Comic thriller adapted from a graphic novel: fair warning. The flimsy, presumptuous plot sweeps up a former black-ops agent (classified “red,” for retired, extremely dangerous), along with the Pension Services phone operator with whom he has been flirting long-distance, in a high-level earthshaking conspiracy. A paranoid John Malkovich in a …
Tom Stoppard's scholarly jest (undergraduate-level), fleshing out two Shakespearean spear-carriers, reaches the screen a generation late, and demonstrates already that it lacks something of Hamlet's timelessness. Stoppard, directing the show himself, sets out to compensate for any dimmed cleverness by trying hard, harder, too hard -- beginning with the blues-and-howling-dog …
Imitation Jonathan Kellerman murder mystery (original screenplay by Akiva Goldsman), with a child psychologist as the detective (Richard Dreyfuss, short enough to empathize fully with his patients) and an autistic eight-year-old as the witness to the crime. It's not a kind of detection the mystery fan can take much part …
Droning instruction in politics, economics, and sociology from the liberal slant of John Sayles. (The liberalism is irreproachable: the cast is listed alphabetically, the photographer is Haskell Wexler.) You would like to think that in his fifteenth feature film, you could expect a certain level of professionalism and finesse in …
More fun to look forward to than actually to look at: a feature-lengthening of the TV commercials combining a live-action Michael Jordan and an animated Bugs Bunny, here reunited under the same director, Joe Pytka, along with other Looney Tunes luminaries, and at the last minute Bill Murray, for a …
Virtually a steal from Richard Quine's Pushover, an unjustly neglected film noir of the Fifties (especially neglected as a voyeuristic companion piece to, and from the same year as, Rear Window), about a police detective who falls for the gangster's girlfriend under his surveillance. Or anyway, that much of the …
Based on a Stephen King novella -- but Stephen King without supernaturalism: Stephen King encroaching instead on Sherwood Anderson territory. (Do they still read Sherwood Anderson in American high schools, or is it now all Stephen King, S.E. Hinton, and the "poetry" of Bruce Springsteen?) Set in the summer of …
The personal, not professional, feud between two competing aluminum-siding salesmen (Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito) starts out with Laurel-and-Hardy tit-for-tat attacks on each other's cars and escalates to wife-stealing (or wife-dumping, depending on the point of view). It is set in 1963, and in Baltimore, for no real purpose other than …
Pronounced “dubya.” Oliver Stone’s diplomatic biopic on our forty-third President (Josh Brolin, a dead-on impression, but where to go with it?) is so careful to avoid bias as to avoid purpose. It barely matches the caliber of a TV docudrama, much less the compensating snickers. In that department, Thandie Newton …
A fast-bonding psychiatric patient, after his first session with a new doctor, follows the man onto his summer vacation. Bill Murray lacks the guilelessness to pull this off (or the ability to fake it), and it doesn't help to have the script paving his way into everyone's heart but the …
A product of cinephiliac inbreeding. It has to do with a hitman named Critical Jim who, besides his work, loves movies ("The old movies, you know, where it was all about the story"), and it has even more to do with his assigned target, who delays his execution in the …
An earlier film from the director of Run, Lola, Run, Tom Tykwer -- and it's easy enough to understand why we didn't get to see it before Lola ran (and ran). The introduction of the central characters (their names typed out letter by letter on the screen), interspersed with a …
Remarkable for taking a lurid and ludicrous storyline — a federal prosecutor and aspiring politician plunges (reluctantly) into the world of high-priced escorts, even as the FBI goes after the very service he frequents — stocking it with a solid cast — Patrick Wilson as a twitchy, tortured Paul Newman, …