Part two of Wes Ball's (The Maze Runner) adaptation of the hit YA trilogy runs and runs and ultimately stumbles on its way to part three. But first, there’s lots of running, both from evil authority figures who want to harvest our heroes to help fight against the zombie plague, …
American remake of Mostly Martha, blunted to the point of total pointlessness, eliminating the national differences between the German and the Italian, leaving only the passably cool Catherine Zeta-Jones and the insufficiently warm Aaron Eckhart as the executive chef and sous-chef at a swank Manhattan eatery. Abigail Breslin, of Little …
Like a soap bubble, writer-director Sally Potter’s arch sendup of the English intelligentsia (plus the odd coked-up banker) is brief, diverting, and laden with impending doom from its very first moments. (We open on a distraught and undone Kristin Scott Thomas, filmed in delicious black and white, opening her front …
Thanksgiving-from-Hell comedy wherein a rebellious daughter, living in a bad neighborhood in the big city, tries to prepare her first holiday meal for her barely functional family from the suburbs. Small but broad, cheap but commercial, with a movie-stealing performance by Sean Hayes as the prissy upstairs neighbor in possession …
Slow and "heavy" Americanization of an egghead detective novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Like a lot of actors-turned-director, Sean Penn is disposed to dump an emotional load on his actors and watch them stagger around under it awhile. Most of them -- Benicio Del Toro, Patricia Clarkson, Mickey Rourke, Vanessa Redgrave, …
Patchy, raggedy "indie," based on short stories of A.M. Homes: back and forth between four neighboring middle-class families, your proverbial lives of quiet desperation. Despite the juicing-up (roadway tragedy, the threat of pedophilia, a young boy's intimate conversational relationship with a Barbie doll), it remains flat and drab. With Glenn …
“Disturbing” would be one word, maybe the best word, for Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Fifties-period Dennis Lehane detective novel. Nothing, let’s be clear, in the list of ingredients — the Alcatrazzy asylum for the criminally insane, the locked-room mystery of a vanished female inmate, the dreamland visitations from the …
The rare feature film to be built around a dwarf -- a taciturn loner who moves into an abandoned train depot in a remote corner of New Jersey to get away from other people ("Hey, buddy, where's Snow White?"), and who instead falls into a web of new relationships with …
You can’t claim that Woody Allen’s rapid rate of production doesn’t show. Even the title of this one sounds more like brainstorming for a title than like a final decision: three names off the chalkboard of keywords. Vicky and Cristina, two separate people, are dissimilar American friends, the first pragmatic …
Co-written and -directed by the brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, this counts as the second American remake, after Louis Malle's crummy Crackers in 1984, of Mario Monicelli's prototypical caper comedy, Big Deal on Madonna Street. The freshness and flavor, naturally, are long gone. But considered as a repertory piece, like …
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 …