Chronicle of the relationship of a young couple brought together at the office, a greeting-card company, through their shared taste for the music of the Smiths, among other things: “She likes Magritte and Hopper!” It is a maddeningly mixed experience, beginning (and continuing) with the two leads. A dimply Joseph …
A slice-of-life indie-looking movie about a peevish, aimless young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) facing cancer. Except it’s mostly not really about the young man’s struggle with cancer; it’s about his difficulties with girls (Mom included). Once you have that down, it’s easier to see why most of the film seems to …
And on the pitcher's mound, and in the batter's box, and on the base paths, aiding the California Angels on their drive to the pennant. The (lower-case) angels, excluding the maniacally mugging Christopher Lloyd, are impressive -- glowing, shimmering, streaking things in the sky. But only the very young and …
Affected debut film from Rian Johnson, writer and director, a test-tube species of teen noir, a hard-boiled high-school hybrid, featuring a junior detective, a fille fatale, a small-time Mr. Big, and a brawny henchboy. Opaquely plotted, arcanely scripted, darkly photographed, and reverberantly recorded, incomprehensible on several levels. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, …
Most guys pass out after a spirited round of lovemaking. Not this guy. Incapable of replacing fantasy with reality, porn addict Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) can’t wait to knock off a one-night stand and scurry to his computer for some quality alone time. It’s very hard to make a smart …
Single mom Flora (Eve Hewson) is at a loss about what to do with her rebellious teenage son, Max (Orén Kinlan). Encouraged by the police to find Max a hobby, Flora tries to occupy him with a beat-up acoustic guitar. With the help of a washed-up LA musician (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), …
Like Transformers, this enterprise — this franchise — has put the merchandising first, succeeding as opposed to preceding a line of toys. (Trademark Hasbro.) The movie, opening deflatingly in 17th-century France before advancing to a science-fictional “not too distant future,” is a live-action cartoon from the maker of The Mummy …
The film is an opportunity to see familiar faces in unfamiliar roles, most notably Natalie Portman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The story centers around TJ (played with vulnerable conviction by Devin Brochu), a diminutive high schooler struggling with the death of his mother. His grief management takes a drastic turn with …
A major snow job from fair-haired filmmaker Christopher Nolan, nominally a science-fiction thriller focussed on some sort of psychic superspy (Leonardo DiCaprio, fully earning the furrow between his brows), an expert in the gentle art of “extraction,” the stealing of conscious ideas from people when their guard is down in …
Respectable directing debut by the veteran screenwriter of The Interpreter, Minority Report, Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Malice, etc., Scott Frank. Suffering brain damage in a car wreck four years earlier, still having trouble with his memory and his "sequencing" and his "disinhibition," writing memos to himself like the protagonist …
A nifty idea botched by writer, director Rian Johnson's (Brick) unnecessarily dense plotting. (A calculatedly confusing storyline does not a good movie make.) Tickets should come with a road map (or a comic book adaptation) wrapped around them to help guide audiences through this. In a dystopian universe that resembles …
Spike Lee, redundantly setting the record straight about black participation in the Second World War, flatters himself on doing what Glory did for the Civil War, although without the inherent significance. The racial issues here feel tacked-on rather than built-in. Even so, if setting the record straight were an artistic …
Pedophilia (at the hands of a Little League coach who looks like Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid), male prostitution, unprotected sex and the inevitable V.D., in the "dumb-ass hick town" of Hutchinson, Kansas. Pretty rough in content, and pretty crude in style. The employment of phantom space aliens as …
A smartly built, chemically-enhanced Christmas story about growing up that you can't watch with the grown-ups — at least, not the ones who will get bothered by dick pics. The Night Before, which follows three friends (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and Anthony Mackie) as they wind down a tradition of …
It's a fun premise: take a practitioner of a universally loathed profession — New York City bike messengers, a group that treats traffic laws and those who follow them as little more than video game obstacles — and make him a hero, a guy whose Special Delivery can literally deliver …