Take away the stupidly expensive (and sometimes just stupid, or overdone, or overlong) visual effects, take away the sad necessity of hitching your story to a familiar wagon (oh, look, the first installment in this particular reboot of an established property made over a billion dollars!), take away the Disneyfied …
For anyone who heretofore hadn't encountered the character on HBO, Borat Sagdiyev will need an introduction. He is one of the personas of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen on Da Ali G Show, a Kazakh TV reporter dapperly dressed in a dove-gray suit, bristlingly mustachioed, blissfully sexist, superstitiously anti-Semitic, and …
Like its predecessor, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is an unremitting wellspring of laughs, many refreshingly disgraceful. As with everything Cohen signs his name to, the artist’s mind may be in the gutter, but his moral compass generally points due north. Throwaway gags brought gales of giggles — the Johnny the Monkey/lipstick …
I’ve seen it twice and comparisons to the impossible-to-top Borat are unfair. If a comedy is to be judged strictly on the amount of laughs generated, this cheese is gleeful to stand alone in praise of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest fountain of offal. With few bones left for the Jackass …
A reteaming of the star and director of Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles respectively, to peddle the same or a similar shtick in a different persona: a different funny accent, different funny wardrobe, different funny hairdo. The shtick, should you need to be reminded, is to inflict the …
Sacha Baron Cohen plays “Admiral-General” Aladeen, the brutal dictator of a fictional Middle Eastern country who finds himself stranded in Manhattan after a case of mistaken identity. From the outset, much of the humor relies on sequences of shtick that outlast their wit. Behind the guise of political satire, the …
Johnny Knoxville did it better. A career military nutjob (Robert De Niro) observes his future granddaughter-in-law texting at his wife’s funeral and decides a Hangover-style road trip is just what his uptight grandson (Zac Efron) needs to derail the pending nuptials. The script rat-a-tats like a gatling gun misfiring one …
Martin Scorsese goes to town (Paris) with CGI effects and 3-D and the fantasy story from Brian Selznick’s book about Parisian orphan Hugo Cabret. Asa Butterfield is Hugo, maintaining the clocks in a train depot in 1930. Lonely, brilliant, and cute, he wins the friendship of a girl (delightful Clöe …
Sincere story of answered prayers, mostly those of one Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), an ex-con who tastes mercy and tries to break free from his criminal past (he stole a loaf of bread). But the reformed man is pursued by Javert (Russell Crowe), a lawman who does not believe reform …
The light-in-the-loafers cartoon lion, a self-professed “protégé of Fosse and Robbins,” accidentally finds his way, along with the zebra, the hippo, and the giraffe, back to his ancestral home, where he proves to be an embarrassment to his kingly father: “Lions don’t dance.” The not so subtle pleas for diversity …
Will Ferrell vehicle, on the NASCAR circuit, goes too far, too fast, too often, but the excesses are usually easygoing (the bratty brothers' response to the news of their parents' divorce: "Yeah! Two Christmases!"), and the nonstop product plugging is satirically motivated (i.e., dramatically justified), and John C. Reilly and …