Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are Beautiful People in Love who just want to be together, darn it. But The Chairman (i.e., God) has other plans — or rather, The Plan. So the Chairman dispatches his agents (including Terence Stamp and Mad Men’s John Slattery) to keep the lovers apart. …
From the Cormac McCarthy novel, a post-WWII cowboy movie, not quite a purebred Western, a little like The Hi-Lo Country. A little (including in that scope the scrumptious Penelope Cruz), but not a lot. And it is, whatever its constitution, more than director Billy Bob Thornton can chew. The opening …
Contemporary war story about a U.S. Navy flier downed in the demilitarized zone of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the posse of Serbs hot on his heels, and the rescue effort thwarted by a NATO busybody of divided loyalties. (Opportunity, there, to reprise the wistful Vietnam refrain about taking the gloves off and untying …
Matt Damon narrates a documentary history of the Boston Marathon.
Those who had been backing Doug Liman as a vital new maverick director (Swingers, Go) will have their work cut out for them on this one, a middle-of-the-road adaptation of the Robert Ludlum best-seller about an amnesiac spy, previously made as a two-part TV miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn …
The Bourne sequel. Admittedly, the basic premise of an amnesiac spy who remembers none of his assignments but all of his training is intrinsically ridiculous, internally illogical. (His unusual handicap -- groping along a fogbound Memory Lane -- never seems to slow him down, never lets his scheming adversaries get …
The Bourne absurdum. It isn't just that Part III in the adventures of the amnesiac superspy adds more ridiculousness. It's that, at these lengths, the ridiculousness multiplies exponentially. More ridiculousness, that is, and more and more ridiculous. (The sentimental soft spots found in Parts I and II are here concentrated …
None other than Jacob and Wilhelm, not yet world-famous folklorists, merely ghostbusting con men, whose ruses are not state-of-the-art magic circa the early 19th Century, but rather state-of-the-art FX circa the 21st. When they are recruited by the occupying French army, however, to investigate a case of missing children (a …
An adaptation of the "unauthorized autobiography" of Chuck Barris, TV game-show producer -- The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, et al. -- and moonlighting CIA hit man. Says him. We meet the protagonist (played with maximum smarm and supreme sleaze by Sam Rockwell) holed up, Manson-haired, naked, close to catatonic, …
A global plague quickly dispatches Gwyneth Paltrow, but Marion Cotillard and Kate Winslet carry on the fight as noble doctors. Lawrence Fishburne is the solemn voice of humane science, like Dennis Haysbert intoning for Allstate Insurance. Steven Soderbergh directed with brisk, methodical care for the big vista and small details, …
Martin Scorsese's career-changing turn to the overblown epic, a turn marked by Casino, would seem to be a course difficult to reverse. Kundun ... Gangs of New York ... The Aviator.... And now even a trashy light diversion, adapted from an average-length Hong Kong action film, will get dragged out …
Martin Scorsese's career-changing turn to the overblown epic, a turn marked by Casino, would seem to be a course difficult to reverse. Kundun ... Gangs of New York ... The Aviator.... And now even a trashy light diversion, adapted from an average-length Hong Kong action film, will get dragged out …
Filmmaker Kevin Smith shows some nerve, though maybe not as much of it as he showed in Chasing Amy. Where, in the mature-adult-relationship stuff of that previous film, he took a chance on alienating the affections of his callow followers from Clerks and Mallrats (an already dwindling band), he takes …
Director and co-writer Alexander Payne gets Matt Damon to go full Everyman as Paul Safranek, a middle-aged, lower-middle-class white guy who’s rightly worried about the future: the world’s, sure, but mostly his own, which looks pretty bleak, at least by American Dream standards. When he starts hearing about the economic …