The movie itself was rather overwhelmed by the advance announcement that its star, Joaquin Phoenix, was hereupon retiring from acting to pursue a career in hip-hop. It is a movie easily overwhelmed, an intimate little indie directed and co-written by James Gray (The Yards, We Own the Night, both with …
The rise and fall of Iron Mike in his own words: Brooklyn, Cus D’Amato, the heavyweight belt at twenty, Robin Givens, Buster Douglas, Desiree Washington (“that wretched swine of a woman”) and the three-year prison term for rape, the tattoos of Che and Mao, the Muslims, Don King (“a wretched …
Cool-blonde control freak and dark hairy caveman (Katherine Heigl, Gerard Butler) in a conflict of philosophies, personalities, and sexualities, behind the scenes at a Sacramento TV morning talk show. The road to the predictable and inevitable is paved with, among other things, a pair of vibrating panties, the remote control …
Cheap thrills of the seeing-things variety: hallucinations, dreams, nothing with staying power. The initial edge thus turns dull in a hurry. But the upside-down heads — of dog and man — are creepy effects, and the climactic exorcism of a dybbuk (respectful observance of tradition), from the wispy body of …
Doctors and patients dispense education on the epidemic of tick-borne Lyme disease. Education, and dread. Controversies over diagnosis and treatment, plus the politics and economics of health care, cloud the picture. That doesn’t inhibit filmmaker Andy Abrahams Wilson from manipulating emotion, mainly musically.
Life here is better, down where it's wetter, take it from meeeeeee!
After two installments, Kate Beckinsale and her director husband, Len Wiseman, have dropped out for the backstory, but the murkiness and the monotone continue unabated, and Rhona Mitra fully matches the tire pressure in Beckinsale’s lips. The plentiful action is cut to tatters. With Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy, and Steven …
Unwelcome remake of a Korean shocker: wicked-stepmother mechanics tricked up with pseudo-supernatural “visions” and a hopefully mind-blowing ending. Fuse-blowing, more likely. Direction is credited to “The Guard Brothers,” Charles and Thomas. With some people, two heads are no better than half a brain. Emily Browning, Arielle Kebbel, Elizabeth Banks, David …
Engrossing account of the search for the transmigrated soul soul of Lama Konchog, a Tibetan Buddhist holy man who died in 2001 at age eighty-four, leaving his young, insecure, and sensitively photogenic disciple, Tenzin Zopa, with the unwanted assignment of conducting the search, combing the countryside for signs of an …
A comedown from Jason Reitman’s auspicious first two features, Thank You for Smoking and Juno, narrowly centered as it is on a narrowly self-centered hero, a travelling corporate downsizer, a hired hatchet man, now a potential dinosaur whose way of life is threatened — by long-distance terminations via the innovation …
Another side of Benito Mussolini, the sex drive, the secret mistress, the hidden love child, and the resulting trouble for his marriage and his ambitions, but more so for his mistress. An interesting subject, lurchingly chronicled, obscurely photographed, operatically scored. Giovanna Mezzogiorno delivers an impassioned performance from start to finish, …
Hoked-up Civil War epic, visually very uneven, set in mid-19th-century China, featuring three of the usual suspects, Jet Li, Andy Lau, Takeshi Kineshiro, and directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan. The weighty statements on the specific history and on war in general are subverted by eruptions of martial-arts silliness in the …
Continued escalation in the superhero genre, one or two stair-steps above The Dark Knight. Adapted from “the most celebrated graphic novel of all time” (the escalation commences, even if the kudo is roughly akin to “the most celebrated reality-TV show” or “most celebrated MMA fighter”), it runs almost two hours …
Unmistakably minor effort from Woody Allen, despite throwing in our faces an older-man-younger-woman relationship. (Take that, make of it what you will.) The older man is diplomatically not Allen himself, but an Allen surrogate, Larry David, in the role of a neurotic misanthropic hypochondriacal self-acclaimed “genius,” once considered for the …