Eep! Richard Griffiths as W.H. Auden! Meeting Benjamin Britten while BB is working on his Death in Venice opera! Jawing about art! Arguing with biographers! I'll stop. Squeee! No really, I'll stop.
Low-profile science fiction, so light on the hardware, the décor, the couture of the genre, so mundane in all its trappings, as to skirt classification, operating in a borderland, a no-man’s-land, occupied by the likes of On the Beach, Lord of the Flies, maybe Daniel Petrie’s Resurrection, maybe Todd Haynes’s …
Do we believe in famously tough Russell Crowe asking, “Show me where the bullets go”? Hardly, but Crowe has haggard moral weight as a Pittsburgh teacher whose wife (Elizabeth Banks) is imprisoned for murder. Director-writer Paul (Crash) Haggis, retooling the French Pour elle, details Crowe’s increasingly criminal effort to free …
Faux fairy tale in which a poor Irish fisherman fetches up a girl in his net, turning his luck around and affording a companion for his precocious wheelchair-bound young daughter (“This town is what you call sartorially challenged”), who classifies the newcomer as a “selkie” rather than a mermaid. The …
Cop-partner comedy from Adam McKay, not to say cop-buddy, with Will Ferrell wobbly in tone as a contented desk jockey and Mark Wahlberg a steady straight man as a pent-up eager beaver. It evinces a deathly pale image, a fair amount of industry, and a few amusing ideas (a fight …
Uncalled-for encore, a prequel rather than sequel, replacing the stationary home-video camera with a whole battery of security cameras in addition to a hand-held camcorder. The wider coverage affords no advantage, certainly no aid to invention, and no sufficient reason for use of the camcorder. Frightfully dull for the first …
It would be hard to conceive a more painful introduction to Greek mythology. Or reintroduction, even more. Chris Columbus, who directed the first couple of Harry Potter entries, is looking literally for another lightning bolt — Zeus’s stolen one — in the quest of a dyslexic present-day teenager, the unknowing …
Fact-based inspirationalism appalling and amusing in ineptitude: a scrappy upstart Little League team from Monterrey, Mexico, blazes a trail across the U.S. to the 1957 World Series in Williamsport, evidently without ever having played a prior game, and without encountering en route a single intelligible and suspenseful baseball situation. The …
Underwater earthquake releases computer-generated prehistoric caribe by the thousands into Lake Victoria, AZ, during Spring Break. In 3-D, to add a certain je ne sais quoi to the projectile vomit, the surgically enhanced hooters, the severed penis, etc. Well, it’s a living. If this is living. (Alexandre Aja, director. Elisabeth …
Writer-director Nicole Holofcener, of Friends with Money, Lovely and Amazing, Walking and Talking, transfers her base of operations from the Big Orange to the Big Apple, to consider matters of vanity and charity, love and lust, life and death, among two intersecting circles, or intersecting triangles, of characters. Something of …
“Can someone please just tell me what the fuck is going on here?” Why, yes. A disparate group of cutthroats has been parachuted down to a jungle planet to participate in an extraterrestrial version of The Most Dangerous Game, prey for dreadlocked beetle-helmeted hunters. Despite the multitude of monsters promised …
Arabian Night-ly video game of computerized desertscapes, an all-over rosy glow, a magic dagger than can turn back time, a pretentious and presumptuous plot parallel to the present-day search for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq, and a British-accented Jake Gyllenhaal to fit in with Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina, and Gemma Arterton, …
Stiffly enacted history lesson, common knowledge in the fiftieth state of the union, news to the other forty-nine, to do with the Victorian-era heir to the Hawaiian throne who witnessed the foreign takeover of her nation. The tragedy is compounded by its utter dullness. With Q’orianka Kilcher, Shaun Evans, Barry …
Grinning, giddy Tanna Frederick continues her rise to buzzy stardom, at least in the world of Henry Jaglom’s L.A. vanity movies. After the opening logo (a shot of Orson Welles’s face), all style vanishes, the plot starts to curdle, and we are left in the Jaglom zone of sterile lighting …