Eddie Murphy vehicle, casting him in only two roles instead of his customary multiple, that of an anthropomorphic alien spaceship designed in the image of its captain, and that of the Lilliputian captain himself, sent to Earth from the dying planet Nil to retrieve a lime-sized orb that can drain …
Amiable, amusing anti-Americanism, in the form of a spoof of a WWII military training film, “declassified” under the Freedom of Information Act. Black-and-white Hollywood war films of the period, featuring the likes of William Holden, Alan Ladd, Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, and Ronald Reagan, some of whom have been obviously …
Gus Van Sant’s celebratory biopic on Harvey Milk, the gay-rights activist and San Francisco City Supervisor martyred by assassination in 1978. However useful as pep rally or memorial service, the film comes up short as drama, relying altogether too much on Position Statements, Slogans, Bromides, primarily through the protagonist’s stump …
Spike Lee, redundantly setting the record straight about black participation in the Second World War, flatters himself on doing what Glory did for the Civil War, although without the inherent significance. The racial issues here feel tacked-on rather than built-in. Even so, if setting the record straight were an artistic …
It begins (after a pre-credits throat-slit) with a promising setting, a burned-out department store of charred mannequins and hallucinogenic mirrors. It proceeds, however, into repellence, incoherence, and tedium. With Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart, and Jason Flemyng; directed by Alexandre Aja.
Stagy farce under the shadow of approaching war in the London of the Thirties. An unemployed and all but unemployable governess stumbles, through a chance of mistaken identity, into the temp job of social secretary for a visiting American chanteuse. The underemployed Frances McDormand seems a little miscast in the …
The journey to manhood of a young Scottish voyeur who stumbles upon a dead ringer for his dead Mummy, only nearer his own age — an uninvolving and unconvincing Oedipal kink fest. The cartoon credits sequence, jammed in tardily and abruptly, creates the false expectation of something larkish, something perhaps …
Less than a movie, a rah-rah sports documentary of ordinary but not extraordinary interest, just about adequate to fill up two hours of Sunday-afternoon television while waiting for the NBA playoffs. Through home video, TV broadcasts, and reminiscing talking heads, it traces the amateur career of LeBron James and his …
Improbable romance begins with a meet-cute fender bender in a supermarket parking lot: the woman’s a bedraggled forty-one-year-old Belgian with three kids and a straying husband; the man’s a divorced recovering-alcoholic Italophile twelve years her junior. (Her straggly strands of hair will get smoothed into place post-coitus.) The down-in-the-mouth Barbara …
Tomb of the Dragon Emperor — As if this “franchise” were not already junked up (and joked up) enough, it now adds Asian martial arts, Shangri-La, computer-animated yetis, a snowy avalanche in place of a sandstorm, a three-headed dragon, a terra-cotta army, and more. Will the thrills ever commence? With …
The first American film of Wong Kar-wai and the acting debut of pop singer Norah Jones proves to be an event less than momentous. The Hong Kong director has no doubt brought along a vision, confined as it largely is to café, diner, bar, and casino, dressed up with sufficient …
Watch the clip. Should tell you what you need to know.
A teenage Tom Cruise impersonator (Sean Faris) risks his pretty face in after-school Mixed Martial Arts, a self-labelled “quick learner” looking for retribution against the class bully. The filmmakers show their interest by continually changing the level of color saturation as if fiddling with the settings on a TV remote. …
Surf froth that features naturalistic male camaraderie, lyrical slo-mo aquatics, a laughable masturbation montage, no less laughable tragedy and triumph. Only the Aussie accents, and perhaps also the gay ingredient, restrict it from the multiplex and relegate it to the art house. Lachlan Buchanan, Xavier Samuel, Reshad Strik, Shane Jacobson, …