The relationship thing. Old marrieds, new marrieds, engaged-to-be-marrieds. Kicked around in dialogue that seems to have an ear cocked for a laugh track ("He's still the most charming man I've ever met. I just can't stand to be with him right now" and "Fifty percent of all marriages end in …
The big-screen resuscitation of the defunct HBO series (1998-2004) runs, or better say sashays, two hours and twenty minutes. That’s a lot of clothes and accessories, a lot of accompanying pop songs, a lot of chatty first-person narration, a lot of superficiality, a lot of vacuity. Maybe it would help …
The big-screen sequel transfers the base of operations from New York to Abu Dhabi, the advertised New Middle East where the self-indulgent girls — er, self-indulgent middle-aged gals (Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall) will be overindulged on an expenses-paid jaunt courtesy of an Arabian film producer, …
Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, and Ellen Page in an indie misfit comedy in an academic setting, which enables the viewer to feel more virtuous when not laughing than when not laughing at a low-brow Hollywood comedy: “My fun’s just a little more cerebral than your fun.” …
Hollywood film crew invades a sleepy little burg in rural Vermont. (The watchword on the streets is "Go you Huskies!") Make no mistake. The real invader, merciless as any Martian body snatcher, is writer-director David Mamet, who compels all his characters, natives and aliens alike, to speak his own secret …
Big-screen blowup of the culty Comedy Central series built around Amy Sedaris, looking uncannily like Tracey Ullman in one of her countless disguises, as a sexually ambiguous (or ambidextrous) ex-con ex-junkie who returns to high school in her late forties, afflicted with all the normal anxieties about "fitting in." A …
Sloppy cop show. If a car chase takes place first thing in the morning, it shouldn't be nightfall by the time they pull a groggy survivor out of the wreckage. And if again a body is fished out of the river first thing, it shouldn't be nightfall when the homicide …
Theater director Daniel Sullivan's re-staging of the Jon Robin Baitz play, still stagebound, about a Holocaust survivor and old established New York publisher (Ron Rifkin) who has no room for frivolity on his booklist. There's some fun in the character's unyieldingness, as well as in the particular titles he champions: …
Lelouchian itinerary of coincidence and convergence on the road map of romance -- but cutesified to the heights of embarrassment. And after all, the entire thing is one, long, teasingly delayed Meet-Cute. (The model is probably Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle, more than Lelouch's And Now My Love.) Sarah Jessica …