AKA The Rise and Fall of Studio Ghibli? Yeah, probably, at least if you listen to cofounder and chief director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle). “The future is clear,” he intones with an old man’s matter-of-factness as he smokes in the studio’s rooftop garden, “it’s …
Two best friends, both in permanent disconnect from their parents, and an ethnic-looking, slightly addlepated urchin positioned to grace t-shirts as this summer’s huggable answer to Napoleon Dynamite’s Pedro, flee home to spend the summer cobbling together a dilapidated cabin in the woods. More Sundance-sanctioned tripe that never should have …
Xan Cassavetes tries to restore a little grit and gore to the vampire-human love story genre.
A winning political strategist (Rob Lowe) is taken by a sudden case of the guilts in this lumpy, predictable comedy. An attractive cast does its best to buoy the political satire, but writer/director Bill Guttentag has other plans. According to Lowe, “To win in politics, you have got to be …
Five fair-haired Norwegians and a bald Swedish ethnographer spend 100 days and 5000 miles charting the Pacific on a balsa wood raft to prove right adventurer Thor Heyerdal’s (Pål Sverre Hagen) theory that South Americans, not Asians, populated Polynesia. Roadblocks to perfection: a second-act encounter with a shark bordered on …
Verdi's opera about the Babylonian conquest of the Jews.
Remember that one scene in Prometheus where the two dudes turned into space zombie things? Don't you wish there was a whole movie about that one scene? Well, too bad, you're getting one anyway. With Liev Schreiber, a fine actor who just ain't care about his cinematic legacy.
Things were going so well for Nell (Ashley Bell) in the group home where she was deposited after all the mishigas that went down in the first Last Exorcism. But the demon Abalam refuses to allow Nell to move on. For 75 minutes, Ed Gass-Donnelly's film chugs along with the …
Weary screen warrior Arnold Schwarzenegger returns to Hollywood in a film about a cop who got old and left LA for an Arizona border town. But this being Arnold, trouble finds him. And this being Arizona, it's Mexican trouble (though — ha ha — this time it's a Mexican who …
A wealthy stag finally settles on a trophy bride, and three lifelong friends join him in Vegas for a senescent bachelor party. The Hangover with Depends. Michael Douglas tries, Kevin Kline succeeds, De Niro can barely summon the strength needed to hold a permanent scowl, and Morgan Freeman - engulfing …
Lee Daniels' schmaltzy abridgement of the Civil Rights movement. Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), an African-American man born into a family of sharecroppers and schooled in the art of “knowing he’s black,” spends 34 years of his life in domestic servitude under seven presidents. While Cecil dignifiedly fights to change the …
Midwestern Miss Dorothy (Lea Michele) must return to Oz with her little dog Toto to help her old friends The Tin Man (Kelsey Grammer), The Cowardly Lion (Jim Belushi), and The Scarecrow (Dan Aykroyd) defeat the evil Jester (Martin Short). (Hey, weren't those guys comedians once?) Along the way, they …
There is very little to feel good about in this documentary on the disastrous attempt by the City of Philadelphia to forcibly evict members of the black liberation organization MOVE from their row house on Osage avenue in May of 1985. Except maybe this: director Jason Osder’s organizing principle for …
Were it not for Laura’s (Maggie Baird) inability to fit her faithful guitar in a Goodwill box, the 46-year-old housewife and mother of three might never have reignited her passion for music. With her youngest, most outwardly troubled son, Shane (Finneas O'Connell), in tow, Laura begins making the rounds of …
Children switched at birth is both a parent's worst nightmare and the basis of untold movie-of-the-week melodramas. Happily, this nurturing, resoundingly contemplative family drama comes dealt with an open hand by master filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda (After Life, Still Walking). Driven businessman Ryota Nonomiya (Masaharu Fukuyama) doesn’t have time for impromptu …