Amiable Phil Rosenthal, having created the hit show Everybody Loves Raymond, went to Moscow to help craft a spinoff copy, Everybody Loves Kostya. Smart but sometimes clueless (taken to a Russian military museum, he can’t relate), he felt frustrated by a culture gap in humor, intrusive bosses, miscasting, etc. This …
Extremely ambitious and incredibly pretentious. Also false. A brainy, yappy New York boy (Thomas Horn) feels guilty about not answering the WTC calls of his doomed dad (Tom Hanks) on 9/11/01. He walks around New York looking for fishy clues, and a mute, grizzled man (Max von Sydow) tags along …
The ancient, noble quest of the archetypal hero was resonated by famous mythologist Joseph Campbell. This film says little about Campbell but quotes his ideas (“find your bliss,” etc.) in a buzzy spray of testimonials, celebrities (Tony Hawk, Mick Fleetwood, Laird Hamilton, Deepak Chopra), film clips (Star Wars, The Wizard …
Dramatized uplift of an inspiring man, with the glow of a National Geographic production. Oliver Litondo is moving as very old, partly crippled (from torture) Maruge, a long-ago Mau Mau rebel in Kenya who decides he finally wants to read and write. Pretty Naomie Harris is a charisma burst as …
Emily Blunt is so honestly appealing that she saves moments, but nothing can save the film. Director Nicholas Stoller wrote this glib junk with actor Jason Segel, who has many moments of stupid, fumbling vulnerability as a young chef resentful when teacher Blunt outpaces him. Engaged, they push off marriage, …
Spirited remake of the 1984 hit about hormonal teens who face a preacher’s ban on dancing, their liberation coming with the title tune. Dennis Quaid is the grim cleric who hates the devil’s music — funny, if you remember Quaid rippin’ and rockin’ in Great Balls of Fire! Kenny Wormald, …
The internet and cell phones have come to Albania, yet that doesn’t keep a blood feud and its archaic rules from tormenting a small town. The bull-brained machismo earns female contempt (“They all act like children”), and a bright teen boy (Tristan Halilaj) desperately wants out. Director Joshua Marston, who …
Movie or infomercial? Both, convincingly. “Let food be your medicine,” said wise old Hippocrates. Too often, modern food hooks us on salt, sugars, cholesterol, and meat-based protein, causing obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease. Director Lee Fulkerson ate himself back to health by following the advice of Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr. …
A vacuum tube that chuckles. Breast and penis and poo poo gags, a cute baby, lots of bar chatter, and insufferably glib Adam Scott as a New Yorker who has a kid outside marriage with his sex buddy Jennifer Westfeldt. She has great cheekbones, also wrote and directed, but this …
A stylized pipsqueak comedy from performance artist, director, and deadpan conceptualist Miranda July. Her spaced husband (Hamish Linklater) talks to the moon, and July speaks in a wee voice as her sick cat. The film floats as a bubble of whimsy, like Pee-wee Herman and David Lynch conversing underwater in …
Serge Gainsbourg, the iconic French singer, grows up (more like down) from a snarky Jewish imp provoking anti-Semites in Occupation Paris and becomes a runty media star (Eric Elmosnino) who beds famous women: Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis), Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta), Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon), ripe to satisfy his scrawny …
The ancestral muse for this is choreographic-editing wizard Busby Berkeley. There seem to be about two million shots, each designed to arrive in perfect sync as a snap, pop, and crackle of Gleek delirium. The big-cult TV show spawned a touring concert event, filmed in 3-D at New Jersey venues. …
A Shakespearean herald reading the play’s old prologue is comically yanked at the beginning. So much for the literary roots, and despite mostly British accents, the wit leans to “Adios, loser,” “Let’s kick some grass,” and a “pansy” joke as garden gnomes fill out plastic remnants of the Romeo and …
A trembling, French, often smart view of first fixation. Lola Créton is charmingly vivid and vulnerable as the Parisian teen whose obsession with a smitten, more sensible guy (Sebastian Urzedowsky) makes him restless. She gets partly rehabbed by her teacher of architecture but pines for the former life plan. Romantic …
Pamela Yates returns to bloody Guatemala, where her When the Mountains Tremble (1984) helped alert the world to military persecution, even genocide. Mayan activist Rigoberta Menchú rose to a fame that led to her Nobel Prize. Yates revisits the endless struggle — a racial and class conflict — and her …