A mighty contest between the cool, interior sci-fi stylings of writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, In Time) and the overheated adolescent emotionality of Twilight creator Stephenie Meyer, who wrote the source material. Meyer wins in the end, but for the first two acts, the tension proves fruitful. Alien parasites known as …
A black comedy for whomever Arsenic and Old Lace suffices as a black comedy. The trumpeted preamble -- "This film is based on a true story": a story, so it develops, about a wife's repeated attempts to murder her husband after she discovers he's been tomcatting around on her -- …
All right. Agreed. Ang Lee’s heavily psychological Hulk was no world-beater. But did that mean, following in the footsteps of alternative versions of the Batman and Superman series, we wanted a new incarnation of this steroidal superhero, the unjolly green giant, a mere five years later? Action specialist (not master) …
Illustration, in a sketchy hand, of the Jon Krakauer nonfiction book on Christopher McCandless, a 1990 college graduate, on the doorstep of Harvard Law School, who gave away his tuition fund to Oxfam, obliterated his identity, renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, and swapped the evils of society for the purity of …
Unaware of her noble lineage, our titular princess is plucked from the convent in which her father placed her and called into service as the royal composer. Her first assignment: a dirge to celebrate the slaughter of the castle mermaid, who just so happens to be her BFF. (The sacrifice …
The basic situation is a combustible one. A political prisoner named Valentin shares a cell with a homosexual pederast named Molina in an unnamed Latin American country. The homosexual, who is eventually revealed to have been bribed by prison officials to worm information out of his cellmate, but by then …
When was the last time that three, count 'em, three war movies, set during three different wars, played town in the same week? First, thee's World War I as depicted in 1917, followed by World War II and Quezon's Game, and now the true-life story of Vietnam vet, Airman William …
That's where you end up when you go into hyperdrive without passing through an established Hypergate. The campy TV series from the Sixties serves as a frail scaffold on which to hang several smothering tons of special effects. Lacey Chabert, the spunky punky early teen in this Space Family Robinson, …
That would be the Archangel Michael, if you please. The one who battled Lucifer ("That was a long time ago"). The one who invented, so he claims, the concept of standing in line. The beer-bellied, crotch-scratching one who smokes cigarettes but nonetheless smells "like cookies." The one who now, losing …
Gus, the Con-Ed guy, needs to find a new mate for his ex, so he can stop paying alimony, so he can go partners in a bowling alley. There's a nice long moment of discomfort when the two exes (Matt Dillon, Annabella Sciorra) bump into each other in the company …
Carl Franklin's screen version of the Anna Quindlen novel -- careerist feminist daughter obliged to move back home to nurse her happy-housewife mother through the final stages of cancer -- does not escape the TV-movie-disease-of-the-week syndrome. Neither does it escape a certain schematicism in its treatment of women's issues, mother …
Stephen Hopkins’ account of track and field legend Jesse Owens and the controversy surrounding US participation in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 is overstuffed, muddy-headed, heavy-handed, derivative, and weirdly sanitized — and yet it almost works, because who wouldn’t thrill to see a black man take on Nazi ideology on …
The fifth collaboration between director Ridley Scott and leading man Russell Crowe (Body of Lies, American Gangster, A Good Year, Gladiator, count ’em) won’t satisfy your craving for the legend, but perhaps your craving, if any, for Dark Age dreariness, savage combat (shot in that skittery long-lens style that looks …