How The Other Half Grieves — the other half being rich, beautiful, and above and beyond the dubious comforts of group therapy for parents who have lost a child. (Well, maybe not “beautiful” — unless you find Nicole Kidman’s shift from China Doll to Sinewy Skeleton transporting.) Moments of exquisite …
Never mind baby Roberta. For that matter, seldom mind older sister Beezus (a mispronunciation of Beatrice). This is mostly about Ramona, the disaster-prone grade-schooler of Beverly Cleary’s series of children’s books. Healthful family entertainment in spite of parental unemployment and pet death; pacelessly episodic; Ginnifer Goodwin good in support as …
Comic thriller adapted from a graphic novel: fair warning. The flimsy, presumptuous plot sweeps up a former black-ops agent (classified “red,” for retired, extremely dangerous), along with the Pension Services phone operator with whom he has been flirting long-distance, in a high-level earthshaking conspiracy. A paranoid John Malkovich in a …
Lovers’ tragedy set in New York City in the days leading up to and including 9/11, leaving aside the green-and-white prologue set ten years earlier. Robert Pattinson of “the Twilight saga” and Emilie de Ravin of the TV series Lost do a generally credible and at times mortifying job of …
Grisly vision of the future, where artificial organs are sold on the installment plan and are repossessed by force when the recipients fall behind in their payments, and where one such repo man receives a transplant of his own and grows a conscience. The ending is terrible from several angles …
Milla Jovovich back on the warpath, post-apocalypse, anti-undead, armed with 3‑D in addition to her usual arsenal: “I don’t know if I can do this much longer.” The action frequently slows down so that the good guys can look hot, and sometimes it relents altogether, although the pounding rock score …
Sebastian Junger’s and Tim Hetherington’s documentary chronicle of a single year with a single platoon in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, a helpful supplement to dry newspaper accounts of the war. Bloodshed is considerately confined to after-the-fact interviews, although reactions to it are on one occasion captured raw.
The fifth collaboration between director Ridley Scott and leading man Russell Crowe (Body of Lies, American Gangster, A Good Year, Gladiator, count ’em) won’t satisfy your craving for the legend, but perhaps your craving, if any, for Dark Age dreariness, savage combat (shot in that skittery long-lens style that looks …
The story of the eponymous all-girl rock band assembles some backstage clichés to facilitate the continued growth, right before our eyes, of Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, as guitarist Joan Jett and vocalist Cherie Currie respectively. “This isn’t about women’s lib,” announces their mid-Seventies Svengali. “This is about women’s libido.” …
Feature film spin-off of the popular reality television show originally based on a South Korean variety format. The film stars Wang Baoqiang (Lost in Thailand), Li Chen (Aftershock), Zheng Kai (So Young), Angelababy (Love on the Cloud) Korean singer and TV personality Kim Jong-Kook and Chen He (Back In Time), …
Set in the 5th Century B.C., Sacrifice tells the powerful tale of a Chinese general responsible for the ruthless slaughter of all but one member of a rival clan. The sole survivor, an infant prince named Cheng Bo, is secretly raised by the doctor who delivers him, a man that …
The feature debut of writer-director Hue Rhodes is a pack-following independent film caroming from oddball to oddball: a midget boss, a sunny secretary surrounding herself with yellow Smiley Faces, a wheelchair stripper, a gun-toting militant nudist, a sideshow human fireball, and so forth. It's nice, or it ought to be, …
The Cold War refrozen: a subterranean population of Russian “sleeper” agents in a Destroy America operation that dates back to Lee Harvey Oswald. For a short time the film, like its patient spies, puts up a decent front. Director Phillip Noyce, who owns such respectable credits in the genre as …
Oh, to be young, poor, and Aborigine in the Outback, hounded by white racists and even your own dead-zoned people. Warwick Thornton’s debut film is a rather sensual vision of despair, using amateur actors, native art, ants, and a dead kangaroo, and it goes where it must. Not even Victor …
More accurately Scott Pilgrim vs. Seven Evil Exes, six guys and one girl whom he must in some sense “defeat” in order to win the hand of the pink-haired, then blue-haired, then green-haired girl of his dreams. (Literally she first appeared to him, on skates, in a dream.) The serial …