Coming-of-age comedy with airs. Jesse Eisenberg for all intents and purposes plays an extension of his pretentious youth in The Squid and the Whale, a virginal egghead (“I read poetry for pleasure sometimes”) obliged to take a minimum-wage summer job at a Pittsburgh amusement park while awaiting admission to the …
Third installment in the god-awful series about the preening and posturing vampire-hunter out of Marvel Comics. The previous installment at least had the curiosity of a slumming Guillermo del Toro at the helm. He, in the meantime, took his slumming elsewhere (Hellboy), leaving the scriptwriter of the first two installments, …
Gimmicky thriller whose single gimmick, if you have not been tipped off beforehand, dawns on you with a mounting sensation of hopelessness and resignation. Ryan Reynolds, in a word, is to be the only human being to appear on screen for the duration, entombed underground in a wooden coffin in …
It opens with a cute infant projectile-defecating into the mouth of his dad (Jason Batemen) and never gets better. Solid bourgeois lawyer Bateman and his crass bachelor chum (Ryan Reynolds) switch bodies, thanks to magic (a blackout!) while urinating into a public fountain. That allows the horndog to vulgarize Bateman's …
An anti-superhero movie (or maybe a super-antihero movie) that might have worked if it had the courage of its lack of convictions. That is to say, it starts out, story-wise, with a messed up mercenary named Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), except he mostly just jokes about being messed up, and …
Director David Leitch and star Ryan Reynolds know why you’re here: to hear the merc with a mouth revel in smug-smart impieties (about other characters, about superhero movies, about narrative in general, ad infinitum but not quite ad nauseam) and to watch him kick ass despite enduring mind-blowing (bone-breaking, flesh-rending, …
Director David Leitch and star Ryan Reynolds know why you’re here: to hear the merc with a mouth revel in smug-smart impieties (about other characters, about superhero movies, about narrative in general, ad infinitum but not quite ad nauseam) and to watch him kick ass despite enduring mind-blowing (bone-breaking, flesh-rending, …
Superhero movie fans of a certain age may recall a moment at the end of Avengers: Infinity War when big baddie Thanos snapped his gauntleted fingers and so ended half of the universe’s living things — including folks like Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange. For one brief darkling moment, …
A little girl’s first Sex Education class raises questions in her mind about where she came from, and raises the word “penis” repeatedly to her lips. The answers take the form of a “mystery love story” in which her father recounts in flashback his entanglement with the three leading ladies …
Ryan Reynolds’s neat ’n’ tidy physique, plunked down into a garish and untidy superhero movie. The story makes much of the character’s mythological underpinnings, then chucks ’em for the sake of Daddy issues and growing up. Oh, and there’s a girl. But the Big Bad Thing that threatens the universe …
Ryan Reynolds is very good at layering a hard candy shell of wisecracks over a gooey caramel center of emotion. Samuel L. Jackson is very good at snapping between glowering menace and cackling affability. And director Patrick Hughes is very good at letting the viewer know he’s hip to his …
Unmotivated remake of the 1979 spy spoof of the same name: the mild-mannered dentist who gets ensnared in the psychopathic cloak-and-daggery of his daughter's future father-in-law is no longer a dentist but a podiatrist (fun-NY), though the heavy-breathing espionage maneuvers are barely recognizable anymore as comedy. You might have thought …
Broad comedy about a high-school fatso who slims down to become a callous Casanova in adulthood. Unlike him, the humor never slims down, remains broad throughout; heavy; clumsy; lazy. With Ryan Reynolds, Amy Smart, Anna Faris, and Chris Klein; directed by Roger Kumble.