The peak adventures, climactic decisions, and profound self-revelations of an inconceivable quartet of bosom buddies (four diverse types, from class prez to hot-rod hood, who would not utter two words to one another throughout four years of high school) are compressed into one long and lively night, placed vaguely at …
The peak adventures, climactic decisions, and profound self-revelations of an inconceivable quartet of bosom buddies (four diverse types, from class prez to hot-rod hood, who would not utter two words to one another throughout four years of high school) are compressed into one long and lively night, placed vaguely at …
Although the Dan Brown novel was written before The Da Vinci Code, the screen adaptation of it (directed again by Ron Howard) takes care to situate itself afterwards with a reference or two to the returning hero’s “recent involvement with, shall we say, Church mysteries” and his consequent strained relations …
Some gorgeous images of fire, swirling and undulating with almost a shifting-sand, simmering-pot sort of subtlety. Also some standard fireball images of the kind you get when any One-Man Army launches a bazooka rocket into the opposition's ammo dump. And while the finale socks you with spectacular sights at approximately …
A long time ago, there was a band that became very popular, thanks in part to their live performances. This is a found-footage compilation about that band by director Ron Howard.
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 …
Clint Eastwood was due for a dud, and this stacks up as his flattest film, his stumpiest film, since Blood Work, bookending his hot streak of Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and the Second World War diptych, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Time once again to …
The story of heavyweight boxer James J. Braddock, the Bulldog of Bergen, the Pride of New Jersey, a working-class hero for real. It's something of a puzzle why his story had not been told on screen before, seeing as how we have it on the authority of Damon Runyon, who …
Science fiction, but only by the technicality of containing several characters who are said to be aliens. They could as easily have been somebody's fairy godparents or genies from a bottle or the sort of lubricious Cupids who used to get things going in Thorne Smith's fantasy novels of the …
Nonsensical retelling of the Dan Brown best-seller, premised on "the greatest cover-up in human history," namely the murderously guarded secret that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene married and multiplied. (The additional premise that the disclosure of the secret would have the immediate effect of liberating the oppressed worldwide and bringing …
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 …
A major ouch. The kiddie-lit holiday homily — "Maybe Christmas doesn't come from a store./ Maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more" — illustrated in theme-park sets and costumes (rodenty snouts on all the citizens of Whoville save the little heroine, Taylor Momsen, and Christine Baranski). Jim Carrey, as …
The town sheriff's ne'er-do-well son, a jug-eared redhead, swipes the winning Mustang from a stock-car racetrack -- simply to appease the whim of an All-American blonde bitch in white hotpants and knee-high boots -- and takes off on a day-long joyride with a Keystone Kop posse in hot pursuit. Charles …
The movie equivalent of the kind of novel that no self-respecting literary critic would condescend to notice: one of those sweeping, sprawling, flag-waving, button-popping, bodice-ripping, lusty, busty historical romances that have "best-seller" written literally all over them — all over their paperback covers at any rate, in close proximity to …