The film that dares to ask: will you buy Sandra Bullock as a borderline, ball-busting political strategist? To bring down your asking price, the film takes her south of the border, where everything is portrayed as cheaper: the cynicism, the political strategizing, the despair, and even the redemption. At least …
Insert sinking balloon joke here. James Franco mugs his way through director Sam Raimi’s candy-colored CGI wonderland as a carnival magician who finds himself called upon to rally the oppressed people of Oz to believe in him. Or at least, to believe in the power of their dreams? Anyway, belief …
Director Guillermo Del Toro goes for the gold, offering up a robots-punch-monsters movie tailor-made for the international market: modeled after Japanese anime, set largely in Hong Kong, featuring Chinese, Russian, and Australian heroes operating giant robots named with a German word, and offering a Brit (Idris Elba) as its emotional …
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 original (well, first, anyway) Pacific Rim was a genre love letter. The sequel is an exemplar, a big-budget actioner that goes about its bang-up business with skill and speed. (The only thing more breakneck than the pacing is director and co-writer Steven S. DeKnight’s frequency of …
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 original (well, first, anyway) Pacific Rim was a genre love letter. The sequel is an exemplar, a big-budget actioner that goes about its bang-up business with skill and speed. (The only thing more breakneck than the pacing is director and co-writer Steven S. DeKnight’s frequency of …
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 original (well, first, anyway) Pacific Rim was a genre love letter. The sequel is an exemplar, a big-budget actioner that goes about its bang-up business with skill and speed. (The only thing more breakneck than the pacing is director and co-writer Steven S. DeKnight’s frequency of …
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 original (well, first, anyway) Pacific Rim was a genre love letter. The sequel is an exemplar, a big-budget actioner that goes about its bang-up business with skill and speed. (The only thing more breakneck than the pacing is director and co-writer Steven S. DeKnight’s frequency of …
It may be difficult to find a review of director and co-writer Paul King’s followup to his first take on Michael Bond’s émigré bear from darkest Peru that does not employ some form of the word “charming.” This is right and just, and the achievement is surely harder than the …
Here is the privilege of artistic reputation: even your fallow periods may serve as fertile ground. When we meet filmmaker Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas, low-key and soulful as the stand-in for writer-director Pedro Almodóvar), he is floating underwater, eyes closed, motionless, not even a bubble escaping his nostril. An artist, …
Pro-nuke propaganda it may be, but at least it's straightforward about it. (As opposed to, say, pro-solar propaganda from an oil industry that knows solar poses no real threat to market share.) Plus, it's smart about its presentation, employing as it does a slew of environmentalists who have converted — …
Not so much a motion picture as a moving postcard. The big deal here is that it’s the first Hollywood movie filmed in Cuba since Castro’s revolution. They even got inside Ernest Hemingway’s house, Finca Vigía! The big deal should be that the autobiographical screenplay was written by Denne Bart …
A grown-up movie for kids, if by grown-up you mean gleefully cynical about human nature, fascinated with ugliness, and spiced with sexual references of varying heat. Perhaps it would be better to call it a movie that views kids as little more than miniature grown-ups; all the best gags land …
Director Taylor Hackford gives author Donald Westlake's famous thief another crack at the big screen. The effort probably won't make anyone forget Lee Marvin in Point Blank, but it just might eclipse Mel Gibson's Payback. Parker is a man of principle; if he weren't played by Jason Statham in perpetual …
Fascinating look into the world of science — or more precisely, the lives of scientists — structured around the construction and deployment of the Large Hadron Collider, aka the Largest Experiment in Human History. The goal is to observe the heretofore undetected Higgs Boson particle, the weight of which may …
Out there at the edge of the city, amid the crumbling concrete and untended landscape, the charismatic Gregori (Vincent Cassel) has assembled a big, happy family from mistreated, grateful women and their innocent children. Or mostly innocent: the kids help pay the bills by conducting assassinations out there in The …