Call it the Alien/Aliens effect. One alien on a single spaceship is a horror story, but a thousand aliens in a colony is almost necessarily an action pic. So while any single monster from R. L. Stine's series of young adult horror novels may have been enough to make kids …
A tribute to that dying breed, the public, progressive intellectual. Hagiography isn't always this entertaining; but then, Vidal was an entertainer. Novelist, yes; essayist, certainly; TV personality, hell yes; even erstwhile politician and screenwriter (Suddenly, Last Summer). But always an entertainer, if only to mask the pain of an awful …
Writer-director Cristian Mungiu continues his expert evisceration of his native Romania, and by extension, this whole rotten world and the people who make it that way, even as they convince themselves otherwise. Here, the remarkably sympathetic villain is a father (Adrian Titieni) who just wants a better life for his …
Director Wes Anderson's apologia pro style sua. Most of the action takes place in the pre-communist heyday of the titular (and pinkly ornate) Alpine retreat, and involves concierge extraordinaire Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his attempt to claim the priceless painting left to him by a grateful old guest/lover. The mannered, …
An Irish fable about how much joy and satisfaction an Irishman takes in a hard day's work. How much? So much that a man (Brendan Gleeson, looking beardy) will spin lies in every direction just to punch a clock: to the oil company he needs to choose his town for …
An illustrated existential crisis. Or, a survival story in which nearly every exterior event carries interior significance. Either way, it's gripping. The story is simple: an astronaut (a smooth-faced Sandra Bullock), cut loose from her spiritual moorings by a freak accident, is cut loose from her physical moorings by another …
Director Michael Gracey sprinkles age-defying pixie dust all over song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman to produce a modern musical version of the PT Barnum story that transforms the Great American Flimflammer into Saint Circus, patron of the outcast and unwanted (but also profitable). It turns out that rounding up freaks and …
Director Michael Gracey sprinkles age-defying pixie dust all over song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman to produce a modern musical version of the PT Barnum story that transforms the Great American Flimflammer into Saint Circus, patron of the outcast and unwanted (but also profitable). It turns out that rounding up freaks and …
Director Baz Luhrmann finds a suitable subject for the riotous excess of his directorial style in the riotous excess of the Jazz Age. By the time the onscreen parties lurch to a halt, you may feel a little buzzed yourself. Unfortunately, there's still rather a lot of movie remaining at …
Director Zhang Yimou enlists the friendly All-American face of Matt Damon to entice multiplex audiences to embrace subtitles, the glories of Chinese civilization, and the coming wave of Chinese cinema. (Damon’s face, scowly and granitic, is up to the task, his slippery accent isn’t.) The story feels American as well; …
Pay attention to the opening scene, people: a boy who plays with superhero dolls is chewed out by his dad in the world’s most opulent newspaper-editor’s office. Because, as the film’s last scene hammers home with a clang, that’s what this movie is about: a schlubby, bighearted underachiever coming to …
Ryan Reynolds’s neat ’n’ tidy physique, plunked down into a garish and untidy superhero movie. The story makes much of the character’s mythological underpinnings, then chucks ’em for the sake of Daddy issues and growing up. Oh, and there’s a girl. But the Big Bad Thing that threatens the universe …
Director James Gunn brings the same brand of sweetness-amid-the-horror he peddled in Super to a big-budget Marvel Universe space saga. Put another way: this is an anti-Avengers. There, a disparate group of heroes had to look past their own individual excellences in order to come together as a team. Here, …
More dick talk than most Marvel movies: “If what’s between my legs had a hand…,” references to engorged nether regions, “Yes, I do have a penis, and it’s a pretty good one,” etc. But what are you gonna do? We can’t all grow from our own cuttings like cute Baby …
James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy always played as a kind of funhouse Avengers — while Iron Man and Captain America traded quips and jokes, the stories were superhero serious: half of all the life in the universe needed saving, and they were the only folks powerful enough, smart enough, …