Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift. —There. That’s about all that need be said, and the ads already …
Jason Friedberg’s and Aaron Seltzer’s spoof of the Twilight series, solely for those who need remedial help in seeing its silliness. Anyone else would get more snickers out of the straight version. More, that is, than none. Jenn Proske, Matt Lanter, Christopher Riggi, Diedrich Bader.
Deep spirituality turns vague and hazy in religious films, like 3D for which only God has the glasses. But Margarethe von Trotta’s film about 12th-century nun and brilliant scholar Hildegard (Barbara Sukowa) reveals vivid, involving aspects of her brave, even feminist life, often sensual in a cloistered way. The Gothic …
Davis Guggenheim, the overshadowed director of An Inconvenient Truth, tackles another man-sized topic, American lower education, giving him much more to do than just to film a visually-aided lecture. He delivers his own personalized narration, includes footage from an earlier documentary of his, The First Year, digs up a clip …
Twenty-three years after he first visited the scene, Stone weighs in (thud!) on recent developments in the stock market, another chapter in his career of heavy breathing over epochal events. Gordon Gekko, his most memorable fictional creation (not to compete with Nixon, W., or Alexander the Great), out of prison …
Brazilian émigré artist Vik Muniz, glowing with New York success, returns to Rio. At the immense city dump, he photographs scavengers who embellish their portraits with trash. Hard lives are recycled as exuberant art. Lucy Walker’s sensual documentary doesn’t slum to mock, nor to protest, and has genuine human interest.
A dying boy's bucket list.
Frightfully unfunny romantic-comic fantasy revolving around a junior curator at the Guggenheim, a single girl in Rome for her younger sister’s wedding, who does as the Romans do not: pilfering five coins from the Fontana d’Amore and in magical consequence drawing their last owners to her like a magnet. If …
Looking like a bleached bone — the whitest person in a French African colony disintegrating into “liberty” — Isabelle Huppert holds on to her coffee plantation like Scarlett defending Tara. Huppert has the sly charisma of a veteran star. Director Claire Denis’s feeling for racial and cultural collision is acute, …
Bill Nighy will, for some older viewers, elicit fond memories of Clifton Webb. Dry, sly, snarky Nighy plays a sheepish English assassin with a bossy mom (Eileen Atkins), a sexpot in peril (Emily Blunt), and a cute apprentice (Rupert Grint). Silly in plot, pushy in music, Jonathan Lynn’s crime comedy …
Documentarian Ben Steinbauer tracks down, with great difficulty, one Jack Rebney, the YouTube icon branded “The Angriest Man in the World” for his profanity-filled outtakes from a Winnebago promo film in 1989, re-run here in very poor video. After almost twenty years, the man hasn’t mellowed: “I’m very old, I’m …
Poky, low-key, somewhat parsimonious rural thriller with a simple set-up: if absent Dad, arrested for “cooking crank,” the new moonshine of the Ozarks, fails to show for his court date, the family stands to lose the house he signed over for bond, and so it falls to his eldest daughter, …
Under the drillmasterly direction of Joe Johnston, the remake emerges as your basic tale of Oedipal lycanthropy, an Oedipus simplex if you will (the ungovernable son, for good measure, has been playing Hamlet on the London stage), so basic that it takes place in the 19th Century, unearths an archetypal …
Old scores, old high-school scores, resurface before a big wedding, leading to old, old gags: the plumbing mishap, the nature disaster, spilled food, purposely dumped food. A plucky cast — Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Odette Yustman, Betty White — goes down fighting, but goes down hard. Directed …
The documentary is "based on security camera footage from an encounter in Guantanamo Bay between a team of Canadian intelligence agents and Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, then a 16-year-old detainee."