Facile but enjoyable. George Clooney directed and stars as a presidential candidate, a glib liberal dream — apart from his Clintonian attraction to a naïve intern (Evan Rachel Wood), who seems to be running on the Live Bait ticket. As a silky machine of ambition, he excites other tough guys: …
The Coen brothers film with the widest, the broadest, the massiest appeal to date, or in the common phrase their "most accessible." Two glamorous A-list movie stars of opposite sexes, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, looking their respective bests, sugar-cured and honey-glazed, and none of the Coen "regulars" -- no …
Intermittently cute comedy on the wild and woolly early days of pro football, cute in some of the archaic banter, but not cute in the unrelieved drab brown color scheme or the indifferent and infrequent on-field action. It shows a lighter side of director George Clooney (Confessions of a Dangerous …
The first Coen brothers film to disappoint. That's not to say it's not good, certainly not to say it's not even as good as their first, Blood Simple, when there could be no expectations and so no disappointment. The brothers have not suddenly lost their touch. They do for Billy …
The first film directed by character actor Grant Heslov has a promising premise (paranormal military research), plenty of script troubles (an investigative reporter's blathering narration, the disruptive channel-switching between periods twenty years apart, a sputtery and rudderless last act), and a couple of tickling performances by Jeff Bridges as the …
The title figure is the designated fixer for the elite Manhattan law firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, touted as a “miracle worker” but more modest in his self-assessment: “I’m not a miracle worker, I’m a janitor. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean it …
George Clooney’s relationship with sci-fi fantasies has been spotty at best. A finely condensed Cliff’s Notes abbreviation: Solaris was Steven Soderbergh’s aesthetically bountiful endeavor to distill Tarkovsky for the masses. Theatre ushers loved the film, as low audience turnout left little to clean up between shows. Gravity was an Awards-season …
Director Jodie Foster’s latest is one long series of narrative gotchas masquerading as moral or intellectual sophistication before finally revealing that it offers nothing more than world-weary sentimentality. (I guess after you’ve gutted everything else — moral outrage, systemic corruption, media vampirism, basic human decency, the plight of the common …
In the latter days of World War II, a band of charming, aging misfits (Bill Murray! George Clooney! Bob Balaban! John Goodman! Matt Damon! Plus that French guy and that English dude!) is tasked with designating, preserving, and ultimately, recovering the art looted by the Nazis during their European conquest …
A road comedy, “based upon The Odyssey by Homer,” about three chain-gang fugitives in Depression-era Mississippi. (The title, should you need reminding, comes from Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels: the proposed title for a “meaningful” film by a refractory Hollywood contract director, whose subsequent quest to get in touch with the …
The gang of scammers and heisters reassembles on a weak premise (revenge for the backstabbed and cardiac-arrested Elliott Gould), weaker even than the deeper premise of making a huge pile of money for Warner Brothers. Despite the "emotional" motivation, there is no loss of smugness (only a loss of Julia …
The blossoming romance of two single parents who must juggle his or her job crisis and his or her only child (sometimes both children at the same time) over the course of one rainy day, one busy day, one hectic day, one frantic day, one long day. (One of them …
Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel falls compliantly in line with the post-Get Shorty view of the author as a fashion plate of the hip, the flip, the cool, the edgy. The result: a cops-and-robbers game that sacrifices logic and suspense for snigger and swagger. In the process, …
Stick-thin Nicole Kidman and stuck-on-himself George Clooney pound the trail of hijacked nuclear warheads from Russia to the United Nations, leaving little time for sexual sparring and flirting, and leaving almost nothing for anyone else in the world to do. The filmmaking celebrates and emulates brisk efficiency (sometimes slipping into …
Moderately old-fashioned but modishly souped-up, grandiose, operatic, and overscaled account of a real-life disaster at sea ("a disaster of epic proportions," in the forecast of a TV weatherman), the swallowing of the Andrea Gail swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass., during the "Storm of the Century" of 1991. James Horner, …