Not just a dysfunctional family; a determinedly, unrelentingly oddball, eccentric, wacky, weird, kooky, cracked family; but only a rarely and very mildly funny family. (None of this deters Gene Hackman, as the long-absent head of the clan, from his normal excellence.) Wes Anderson, the director, favors frontal and centered compositions, …
Kung Fu for laughs. A martial-arts master, member of the Imperial Guard in the Forbidden City, travels to Carson City, Nevada, to retrieve the abducted Princess Pei Pei. (Local pronunciation: "Princess Pee Pee." Local pronunciation of the master's name, Chon Wang: "John Wayne.") Jackie Chan has a new supply of …
The bare outline would look like a hundred other buddy comedies: two old friends from college, an ex-soap opera actor and a would-be novelist, take off for an ostensible round of golfing and wine-tasting a week before the former's wedding. They present a classic study in contrasts: the slob and …
The interweave of ordinary lives in a wintry Northeastern small town has a number of attractions in it, starting with the clear bright wide-screen image, letting in a lot of décor and townscape, albeit much of it self-satirically quaint and cornball. Kate Beckinsale shows off, not for the first time, …
Zero points for originality of concept or strategy of execution: another vintage TV show transferred to the big screen, and, after the fashion of The Brady Bunch of similar vintage, held up to ridicule for its datedness (its tight pants, its wide collars, its perms), among other things. The results …
It starts out as a men-behaving-badly skit about a couple of skirt-chasing cads who drop in on weddings to pick up susceptible girls and promptly drop them. After a frenetic montage of their modus operandi, however, the action settles into a perfectly conventional romantic comedy, hitting all the expected spots …
Auggie (Jason Tremblay), a fifth-grader born with severe facial deformities, attends public school for the first time. When handling similar material in Mask, Peter Bogdanovich surrounded his lead with a support system that would have made John Ford proud. Writer-director Stephen Chbosky’s inspiration apparently came from watching hours of ABC …
The unemployed, unemployable best man (identified by the initials "BM" on his jacket) moves in with his newlywed old buddy, a situation rich in annoyance, dirt-poor in amusement. The casting of Owen Wilson as the adult slacker guarantees the rich gets richer, the poor poorer. With Matt Dillon, Kate Hudson, …
More a facial expression than a movie. The expression is called Blue Steel (but of course there already was a movie called that), the trademark crinkled-brow and puckered-lip look of the "three-time male model of the year," Derek Zoolander. (He's working on a new look called Magnum, but it isn't …
The oldening of Ben Stiller, who directs, stars, and co-writes here, continues apace. It’s not just the sort-of sad, mostly doomed attempt to recapture (silly) lightning in a (men’s fragrance) bottle 15 years after his first story about the titular superdim supermodel. (Though the few times he manages it are …