Michael Shannon grunts and groans his way through a lethargic private-eye case as a gin-soaked gumshoe tailing, for reasons unknown, a middle-aged bald man and a Mexican boy from Chicago to Los Angeles. Comfortless low-budget indie written and directed by Noah Buschel. With Amy Ryan, Frank Wood, Linda Emond, Margaret …
Machine-made cartoon from DreamWorks, credited to co-directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon. It posits a secret government quarantine of benign monsters modelled on such Fifties archetypes as the Blob, the four-fifths-human Fly (except now a Cockroach), Mothra, the 50-Foot Woman (a girl-power placebo), and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. …
Speculation on the anomie of the self-knowing human clone, a reasonable stand-in for the self-knowing human. Written and directed by the British team of Nathan Parker and Duncan Jones respectively, it’s a nice little piece of short-story-sized science fiction freighted with reminders of 2001 — some of Silent Running as …
The modern icon of civil disobedience, the Thoreau of the Vietnam era, tells his story on screen — as a talking head and in voice-over — after telling it already on the page and on audio CD. (The story as synopsized by Richard Nixon: “Son-of-a-bitching thief is made a national …
From the maker of the South Korean monster movie, The Host, Joon-ho Bong. This time he does without a monster, as well as without such staples of the regional cinema as ghosts, gore, and martial arts. He delivers instead a straightforward detective story about a Mommie Fearless who launches her …
Not a sequel to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but a spawn nevertheless, with a slimmed-down Nia Vardalos (smacked with an insult of “skinny”) wooed by another hirsute hunk, Alexis Georgoulis, a Greek bus driver who plays Zorba to the repressed heroine, a fun-loathing tour guide to a motley group …
The coming-of-age of George Hamilton (the septuagenarian executive co-producer), in the guise of dark-haired but short-nosed Logan Lerman, installed behind the wheel of a new El Dorado, to ferry his precociously out-and-proud gay brother (Mark Rendall) and his addlepated Southern-belle mother (Renée Zellweger, speaking under her breathy breath, her mouth …
An eleven-year-old girl,”engineered” in a petri dish to be a genetic match for her leukemic older sister, sues her parents for “medical emancipation” – a recipe for a Lifetime Channel movie, with an extra cup of butter in Caleb Deschanel’s lighting. Outside of the never-say-die mother, the drama is designed …
Lifeless bisexual love triangle out of a Michael Chabon novel. The musty bookishness begins with the nagging first-person narration of a good-looking dullard (“After you’ve thrown up in the topiary and rinsed your mouth out with cheap vodka, you really don’t want to talk to anybody”), but it continues even …
Although movies had been set in Minnesota before Fargo (notwithstanding its misleading North Dakota title), movies as disparate as The Farmer’s Daughter, The Heartbreak Kid, Purple Rain, Grumpy Old Men, it was the Coen brothers who converted that territory into grist for the mill. (On the laugh meter, Wisconsin and …
Second installment in “The Twilight Saga” from the best-selling girls’ books by Stephenie Meyer, a vampire movie sprinkled with pop songs, long and slow and slack. (New director: Chris Weitz.) Whatever may be the attributes that make this franchise a “phenomenon,” they seem to ensure that it will also have …
Paris, Je T'Aime crosses the pond. A multi-director box on bonbons, undeveloped little vignettes of male-female relations in the Big Apple. The ghostly segment by Shekhar Kapur stands out from the rest for stylistic reasons, the pallid palette, the persnickety compositions, the oval mirror frame within the frame. Natalie Portman, …
For the requisite sequel, the locale shifts from N.Y. to D.C., which opens the door to some new characters and creatures (e.g., Albert Einstein bobblehead dolls, which, when brought to life, inconceivably contain Einstein’s actual brain), along with some old ones packed up at the Natural History Museum for storage …
Former choreographer Rob Marshall’s third directorial effort, a restaging of the Broadway musical based on Fellini’s 8½. In essence the filmmaker has taken an intensely personal film (so named as it was Fellini’s eighth and a half opus, counting three collaborations as halves) and depersonalized it, trivialized it, into nostalgic …
Shaggy dramatization of the perils of rock-and-roll in repressive Iran. Through photography often out of focus and carelessly framed, we get the general idea even if we do not get the full impact. One fine and funny scene of a motor-mouthed bootlegger talking his way out of a grilling at …