Contemporary riff on Far from the Madding Crowd, a sex romp of above-average intelligence and in full-blooded color, set knowingly (or if you must, self-consciously) in Hardy country, at and around a writers’ colony in Dorset, where it seems a bit thick of the visiting American Hardy scholar not to …
An exercise in recycling — the Cabbage Patch plasticity of the faces, the unchanging costumes, the glowworm “magic” of the heroine’s hair. Everything looks like a toy. The Rapunzel legend itself is lost amidst the Disney checklist: the awkward sidekick, the trademark characters, and the sentimental, expository songs. For all …
Estonia, following long repression by Marxism, is depressed by predatory capitalism in Veiko Õunpuu’s film about a rising middleman (Taavi Eelmaa) whose life is a Kafka maze of weird, deadpan events. Strikingly photographed in black and white, the movie is a rummage sale of old surrealist or vanguard (Bergman, Antonioni, …
Glacial rural drama of a property-rights dispute in present-day Tennessee: an ornery old cuss escapes the rest home to occupy the sharecropper’s cabin on his rented farm, at daggers with the lawful residents. Hal Holbrook, steering just wide of a Jimmy Stewart impression, plays the protagonist with a crust under …
Rehash of the shameful facts of how Pat Tillman, Jr., the Arizona Cardinal who set aside a professional football career to enlist in the Army post-9/11, had his head shot off by friendly fire in Afghanistan, how the circumstances of his death were initially covered up behind a whole-cloth scenario …
Tiny, for sure. Director and writer Lena Dunham stars as Aura, back at home in Tribeca after college and feeling bored, fat, and underloved. Almost every feeling and glib chat is encased in attitude. Using Dunham’s family and friends, this is like a hipper, Manhattan version of Henry Jaglom’s vanity …
Bold colors, Indian food, and cute accents dominate a “foodie comedy” about an aspiring chef. He saves the family restaurant in New York with a taxi-driving master of Indian cuisine, acted by impish scene-stealer Naseeruddin Shah. Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show scripted from his play and stars. He lacks …
Screenwriter Stuart Beattie, of Pirates of the Caribbean fame, tries his hand at directing by plundering John Milius’s Red Dawn. Eight teens return from vacation to find their fictional hometown of Wirrawee invaded by anonymous Asian soldiers. Kids become combatants, and the outcome is as predictable as it is long …
Angelina Jolie is a comatose sculpture in this slack, dated load of thriller clichés. She glides her deadpan “acting” and mighty cheekbones around a postcard Venice, and Johnny Depp tags along like a puzzled puppy. The film achieves vacant star display and the worst canal chase ever, while wasting Venice, …
Ben Affleck’s second directed film, after Gone Baby Gone, is a moderately diverting, mildly despicable game of cops-and-robbers that counts, in its play for the spectator’s sympathies, on the moral depravity of the public at large, a cynical safe bet. The central character (Affleck himself), a sensitive stickup man who …
The second sequel adds little but minutes to the previous one, and for a computer-animated children’s film it adds quite a lot of those, somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and five. In specific, the new 3-D adds little (but four dollars of admission) to the prevailing depth of …
At last, a film devoted to the concept of wabi-sabi. So if you feel the urge to complain about how Tron: Legacy bites on the style of Star Wars, Batman Begins, The Matrix: Reloaded, Christianity, Buddhism, and even The Big Lebowski, remind yourself: perfection is unknowable, man. Besides, you’re watching …
If this horror spoof is not quite Shaun of the Dead, it’s because Friday the 13th is not quite Night of the Living Dead — you have to consider the source material. Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk star as a pair of genuinely good good ol’ boys who accidentally run …
Rumbling, rattling action film revolving around an unmanned runaway freight train hurtling toward Scranton, PA, with a cargo of hazardous chemicals, and around the two lowly railway employees (Denzel Washington, Chris Pine) who go against explicit orders in a valiant attempt to avert disaster: “We’re gonna run this bitch down!” …