Video-game violence accompanied by headbanger heavy metal and leavened (if that's the word) with lead-balloon jokes. Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, and Monica Bellucci, who ought to be ashamed of themselves at any wage, serve as rubber-duck decoys to lure in the unwary. It seems far more honest and honorable to …
A new Rambo for a new millennium. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger (a compact, tense, stoic, unswaggering Mark Wahlberg), already abandoned once in the field in Ethiopia, is lured out of mountaintop retirement ostensibly to use his sniper know-how to foil a plot to assassinate the President but in …
Michael Moore, documentarist, polemicist, provocateur, pest, scold, nag, and wag, takes on the American health-care system and finds it sorely lacking, particularly as compared, in turn, to that of Canada, the U.K., France, and even Cuba. Anecdotal, rambling, repetitive, unbalanced (not to say mentally), the film contains few real surprises, …
Carlos Reygadas’s domestic drama of marital infidelity in the strict, German-speaking Mennonite community of Chihuahua, Mexico, exudes an almost Scandinavian chill, specifically a Dreyer-esque severity and self-discipline (to say nothing of his Lutheran rectitude and sense of personal responsibility), characterized by, among other things, front-and-centered compositions, long takes, a clock-ticking …
After two decades of getting it for free, we now get to pay for it. (Making a joke of the fact, first thing out of the gate, doesn't alter it.) The M.O. of the Fox-TV weekly series carries over into this Unprecedented Cinematic Event: the throwaway amusements in the early …
Streamlined, diverted, nevertheless tedious remake of the Anthony Shaffer theatrical thriller. Michael Caine, returning to the scene, takes the part of Laurence Olivier from the 1972 version, while Caine's original role is taken by the man who took his role in the remake of Alfie as well, Jude Law. There's …
Callous and smarty-pants action thriller in the Tarantino mode, or better, Tarantinissimo, revolving around a horde of free-lance bounty hunters and hit persons (a lavishly pierced and tattooed heavy-metal trio, a couple of black lesbians, a scar-faced master of disguise in Mission: Impossible latex, among others) in competition to cut …
Slow-starting, long-lasting, highly diffuse sequel, what with a shape-shifting sandman (the true murderer of the superhero's uncle), parasitic licorice vines from outer space, an amnesiac avenger, an unprincipled newspaper photographer, and of course more rocky romance, dipping low while Spidey explores his Dark Side. All in all, a sharp comedown …
Slow-starting, long-lasting, highly diffuse sequel, what with a shape-shifting sandman (the true murderer of the superhero's uncle), parasitic licorice vines from outer space, an amnesiac avenger, an unprincipled newspaper photographer, and of course more rocky romance, dipping low while Spidey explores his Dark Side. All in all, a sharp comedown …
Facetious fairy tale located in a magical kingdom within Merry Old England, populated by an ardent suitor, a grasping inamorata, a humanoid heavenly body, a stray unicorn, a wicked witch, a power-mad prince, a gallery of ghosts, a gay flying pirate (putting the fairy in fairy tale?), among others. The …
Literary indie, not just in source material (a well-regarded novel by Brian Morton) or in talky, articulate, literate treatment, but also in subject matter: a stiff-necked New York Jewish intellectual (he wears a tie when home alone), a drinker at the well of Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Irving Kristol, et …
Serious science fiction, rising at times to full ululation, about a dying sun and a desperate mission to rekindle it with a nuclear bomb. The seriousness survives some incomprehensible action, some illegible CGI, and (beneath cascades of sound effects and background music) some unintelligible dialogue. With Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, …
The Grand-Guignol Broadway musical (words and music by Stephen Sondheim), Tim Burtonized for Hollywood. Which means, among other things (such as less music), a ton-of-bricks production design, an ashen color scheme sometimes edging up to the border of black-and-white (excluding the rivers, lakes, geysers of rich red blood), and the …
Ryuichi Inomata's film follows "a dog named Mari and her three puppies in the aftermath" of the 2004 Chūetsu earthquake. In Japanese with English subtitles.