The scary (and gory) things on screen may be zombies, but the real monster here is the troll in the director’s chair. Jim Jarmusch and friends (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, et alia) have a laugh at the audience’s expense with a film that starts off sounding good, looking …
Brutal dictators and their conspiratorial would-be successors — they’re just like us! Read: grasping, vain, selfish, petty, blind to their own weakness and stupidity, and only too willing to let others suffer as long as they prosper and advance. Director and co-writer Armando Iannucci puts it all on black (comedy), …
Robert Rodriguez's big-budget Hollywood followup to his teensy-tiny El Mariachi: a faked folk tale, with a bubbling-over level of mirth, to do with an angelic avenger (the preening, posturing Antonio Banderas) who lugs around a private arsenal inside a guitar case. In spite of the newfound gloss, it still seems …
Suspenser in the tried-and-true pattern of the Boy Who Cried Wolf: a mendacious early adolescent (Matt O'Leary, vulnerable as required) who discovers that his well-heeled new stepdad (Vince Vaughn) is first of all a heel and next of all a psychopathic killer. The police might be forgiven for disbelieving that …
An uncommonly long-delayed sequel, and a medium-volume hoot. It is now A.D. 2013, or anyway it will be as soon as we pass through a preamble that explains how the Big One of the year 2000 created the Island of Los Angeles, thereafter converted into a prison colony of undesirables …
Above and beyond all else, around and through all else, the Coen brothers have assembled here a timeless document on their native state, Minnesota. On its notorious winters. On its snow shovels and its ice scrapers (implement of an uproarious temper tantrum). On its parkas and mittens and gloves and …
The heroine, out of a comic book by Daniel Clowes, is someone a critic could love. Not only a critic, rest assured. Fresh out of high school — or rather, jaded out of high school — she can produce an equal sneer for the wheelchair-bound valedictorian ("High school is like …
Tim Blake Nelson's filmization of his own stage play invites viewers once again to be ground under the Nazi boot heel. It poses the timeless question of how low the human animal will sink for survival -- and not even for survival, necessarily, but just "for vodka and bed linens," …
Five tired comic actors (Kevin James, Rob Schneider, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, David Spade, in approximate order of increasing lassitude), in a matchingly washed-out image, assemble for the funeral of their childhood basketball coach, panning for a few grains of middle-aged masculine truth and coming up completely empty, everything strained, …
The lively undead. Yes, that's the legendary Mel Brooks you hear lending his voice to Great-Grandpa Vlad in director Genndy Tartakovsky's sequel to his human boy-meets-monster girl romantic comedy for kids, Hotel Transylvania. Maybe that explains the relentless, unending, benumbing avalanche of gags (visual and otherwise), puns, and one-liners — …
Camped-up computer cartoon about a humpbacked lackey who bucks the class system in the land of Malaria and aspires to be an evil genius instead of just the lisping, switch-pulling assistant. The backdrops are sufficiently Gothic, but the figures are ghastly, and not in a good way. With the voices …
Directed by one-half of the co-directing team of The Big Night, Stanley Tucci, but not half as good a movie. The other half of that team, Campbell Scott, has an expanded role on screen as the monocled and facially scarred Teutonic martinet who runs a tight ship on a transatlantic …
Funny enough satire about that tragic juncture in American history where the glitz of “big room” Vegas illusionists was eclipsed by common street magicians. There's a moment where the title character, played by Steve Carell, encounters his childhood idol and inspiration, Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin), in a nursing home. Carrell …
The beginning takes place in the vicinity of an Orwellian dystopia, where a closely monitored populace ("Sodium Excess Detected," reads out a urinal at a morning pee) must live in regimented drudgery and sterile isolation, under stricter rules against intergender "proximity" than at a Catholic-school dance, and with the desperate …
Into a complacent marriage comes temptation, the wet-lipped Kerry Washington, a Platonic old friend with vertiginous décolletage. Chris Rock is the star, albeit no actor, and he's also the director and co-writer, nominally inspired by the last of Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," Chloe in the Afternoon, 1972. (The "Fin" …