it's conventional, in other words, all the way, unless you can count having a wicked blonde and a demure brunette as …