Third installment in the Twilight “saga,” with a new director, David Slade, not to say new blood, only recirculated blood. The ongoing grooming of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner as poster boys to be pinned up in pink bedrooms across the land reminds the viewer continually, with pop songs chiming …
Mel Gibson, in his first starring role in eight years, comes back strong, and gracefully aged, as a Boston police officer tracking down his daughter’s shotgun killer. The detective work — the mistaken first assumption is that the detective himself was the intended target — is solid and followable, and …
Trepidation is not the ideal frame of mind in which to approach a film, but after I Stand Alone and Irreversible, the French enfant terrible Gaspar Noé merits nothing less and nothing else, this time offering up a spoken synopsis of The Tibetan Book of the Dead during the descent …
Halfway engaging, halfway aggravating documentary on street art and its inevitable commercialization. Signed by the pseudonymous Banksy, a British graffiti artist who zealously guards his true identity (“The Scarlet Pimpernel of Street Art,” as one newspaper headline puts it) and who appears here on screen wearing a hoodie in silhouette …
Adolescent action fantasy from senior citizen Sylvester Stallone: an elite team of mercenaries descend upon the stock bad guys on the mythical island of Vilena for a chopped-up orgy of carnage. The star, director, and co-writer surrounds himself with younger-generation men of action, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Steve Austin, Randy …
The filmmaking team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, after the mainstream excursion of The Nanny Diaries, return to the alternative cinema — home of their American Splendor — with a vengeance: a kooky comedy about a transvestite aspiring writer (creepmousy Paul Dano) taken under wing by an aging …
Pedestrian disease-of-the-week movie (Pompe Disease by name, a form of muscular dystrophy), typically “inspired by true events” and aptly produced by CBS Films. Giving it big-screen cred is Harrison Ford as the crusty Cornhusker who provides the breakthrough in treatment: a bass-fishing eccentric at the University of Nebraska, listening loudly …
The Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson Affair, retold from their side, the covert CIA agent unmasked and defamed in retaliation for her husband’s op‑ed critique of the invasion of Iraq. Quite incoherent in its exposition, although because it’s a true and a well-reported story, we know where we’re headed; and quite …
Bruiser Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson really ought to share star billing with his equally muscle bound Chevelle SS, but instead it goes to a greasy, ruined Billy Bob Thornton as the druggie cop assigned to stop Johnson's mission of (mostly) righteous revenge. The story, almost Western in its spareness, wants …
Not so much a movie about boxing as a movie about fighting, about the act of conflict. Mark Wahlberg plays Micky Ward, the real-life road worker from Lowell, Massachusetts, who recharged his sputtering boxing career to win the WBU Light Welterweight Championship in 2000. Amy Adams stars as his supportive …
An act of scholarship: re-examining a can of unedited Nazi-propaganda footage, some of it patently staged, of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, an hour’s worth of ghostly images of people long gone, seemingly emphasizing the contrasts of poverty and luxury, but overall of mysterious purpose. (It is, more than anything …
“You never,” reads the advertising tagline, “forget your first love.” But you can soon forget a namby-pamby Rob Reiner film about somebody else’s first love, two preadolescents circa 1960. (Stand by Me territory, with commensurate goldie-oldies.) The alternating his-and-hers perspectives would add more interest if there were any interest to …
Six documentarists — Seth Gordon, Morgan Spurlock, Alex Gibney, Eugene Jarecki, and the team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady — pitch in, in turn, to popularize further the views of economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner — on “the hidden side of everything” — in their nonfiction best-seller …
John Travolta, totally unrestrained, as a self-admiring U.S. superspy with the demeanor of a Hell’s Angel (“Tell me that wasn’t some impressive shit!”), shooting up the City of Light in a grainy sallow digital image. Jonathan Rhys Meyers affects a credible American accent as his timid embassy liaison, perhaps the …
The feature debut of director Aaron Schneider starts like a house afire, meaning it starts literally with a house on fire, and proceeds from there to shave off a thin slice of folksy baloney purportedly based on fact, something to do with a misanthropic old Tennessee hermit who throws himself …