Designed for the perfect fool. Apparently built backwards from its final Surprise Twist, it looks until then to be a deluxe edition of a Lifetime Original, directed by the reputable James Foley (At Close Range, Glengarry Glen Ross, among other gravities), with an Oscar-winning star (the perennially underemployed Halle Berry) …
Olfactory fable about an 18th-century freak of nature, "born with a talent that made him unique among mankind," namely the world's most sensitive nose, to go along with a yearning to recapture the aromatic essence of the young virgin he had once killed by accident -- even if, in order …
Cartoon recap of the comic-strip memoir by Marjane Satrapi, covering her childhood in Iran under (and then out from under) the Shah, her adolescence in Austria to escape the strictures of the Islamic Revolution, her return to her homeland as a depressed and medicated young woman, then a bride, then …
And wit's end. Part III is an endurance test for sure, a turbid, turgid, two-and-three-quarter-hour kiddie movie (an added quarter-hour per sequel), which depends upon your memorization of the earlier episodes to help you figure out what the hell is going on. It's enough to drive a man, possibly even …
Time-tripping thriller wherein a normal, average, earthbound housewife and mother, whose parenting skills seem to consist solely of addressing her two daughters as "Baby," wakes up on alternate days to find that her husband is dead, not yet dead, again dead, not yet dead, and so forth. "Something," she intuits, …
Pierre Salvadori’s Gallic romantic comedy tarries a long time in mercenary amorality before succumbing, not too persuasively, to sentiment. Well-paced all the way, well-constructed most of the way, very well-played by stick-thin Audrey Tautou and liquid-eyed Gad Elmaleh, and scrumptiously photographed on the Côte d’Azur.
Sports pep fest, or pap fest, centered around the new employee at the obsolete rec center, a former college athlete who whips the young neighborhood layabouts into a competitive swim team, and rewrites the acronym PDR from Philadelphia Department of Recreation to "Pride, Determination, Resilience." Terrence Howard, playing a real …
The overhanging question is whether a two-time Academy Award-winning actress, Hilary Swank, can lighten herself into the thespian weight-class of a Sandra Bullock or a Kate Hudson. The answer seems to be no, not when the director and co-writer, Richard LaGravenese, who directed her also in Freedom Writers, is intent …
Disney computer-animated celebration of "differentness," in specific a Gallic rodent who cultivates fine taste, reads books, likes to cook, walks funny, and runs afoul of his garbage-wallowing kin. (Do ask, do tell!) Among the humans, there's some deft caricature of French facial types, a bit rodenty themselves -- especially the …
A miracle-debunker from LSU struggles to explain the sequence of Old Testament plagues visited upon a Bayou backwater called Haven. A sense of awe never arises, only a sense of awful. Hilary Swank and Idris Elba excepted and absolved. With David Morrissey, Stephen Rea, and AnnaSophia Robb; directed by Stephen …
High-def video pseudodocumentary, or if you prefer, humorless mockumentary, about some Marines in Samarra (John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra is de rigueur reading for one of them) who, in the line of duty, mow down a pregnant Muslim en route to the delivery room, and, in their leisure hours, rape …
Adam Sandler drama, maybe "dramedy," definitely not comedy, stretching the comedian in the role of a 9/11 widower with PTSD, an impudent excuse for him to act like a Problem Child, hanging his Dylan-haired head, ignoring direct questions, immersing himself in video games, hiding inside his headphones, banging on a …
The title alludes to the U.S. policy of "extraordinary rendition" (hatched under the Clinton administration, we're informed, just to dirty the hands on both sides of the aisle, but not abused until the Bush administration), which allows for terror suspects to be whisked away in secrecy, without due process, to …
Big-screen blowup of Comedy Central's latter-day Keystone Kops, in an ill-fitting mockumentary format. The cheap, bleached, digital image is fully worthy of the crude humor. With Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Niecy Nash, Cedric Yarbrough, Carlos Alazraqui, Mary Birdsong, Nick Swardson, Paul Rudd, and an unbilled …