Director Neill Blomkamp goes back to the single-city, small-scale sci-fi of District 9, but keeps the super-sized ambition of Elysium in this story of a busted police droid who becomes the world's first sentient robot, thanks to nerd God Dev Patel. The result is frequently messy to the point of …
Two top actresses in low-to-medium-level material, a slavering serial-killer thing, with an overdrawn finale and a checklist of unanswered questions. Sigourney Weaver, as the traumatized agoraphobic brandy-swilling psychological expert, comes too close to repeating herself too soon after her victim role in Death and the Maiden. But Holly Hunter forges …
A recasting of The Prisoner of Zenda or The Prince and the Pauper or State Secret (or others) as a post-Perot piece of sentimental populism about a Presidential look-alike who's installed in the Oval Office by Machiavellian wire-pullers when the real President is laid low by a stroke. (Overexertion with …
Roman Polanski comes as close here to his avowed ideal of the one-character movie as he has come since his feature debut, Knife in the Water: three characters. His third feature, Cul-de-Sac, came close also, and the isolated seaside surroundings of this one, coupled with Ben Kingsley's shaven pate (almost …
Amiable spoof of the Star Trek phenomenon (pre-reunion on the big screen), with names changed to protect the guilty. The most scrumptiously swallowable material has to do with the jostling egos of these former TV co-stars, chained to each other and to their old roles as they hobble around the …
Three parapsychologists, having had their academic grant rescinded and their research equipment confiscated, go into private practice as exterminators of any and all supernatural pests. Just in time, too. It seems that an Art Deco skyscraper on Central Park West has been designed as an antenna to pull in assorted …
A not despicable reprise of the same material, juvenile yet jaded, profoundly lazy and lackadaisical, sufficiently disdainful, even, to aim an occasional joke over the heads of the rubes (something about "my Laura Antonelli tapes"). It is least despicable when least jaded and lazy: Rick Moranis's ineptness as a courtroom …
A New England realtor ignites long-buried emotions and family secrets when she rekindles a romance with her old high school flame. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Morena Baccarin, and Rob Delaney. Directed by Maya Forbes.
Flatteringly retouched portrait of zoologist and gorilla-rights activist Dian Fossey (a bit more warty in the last half-hour, as the movie begins to tabulate suspects for her unsolved murder). It's a "terrific role" for Sigourney Weaver (it gives her plenty of chance to stick out her chin and accentuate that …
By day, Sigourney Weaver is an underpaid researcher at the Institute for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies in London (with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a pair of designer eyeglasses to show for it); by night, an "escort girl" at the famous and infamous Jasmine Agency (and unbeknownst to her, a …
Witless, long-winded comedy about a mother-daughter team of con artists named Conners. That's a sample. The seven-inch semi-erect penis that gets broken off a statue, twice, is another and another and another. Miles of cleavage (if that's how it's measured), though the fifty-one-year-old Sigourney Weaver can't keep pace with twenty-one …
Severely strained kiddie film adapted from a much-decorated novel by Louis Sachar. Three plotlines -- the origins of a hundred-fifty-year-old family curse in Latvia; interracial love, bigotry, and revenge in the Wild West; a juvenile hard-labor camp in present-day Texas -- keep interrupting one another and impeding momentum. The third …
Ang Lee's adaptation of a 1994 novel by Rick Moody, set in John Cheever country at Thanksgiving, with the ice outdoors outweighing even that in the cocktail glasses. The view of the people -- alienation as a spectator sport -- is no less aloof than in the filmmaker's Jane Austen …
The feature-film debut of writer-director Dan Harris is a coping-with-suicide comedy, or dramedy at the very most, and lukewarm either way, about the aftershocks of an Olympic hopeful's abrupt exit. Those left behind include Emile Hirsch, a sort of cross between Leo DiCaprio and Clea DuVall, as the unathletic younger …