Small comedy of larger-than-average ambition, sharp in flavor and in perception, centered around a middle-aged racetrack junkie and hack sitcom writer. Peter Tolan, the screenwriter and first-time director, has his own sitcom résumé, Murphy Brown, Home Improvement, The Larry Sanders Show, far from the pits, though his work here is …
Digital documentary by The Hennegan Brothers (as they bill themselves, like a trapeze act) about the run-up to, and the actual running of, the 132nd Kentucky Derby. Their focus falls primarily on the trainers, although, a bit blindered, not on the actual training; and their assemblage of interviews and intimate …
A pair of backed-up-against-the-wall black Baltimoreans (Ice Cube, Tracy Morgan) go into a ghetto church with the intent to rob it, enter into endless negotiations at gunpoint with the fundraising committee, fix the air-conditioning, and come out better, and not poorer, men. A caper comedy devoid of laughs. With Chi …
Uningenious, straight-ahead, pedestrian account of a true story of David and Goliath, the man who patented the intermittent windshield wiper (or as he called it, the Blinking-Eye Wiper) versus the Ford Motor Company, who took his invention without compensation. Also a story of obsession: he neglects his teaching job; his …
Alarm-sounding documentary by Irena Salina on the world’s dwindling supply of clean water, the pollution of it with toxins and the privatization of it for profit. Hard lessons taught by talking heads in a fuzzy digital image. And among its many musical manipulations, the film hops onto the “Spiegel im …
Badly drawn houseflies (general conformation and consistency of troll dolls) stow away aboard Apollo 11. The 3D computer animation may escape the screen; it can’t escape the insipidness. With the voices of Trevor Gagnon, David Gore, Philip Bolden, Christopher Lloyd, and (as himself) Buzz Aldrin; directed by Ben Stassen.
Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson fight to out-cute one another, and out-bronze one another, as a still-in-love divorced couple on a Caribbean treasure hunt, in competition with a murderous rapper. Some of the brutality is truly brutal; none of the humor is humorous. With Donald Sutherland, Ray Winstone, Alexis Dziena, …
Bargain-basement comedy, improvisational in feel, documentary in technique, about a tae-kwon-do instructor (Danny McBride) with a fragile ego and a thin veneer of machismo. Some of the notions seem viable, though they don’t really flourish. With Ben Best and Mary Jane Bostic; directed by Jody Hill.
A bullied Boston teenager and martial-arts film aficionado (Michael Angarano) gets transported through the Gate of No Gate to a kind of kung-fu Shangri-La, where he learns to fight from the best (Jackie Chan, Jet Li), while fulfilling a prophecy of returning a magic golden staff to Five Elements Mountain, …
Comedy of heartbreak and heartmend, under the imprimatur of producer Judd Apatow, but directed by newcomer Nicholas Stoller, and written by its star, Jason Segel, who envisions for himself the role of a would-be serious composer, cranking out mood music for a network crime drama when he would rather be …
A blissfully unmarried couple (Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn) make the rounds, one day over the holidays, to the four households of their respective divorced parents. Any truth in the humor is buried in crudeness. The classy supporting cast (Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen, Jon Voight) proves to be an …
Playwright Peter Morgan restages the 1977 “no holds barred” TV interview of Richard Nixon by British talk-show host David Frost, and the drum-beating buildup to it. A prizefight metaphor runs throughout, permitting director Ron Howard to slip comfortably into the underdog mode of his Cinderella Man, with Frost, as it …
Stoical prole sob story has some fresh ground to go over — the smuggling of illegal aliens through the slushy snow of the Mohawk Indian reservation on the Canadian border — and some stark scenery to go with it. Writer and director Courtney Hunt, whose plotting and pacing are sloggingly …
Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own Austrian film of a decade earlier is not what it sounds like. Not fun and games, not funny ha-ha, not charades and Mad Libs. It has a good deal in common with his Caché, the clean tidy uncluttered images, the spooky absence of …