Court-ordered community service for two full-grown screwups. Overplayed by everybody but sourpuss Paul Rudd (who co-wrote), and yet a couple of prime comic targets retain their ripeness: the rehabilitated rah-rah directress of a mentoring charity called Sturdy Wings, and a nerdy role-playing club of would-be dwellers in Middle Earth. With …
Facile soccer fable about two bumpkin brothers from rural Mexico who take their sibling rivalry all the way to the big time: money, celebrity, a supermodel, drugs, gambling, the usual. The feature directing debut of Carlos Cuarón, brother of Alfonso, shows off an unsteady camera and damp lighting, but also …
Foolhardy American students (an “F” for everyone), in search of a secret Mayan archaeological dig, find along with it no more than they deserve: murderous natives, parasitic plant life, copious gore. The Mexican Tourism Board couldn’t be pleased, but who could? With Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey, …
Loser’s comedy directed by David Schwimmer (his debut behind the camera) lacks a fat boy, but has a full-grown man, “not fat … just unfit,” who indeed runs and runs. First he runs from his own wedding, leaving his pregnant fiancée at the altar, and then five years later, trying …
Infidelity, homosexuality, incest, madness, and murder among the Bakelite heirs. Fact-based story, unconvincing in period (mid-Forties through early-Seventies), performance, dialogue, staging. Filmmaker Tom Kalin’s sophomore effort shows little advance over his freshman Swoon. His graduation falls behind schedule. With Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne, Hugh Dancy, and Elena Anaya.
The place is South Carolina, the time is 1964, right when LBJ has signed the Civil Rights Act (“Nothin’ but a piece of paper”). An abused white teenage runaway and her fugitive black maid find refuge at a honey farm of “cultured” black sisters named after months of the year, …
Not half-funny. Will Ferrell joins his interest in the Seventies (Anchorman) to his interest in sports (Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory, Kicking and Screaming) in a relentlessly hard-sell comedy on the final season of the American Basketball Association before its merger with the NBA. The name of the focal franchise, …
Speculative, segmentary biography — twenty years in scope — of an obscure figure from 20th-century art history, Séraphine Louis, dite Séraphine de Senlis, a pious provincial housecleaner by day, and by night a compulsive self-taught painter (under past orders from her guardian angel at the convent), whose secret talent is …
Will Smith, in his more sensitive, tormented, teary, and Oscar-hungry persona, takes his crinkled brow in tight closeups on a cryptic personal mission (“We have a plan. Do what you promised me”), flashing an IRS identity card to gain access to total strangers so as to judge whether or not …
The big-screen resuscitation of the defunct HBO series (1998-2004) runs, or better say sashays, two hours and twenty minutes. That’s a lot of clothes and accessories, a lot of accompanying pop songs, a lot of chatty first-person narration, a lot of superficiality, a lot of vacuity. Maybe it would help …
A crack-up, not in the sense of an out-loud laugh, but in that of a car wreck. Teen characters, and audience, are pushed into premature corruption: a gross-out road movie whose itinerary includes a pair of wet-dream-soaked briefs, a slingshot condom, an adhesive dildo, a prosthetic scrotum, coprophilia, and so …
Entrée to a Rolling Stones benefit concert at the intimate Beacon Theatre in New York City. If Martin Scorsese weren’t visible in several minutes of Raging Bull-ish black-and-white footage pre-event, you’d never imagine he was behind the cut-cut-cut hackwork. Old, old interspersed interviews of young, young Mick stimulate meditation and …
High-concept, low-budget, no-name horror show. An irritating transmission over television, radio, and telephone drives half the population homicidally insane: “This is without a doubt the most fucked-up day in the history of mankind.” The movie is divided into three Roman-numeralled parts, and the jokiness of the middle section is even …
Three years later, the girls have gone on to separate colleges (Yale, Brown, NYU, and the Rhode Island School of Design) and on to a different director (music-video veteran Sanaa Hamri) and on to unexciting new challenges (pregnancy scare, married boyfriend, long-lost grandmother, summer-stock role in Shakespeare), and the loss …
Humorless handling of a ridiculous situation: a black-to-the-naked-eye biological daughter of white parents in segregated South Africa — scientifically explained under the heading of polygenic inheritance — and a consequent illicit romance with a young black man. "Is this a joke?" seems a reasonable question, spoken aloud. But the hand …