LEGO as cinema! LEGO as mathematical science! LEGO as therapy! LEGO as art! LEGO as theme park crammed with craggy scale replicas! LEGO as Holocaust remembrance!? (What do you expect from a Weinstein release?) LEGO as official Star Wars merchandiser! Leg’go the kiddie propaganda and there might have been something …
The once proud Dustin Hoffman, with a prissy lisp, bushy eyebrows, shrubby hair, and ice-cream suits, as the centuries-old proprietor of a magic toyshop: crushed under a riot of color and a steamroller of whimsy. With Natalie Portman, Jason Bateman, and Zach Mills; written and directed by Zach Helm.
It’s awards season, and the duo responsible for Blades of Glory and The Switch, virtuoso hacks Josh Gordon and Will Speck, earn a nomination for one the year’s gloomiest comedies. Box office anathema Jennifer Aniston stars as a CEO threatening to shutter her sybaritic little brother’s (T.J. Miller) failing branch …
The Americanization of a BBC miniseries qualifies as a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, and from more than one type of headline: the political sex scandal, the privatization of the military, the death throes of newspapers. The topicality inevitably gives rise to some soapboxing, and along with it some playing on the pieties …
Thin-ice romantic comedy tolerable only insofar as you can tolerate the greased wheels of contrivance as a source of entertainment in itself: the male BFF, strictly platonic but wanting more, of a would-be single mother swaps his sperm for that of her chosen donor, a blond Adonis who teaches Feminist …
Jason Bateman is Judd, a man who, by his own admission, has never taken any chances, who has spent his whole life playing it safe. Oh, dear. Cue the manic pixie dream girl. While you're at it, throw in a dead dad, a wayward wife, a trip home, a sexually …
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 …
Disney’s animated arm wrestles with race relations. Here, that means predators and prey: formerly enemies (the film requires you to resist any temptation to use the modifier “natural”), they have now evolved to the point of living as peaceful neighbors in an urban metropolis. Of course, out in the sticks, …