With a sprinkle of Wishing Dust, the disaffected young heroine, on her first day of teenhood, is spirited into her future life as a "thirty and flirty and thriving" editor of her favorite fashion magazine, Poise. Yet she's still thirteen in her head, with none of the knowledge, the experience, …
Inflated remake of the Robert Penn Warren Pulitzer-winner, with the pseudonymous "Willie Stark" as Louisiana governor Huey Long, and Oscar-winner Sean Penn as Oscar-winner Broderick Crawford. Penn, sporting a Trotskyite haircut as the backwater populist politician ("Ain't nobody ever helped a hick 'cept a hick hisself"), speaks in an accent …
A labor of love on the part of über-geek director Joss Whedon, if not necessarily a labor of art. The genius here shows not in the story (magic geegaw!), nor in the performances (Mark Ruffalo’s embittered Bruce Banner/Hulk excepted), but in Whedon’s ability to juggle six disparate comic-book heroes while …
A divorced record exec (Mark Ruffalo), inundated with booze and bombarded by mediocrity, stumbles upon an open mic night in time to catch a fetching singer-songwriter (Keira Knightley) with a sensational “little voice” who he instantly signs. The gimmick: they’ll record an album on the fly at various locations across …
Serious-minded science fiction, allegorical as you like, about an epidemic of “the white sickness,” a new form of sightlessness that plunges the sufferer into blinding light instead of traditional darkness. We experience this from the point of view, so to speak, of several dozen people left to their own devices …
Self-admiring con artistry that sets the ideal of the “perfect con” as one where everyone involved gets what he wants. If that includes the wary viewer, the ideal is missed by miles. With Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi, Robbie Coltrane, and Maximilian Schell; written and directed by …
Radical nostalgia for a time when anti-war sentiment was working itself up to “the Second American Revolution.” (A long way from the current sentiment against the war in Iraq.) The Democratic National Convention of 1968 and the subsequent trial of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, et al., …
Director Michael Mann situates Tom Cruise under a silver-fox hair dye in the back seat of a taxi cab crowned by an ad for Bacardi Silver. That matching-color fashion statement says a lot about this sleek, cool, preening, glamorous thriller in the Mann-ly manner (Thief, Manhunter, Heat, not to forget …
A hedged bet, marital comedy cum action thriller, with a “boring” New Jersey couple enlivening their stale marriage by getting themselves mistaken for high-stakes blackmailers. Tina Fey will never in her lifetime use up the eternal gratitude she earned for her role in the 2008 presidential campaign (the faux Palin), …
Charlie Kaufman, scriptwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, drills a new tunnel into his favorite fictional locale, the human brain, this time by way of the science-fictional device of an illicit memory-erasure service called Lacuna, Inc. ("Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage, but …
The goal is an Olympic gold medal in wrestling, but the real grappling goes on between two families: the Schultzes (brothers Dave and Mark) and the DuPonts (mother Jean and son John). Yes, those DuPonts. Poor John (Steve Carrell in a fake schnozz) is a crazily wealthy nothing of a …
The biggest problem here is right there in the title, taken from a little girl's cutesy term for her bipolar father's condition: it pretties up the nightmare. Writer-director Maya Forbes wants you to feel like you're being shown the difficult truth of a family wracked by mental illness. But the …
Disappointing for a Jane Campion film, but a cut above the general run, nonetheless. An erotic thriller by type, adapted from a best-seller by Susanna Moore, it leaves something to be desired in both potential areas of excitation. Perhaps surprisingly (for Campion, again), the woman-in-peril plot looks about as lowbrow …
Unremittingly cute, and on a couple of occasions actually funny, this supernatural romantic comedy adds a new wrinkle to the conventional ghost story, and new rules (anything goes) into the bargain. The new wrinkle is that the previous tenant who haunts a breathtaking San Francisco apartment as an intermittent apparition, …
Carefully drawn family portrait in a rough, grainy, indifferent image, a “nontraditional” family let’s swiftly say: two lesbian “Moms” or “Momses” with a biological son and daughter old enough to be curious as to the identity of their sperm-donor dad, who turns out to be a health-food restaurateur and organic …