Boilerplate Disney sports film, the true story of the 1973 Triple Crown winner, fabulous as it unfolded in the sports pages and telecasts of the time, predigested and predictable as recounted on the big screen, no suspense, nothing but basking. Diane Lane does a good job in a bad wig …
The big-screen sequel transfers the base of operations from New York to Abu Dhabi, the advertised New Middle East where the self-indulgent girls — er, self-indulgent middle-aged gals (Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall) will be overindulged on an expenses-paid jaunt courtesy of an Arabian film producer, …
Only for promotional purposes, on posters and billboards and elsewhere, was the fourth installment in the Shrek franchise called The Final Chapter. The promise in that title would have been the best thing about the movie, if such a promise could be trusted from one manifestly committed to continuation rather …
“Disturbing” would be one word, maybe the best word, for Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Fifties-period Dennis Lehane detective novel. Nothing, let’s be clear, in the list of ingredients — the Alcatrazzy asylum for the criminally insane, the locked-room mystery of a vanished female inmate, the dreamland visitations from the …
On May 8 of 1986, a pre-teen girl is raped and murdered in rural Germany. (Our view is mostly obscured by waving wheat stalks.) Twenty-three years later, another young girl disappears on the same day. The cops are on the job, but the fact that almost nothing resembling police work …
Everything you never wanted to know about the advent of Facebook, where “friends” gather on the Internet. An amorphous series of flashbacks from the depositions of two separate lawsuits takes you through the steps by which a socially inept (how ironic!) Harvard computer nerd stumbled upon “a once-in-a-generation holy-shit idea” …
Character piece on an aging skirt-chaser and felonious former car dealer who has a bum ticker and a negative cash flow. The players one and all — Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon, Jenna Fischer, Mary-Louise Parker, Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Olivia Thirlby, Danny DeVito, others — battle bravely and effectively to …
Good and evil Medieval wizards engage in a battle of special effects in modern-day Manhattan. Only a self-professed “physics nerd,” Jay Baruchel channelling Christian Slater, has the capacity to become the Prime Merlinian who once and for all can vanquish Morgana le Fay and prevent the enslavement of mankind, if …
Another reason for strict adherence to a scientific code of ethics: you just can’t trust biotechnologists not to copulate with their illegal experimental hybrids. The creature — a hairless, rat-tailed, chicken-legged, lizard-armed, quasi-human-faced something or other — is well designed and well executed, although it can’t scare away the ruinous …
Amusing bouts of acting between Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, as a stodgy bottled-up parole officer and a jive-ass cornrowed convict. But shaky plotting — the prisoner’s hot-to-trot wife let loose to ply her girly wiles, more specifically Milla Jovovich’s small breasts, colossal nipples — and pretentious, ponderous religious …
Kate Davis’s and David Heilbroner’s diligent documentary on “the Rosa Parks moment” in the gay-rights movement: the police raid and resulting riot at a Greenwich Village gay bar in 1969. Interviews with participants, news footage from the time, and (most astoundingly) benighted old “educational” films set the stage well, and …
More zombies from George Romero. Enough already. Too many already. A hexalogy, now. (Night... Dawn... Day.. Land... Diary....) The island retreat off the coast of Delaware, overrun with "deadheads," offers no strategic advantage to a quad of AWOL soldiers caught between feuding clans of Irish-Americans; and the process of elimination …
Thin-ice romantic comedy tolerable only insofar as you can tolerate the greased wheels of contrivance as a source of entertainment in itself: the male BFF, strictly platonic but wanting more, of a would-be single mother swaps his sperm for that of her chosen donor, a blond Adonis who teaches Feminist …
Elementary heist thriller rendered unwatchable by director John Luessenhop’s hopped-up visuals, the cameraman so excited (often over nothing) that he can’t hold his instrument steady, pressing in so close as to lose sight of what we’re supposed to be looking at, always a step behind the action, a telephoto lens …