A heaping helping of period pleasure from director David O. Russell. Irving Rosenfeld (a gutty Christian Bale, resplendent in combover and ascot) is a '70s Jay Gatsby without the class anxiety, a man comfortable with the notion that everybody is, like him, working the con — getting along by lying …
"Hello, world; it's nice to meet you." Earth from space. Narrated by Jennifer Lawrence.
The movie should be chewing logs of wild comedy, but director Jody Foster prefers to paddle in the pond of earnest family drama. Haggard, driven Mel Gibson is a depressed toy executive whose saving alter-ego is the fuzzy hand-puppet of a beaver. Through it he is able to speak again, …
Directorial debut of the screenwriter of Babel, 21Grams, Amores Perros, Guillermo Arriaga, firm in the belief that no story is so hokey it can't be saved by being fractured, shattered, reassembled out of order. (The connection between two widely separated time zones would have been easier to make if not …
Jennifer Lawrence stars as a soldier whose tour of Afghanistan resulted in a traumatic brain injury. Returning home, she faces countless struggles as she tries to adapt back into to a life that never was all that normal, with the help of a stranger-turned friend played by Brian Tyree Henry. …
Dustin Hoffman said it in Stranger than Fiction: if you’re in a tragedy, you die; if you’re in a comedy, you get married. Viewers will have to decide for themselves exactly what sort of story they are getting from director and co-writer Pawel Pawlikowski’s handsome, gorgeous, heartbreaking, heart-thumping romance. Handsome: …
A young woman trains as a warrior in the first installment of a series set in a dystopian future, eventually finding herself in conflict with the sinister Powers that Be. Divergent fairly begs to be measured against the Hunger Games series, right down to the sibilant similitude of the heroines' …
Because this is what you do when you've made it as an actress these days, Jennifer Lawrence dons a tank top and stars in a horror film.
In the future, rebel districts are punished by the Reaping: every year they have to send a couple of teenagers to the Capitol. There, the kiddies fight to the death in a regulated, televised competition. Sloppily directed by Gary Ross, it’s more games than hunger and more a comment on …
In the future, rebel districts are punished by the Reaping: every year they have to send a couple of teenagers to the Capitol. There, the kiddies fight to the death in a regulated, televised competition. Sloppily directed by Gary Ross, it’s more games than hunger and more a comment on …
Katniss Everdeen won her murder tournament in The Hunger Games. Now she has to deal with the aftermath. Once again, the best reason for seeing a Hunger Games movie is star Jennifer Lawrence, whose protean, Old Hollywood visage brings to mind the line about how They Had Faces Then. And …
For a film about rebelling against the oppressive overlords who just want to drain your precious resources for their own benefit, it's awfully greedy with your time and treasure. You know, because, in an effort to make two movies from one very popular book, they've padded out this installment — …
After the forced histrionics of Part 1, it’s nice to see star Jennifer Lawrence being allowed to quiet down and act again. But the story still feels stretched, a countdown that slows as it approaches zero hour. The various Districts, long divided and conquered by the Capitol, have united behind …
More like Jack Creaker, amirite? Yeah, it’s a lousy joke, but then, it’s a lousy movie, and lousy or not, it’s a propos: dated, silly, and more than a little bit cheap. Tom Cruise returns to his embodiment of a mid-century American masculine fantasy: an ex-military superman who’s gotta ramble, …
Writer-director David O. Russell serves notice that there have always been multi-generational stories of strong women who figure out how to make their way in a so-called man’s world — on television soap operas. He even helpfully opens this (based-on-a-true) story of one woman’s (Jennifer Lawrence) struggle to become the …