Reasonable facsimile of comic sophistication: a thirty-something housewife, still fantasizing about the high-school football hero whom she never went as far as sleeping with, sends her best single girlfriend on a romantic reconnaissance mission, and very soon lives to regret it. The essential middle-class propriety of the thing withstands some …
Director David Fincher, loaded with don't-try-this-at-home ideas on how to prove yourself a man and not a mouse, traces a course of anti-Establishment insurgency, from small acts of personal liberation (peeing in the lobster bisque, splicing a frame of male genitals into the middle of a kiddie film) to organizing …
Writer-director Jason Lew’s debut feature is very much a religious picture, dealing as it does with a wrongfully imprisoned man’s conversion to Islam and the subsequent test of that conversion. But while the religious stuff is clearly set forth and left in plain sight, it’s easy to overlook, given the …
Steven Soderbergh offers no reassurance, after Ocean's Eleven (and Traffic and Erin Brockovich), that he has not been ruined beyond redemption. Outwardly, this day-in-the-lives-of-motley-Hollywoodites would appear to be an attempt to recapture that old Independent Spirit, even if the filmmaker hedges his bet by enlisting Julia (Roberts) and Brad (Pitt) …
Here is your chance to see a penguin pee upside down, to hear Brad Pitt and Matt Damon as brave krill eager to escape the swarm (“Goodbye, krill world”), and to hear a kid penguin sing a Puccini aria with lyrics such as, “Life’s just a big pile of crazy.” …
Quentin Tarantino takes no more than the risible title from Enzo G.Castellari's Dirty Dozen knockoff of 1978, and respells, misspells, that. (Did he ponder Basturds as possibly funnier?) Much of the movie, a revisionist revisitation of the French theater of operations in the Second World War, is unapologetically, unsanctimoniously silly. …
Say this much for Anne Rice: she takes her vampires seriously. Even religiously. Not, however, docilely. Neil Jordan's screen treatment of her cultish novel rummages through the received lore as though trying on skirts and blouses, deciding against this one and for that one, and branching out experimentally into unexplored …
What starts as a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale tapers off into a mere shaggy-dog story about a rock-star wannabe (and Ricky Nelson idolator) who sports a pompadour combed straight up from his forehead, adding half a foot to his height. It's quite well acted without being in the least believable (Brad …
A serial-murder aficionado and would-be bestselling author, about to set out on a cross-country tour of historic murder sites in preparation for a book (with photos by his girlfriend, a specialist in chic black-and-white erotica), advertises on a campus bulletin board for a ride-share couple (his Lincoln convertible gets only …
In order to hammer home its point about American morality with regard to money as manifested on the macro level by the 2008 financial crisis and on the micro level by the machinations of some truly unpleasant urban lowlifes, Killing Them Softly asks the audience to believe that the patrons …
Edward Zwick, one-time director of Glory, has here reassumed some epic aspirations, or epic postures and gestures at any rate, in the matter of an all-male family of four on a Montana horse ranch reminiscent of Bonanza's Ponderosa (Eng. trans., ponderous; labored; lumpish). The unspooling storyline, however, never generates the …
With but 2 features to their credit (am I the only one who’s never heard of The Last Romantic or Band of Robbers) the Nee Brothers, Aaron and Adam, convinced four of Hollywood’s biggest names (Bullock, Tatum, Pitt, and Harry Potter) to star in what is best described as Fabio …
Maddeningly slow remake of Death Takes a Holiday, at more than twice the length of the 1934 version. There is a shocking special effect early on, when that darling Brad Pitt, right in front of our eyes, without apparent edits, gets bounced around between two cars in a crosswalk. (This …