The Rapid Response Tactical Squad travels through a portal known as the Ark to get to Olduvai, Mars, and hunt down slimy creatures in semi-darkness. Mindless kill-and-be-killed action film, based on a video game, with one shooting-gallery section, from a subjective POV over a gunsight, and a musical background of …
The writing and directing debut of the mere co-writer on Coach Carter, John Gatins, is one of the endless supply of inspirational true sports stories to come to the screen, this one the horsetrack story, and only fractionally true, of a filly called Soñador (Spanish for Dreamer, but Mariah's Storm …
Modest little Mexican comedy by Fernando Eimbcke, shot in black-and-white, or anyway low-contrast gray, with an impassive static camera and a strong compositional eye for the artless, graceless lines and planes of a drab urbanscape. (The few grainy flashbacks with a mobile hand-held camera add nothing, and the one that …
Because you just don't see enough good Broadway revues any more. Especially not in movie theaters.
Big-screen transplant of the hayseed TV comedy circa 1980, a younger cousin of the likes of Smokey and the Bandit. There is thus a sort of rough justice in casting the mummified Burt Reynolds, the one-time Bandit, as an odious backwoods bigwig, a greedy pig named Hogg. One early chuckle …
Screenwriter Craig Lucas, of Longtime Companion and Prelude to a Kiss, turns director as well, bringing to the screen his own stage play, a behind-the-scenes peek into the studios and boudoirs of Hollywood: the negotiations over a labor-of-love screenplay about the death from AIDS of the writer's lover (his dream …
Resurrection of the character of that name, not from Greek tragedy, but from the superhero fantasy of a couple of years previous, Daredevil. Resurrection, literally. Just because she got herself killed off, back then, doesn't mean the spinoff has been relegated to a prequel: "Somebody must have brought her back …
There is always something a little embarrassing about a Cameron Crowe film, stemming mainly from the impression that he is trying too hard to ingratiate himself. Yet there is often something actually ingratiating as well, stemming paradoxically from how hard he tries. This one has plenty of both types of …
Everything you already knew about the plundering energy giant -- and worse. Archival clips (CNN, C-SPAN, etc.), talking heads, and the disembodied voice of Peter Coyote, narrator, retrace the route from boom to bust: a chance to be horrified and disgusted all over again. Some of the horror and disgust …
A road film in a sparse landscape, an adaptation of a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. It follows the quest -- the "very rigid search," in the uncertain English of the Ukrainian guide and translator -- for the peasant woman who in WWII saved the life of the late grandfather …
The courtroom drama wedded to the devil-possession horror show, two different worlds, as clearly evidenced when the D.A. jumps to his feet to object to a piece of defense testimony on the grounds of "silliness." The case — a Catholic priest accused of negligent homicide for removing a diagnosed "schizophrenic …
Christmas comedy about the gathering of a clan, and allies, in snowy New England at the holiday. The core family, name of Stone, numbers seven, so a lot is afoot: terminal cancer, a pregnancy, a gay-couple adoption (minorities within the minority: the couple is interracial and one-half hearing impaired), an …
Namely, Mr. Fantastic (a sort of Plastic Man), the Human Torch (more like a Human Comet), the Invisible Woman (plain enough), and the Thing (a cross between the Incredible Hulk and the Golem). The slender storyline explains how they got to be so fantastic, and it then gives them little …
Lust, maybe love, and larceny in the Florida sun, and lassitude in the darkened theater. The plot twists come very slowly and foreseeably. With Jacqueline Bisset, Adam Garcia, Alice Evans, and Stuart Wilson; written and directed by Klaus Menzel.