Stroke of Luck? Who's translating this thing? You've got a film about two dudes — one middle-aged, one young — who suffer heart attacks and must cope with an aftermath tinged by the melancholy of mortality (which also makes everything more precious), you call it Matter of the Heart, just …
Thin slice of American nutloaf, the main ingredients of which are two Albuquerque sisters partnered in the business of “Crime Scene Cleanup.” (A pre-credits shotgun suicide demonstrates the need.) Amy Adams, a single mom in an adulterous affair with an old boyfriend, is a roller-coaster actress overtly sharing every little …
Vicarious living, virtual living, through flawless androids, so that this indeterminate future often bears an eerie likeness to a Ross Hunter production at Universal Studios circa 1959: "Life... only better." The basic situation is confusing enough without the murder mystery and the experimental zap gun that fries not just the …
A ring of Albanian white slavers (Middle Eastern buyers) has the bad fortune to shanghai the virgin daughter of a retired American superspy — “I was a preventer,” he understates — on her first morning of vacation in Paris. There is no satisfaction in the quick-as-a-blink detective work that leads …
Buzzed-up remake of the 1974 hijacked-subway thriller, a handy yardstick of early-21st-century style: photographic gimmicks (pixillation, slow-motion, blurs, zooms, whatnot), throwaway car crashes, outlandish one-man heroics from the deskbound train dispatcher, inflationism in theme and plot as well as in ransom demand. It took some smarts to retrieve from the …
Ang Lee, evidently still banking on the critical goodwill since Brokeback Mountain, whips up some innocuous nostalgia around the milestone music festival of the summer of 1969, a fortieth-anniversary fictionalized addendum to Michael Wadleigh’s official Woodstock, complete with imitative split-screen effects. This docucomedy, so to call it, never gets near …
Alias T4. If, as an exercise in nostalgia, you can recollect the delectable feeling at the end of T1 (as it was not yet known) — a storm on the horizon, a bun in the oven — you would be hard put to look upon its three successors as anything …
A sibling thing, self-importantly mythological, and purportedly semi-autobiographical, about two uncharismatic brothers (Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich) estranged from their domineering father, a world-famous opera maestro, withdrawn from him all the way to Buenos Aires. Its writer and director, Francis Ford Coppola, has by this time far fallen off the pace …
Tortured priest turned tortured vampire: better to suck blood through the plasma tube of a comatose hospital patient than straight from the vein. Slickly done Korean horror film from Chan-wook Park, kinkier even than the vampire norm, but overlong and uneven, with some dopey comic touches at the low end …
This is curtains, much sooner than Michael Jackson meant when he announced a series of comeback concerts cancelled by his sudden death: "This is the final curtain call." The rehearsal footage for that event, intended for Jackson's "personal library," has here been assembled not with journalistic purpose (so to put …
Lifetime Channel science fiction to do with a passive time-tripper who has no control over his departures or arrivals (leaving behind a pile of clothes and taking with him only his birthday suit) and no power to alter events. One can’t be sure that these rules are strictly adhered to. …
Gallic nonsense in claymation, centered on toy figures generically identified as Cowboy, Indian, and Horse, whose adventures take them to the earth’s core, the polar ice cap, and the bottom of the sea. The human figures are appealingly balanced on puddle-like green bases for stability, while the animal can make …
Autobots vs. Decepticons, Round Two, a blur of liquidy computer-generated metal (robot design by trash compactor) and a mass — no, a mess — of contradictions: apocalyptic pomposity and low comedy; heavy combat and light casualties; a too-fast pace that attains two and a half hours and total boredom (except …
Autobots vs. Decepticons, Round Two, a blur of liquidy computer-generated metal (robot design by trash compactor) and a mass — no, a mess — of contradictions: apocalyptic pomposity and low comedy; heavy combat and light casualties; a too-fast pace that attains two and a half hours and total boredom (except …