The graduating class of Lake Howell High meets for its ten-year reunion. The student body appears to have been created in a petri dish: Hitler couldn't have engineered a more physically unblemished graduating class. In addition to the Tatums (Channing and Jenna Dewan), there's Ari Graynor, Justin Long, Max Minghella, …
Conservative thinking-type person Dinesh D'Souza tries to unravel the mystery of Obama the President by investigating Obama the man — or rather, Obama the son of his anticolonial father. The film gets off to an interesting start: D'Souza is an ingratiating investigator, and he pays a fair amount of attention …
An “update” to the ’80s television series, this time involving two high school polarities (the dumb jock and the smart geek) who are recruited for an undercover assignment to pose as high school students and infiltrate the supplier of a new “super drug.” The film is a pinball machine: loud, …
A couple’s relationship is put to the test when her adorable relatives decide to pay a visit. Never heard that one before, probably because I gave up on network sitcoms decades ago. Julie Delpy’s follow up to 2 Days in Paris is so sickeningly sweet, theater chains will want to …
Bernard Rose's latest adventure in adapting Tolstoy for the screen takes the let's-compare-generations story "Two Hussars" and sends it to Hollywood. Dad was a famous director; now the son is taking a crack at the game. And just to add a frisson of something something to the pot, the older …
Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) uses Max Ophüls’s dazzling La Ronde as a blueprint for this cluttered globe-hopping melodrama featuring an all-star international cast in various stages of grief and infidelity. The set-up is exquisite: the use of architecture and highly reflective surfaces function as serviceable tributes …
The seventh installment in what could very well be television’s first reality show. In 1964, Paul Almond began filming a group of fourteen seven-year-old British schoolkids. The directorial reins were later handed to Michael Apted, who has since gone back at regular seven-year intervals to document the group's growth. Inspired …
A pushcart war erupts in a Paraguyan marketplace after Victor, a 17-year-old delivery boy played by young Baba Booey lookalike Celso Franco, unwittingly agrees to transport a passel of crates containing the remains of a disassembled kidnap victim. What starts with a pulse-pounding foot-chase soon gives way to a stock …
Perhaps surprisingly, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is not just a showcase for director Timur Bekmambetov's relentless and varied barrage of combat-related special effects. (This is one of those films where 3-D really makes a difference, perhaps especially in its treatment of vampire eyes. We're a long way from Twilight's red …
The Navy granted “filmmakers” Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh permission to play with their toys, and the result is a gung-ho recruitment film that’s as incompetently acted and slapped together as it is propaganda. If the two former stuntmen could direct as well as they fight, the film would kill. …
A reasonably engrossing documentary portrait of behavioral researcher Victor DeNoble, the first person to blow the whistle on the American tobacco industry’s efforts to manufacture a “maximally addictive” cigarette. Kudos to director Charles Evans Jr. for shying away from scare-tactic closeups of diseased lungs, but his reliance on rudimentary animation …
Documentary chronicles the experiences of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei.
Glenn Close, looking quite small, revives a role she did to off-Broadway acclaim 30 years earlier. Albert, a parched, remote, miserly, desexed “male” butler, is really a woman. His life at a Dublin hotel is mediocre, but Close achieves a sad, stricken pathos. She almost loses the film to Janet …
Alex Cross is a detective whose powers of deduction border on the clairvoyant; he can look at your shirt and tell you what you're having for dinner tomorrow night. But the third big-screen outing for novelist James Patterson's celebrated Washington D.C. come solver will probably be best remembered as a …