A literary hack (Ewan McGregor) — “You name it, he ghosts it” — lands the plum assignment of, for a cool quarter of a million, polishing up the memoirs of a Tony Blair-ish former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan), stepping into the shoes of the previous silent collaborator who has …
Moderately filthy romantic comedy, moderately amusing in compensation, about a young man with commitment issues until he meets a loosey-goosey gal who holds the high score on the Centipede machine at the neighborhood watering hole and whose favorite movie is, hold your breath, The Shawshank Redemption. (Takes all kinds.) Only …
Famed nightclub performer Duke Mitchell is Paul, a paroled gangster with an unholy scheme: to kidnap the Pope and 'charge a dollar ransom from every Catholic in the world. Filmed in 1976 but not released until 2010.
Brash title for a movie not about Muhammad Ali and not remotely great, only goodish. First-time writer and director Shana Feste has devised a sticky situation — the parents of a highway fatality open their home to the boy’s pregnant girlfriend — and she uses it to anatomize the different …
Noah Baumbach, writer and director of The Squid and the Whale, features Ben Stiller as a kind of middle-aged-crazy Jesse Eisenberg (nose up, shoulders forward), a self-absorbed self-conscious ineffectual intellectual, who, upon his release from a mental hospital, wants to concentrate on “really trying to do nothing for a while,” …
Topical war film feeds off and into the widespread cynicism, which is to say the widespread enlightenment, as to the motives behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Matt Damon, maturing into an actor of spartan economy and vigilant interiority, plays the army officer charged with running down the …
Five tired comic actors (Kevin James, Rob Schneider, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, David Spade, in approximate order of increasing lassitude), in a matchingly washed-out image, assemble for the funeral of their childhood basketball coach, panning for a few grains of middle-aged masculine truth and coming up completely empty, everything strained, …
You can, with CGI effects and scale models, make Jack Black far bigger than everyone else and even have him pee on Blenheim Palace. But he remains a bloated teddy bear, a hip doof from School of Rock doing silly stuff at the expense of Jonathan Swift’s classic social satire. …
If only for its proximity in time, this naturally calls to mind Gran Torino. But the vigilante-revenge plot brings it closer to a geriatric Death Wish, with a widowed pensioner in a London slum arming himself against Clockwork Orange ultra-violent youth and drawing on his training in the Royal Marines …
Proof No. 7 that J.K. Rowling’s vision is excitingly served by a savvy film team that both embellishes and concentrates her mythology. Almost Dickensian in richness, the epic darkens as the young heroes wander through a gloomy but elegant wilderness like little Lears, hounded by Lord Voldemort’s furies. Hogwarts and …
Commercial French comedy ideal for a Hollywood remake. A professional breaker-upper, with strict principles, takes only cases of unknowingly unhappy women and never stoops to sexual relations to liberate them. The focal case is atypical: the woman by all measures seems happily engaged, and her rich handsome devoted fiancé is …
Grim morality tale with affectations of social commentary on gang culture, nihilistic philosophy, even evil itself. The screen is awash in stale grays and greasy olive tones. The film does have its visceral touches: The authentic realization of London neighborhood hellholes, the hero’s phoenix-like emergence from a cocoon of flayed …
Picturesque, flaccidly erotic film of Hemingway’s posthumous novel. Virile charisma seems to drain out of handsome Jack Huston as the Hem-like writer, once his hair is dyed blond to match minxish wife Mena Suvari. The movie toys with androgyny and shows off the body of Latin sexpot Caterina Murino in …
Clint Eastwood’s first venture into the supernatural, structured in three distinct, interwoven, and, we may presume, converging storylines, dealing directly with the subject of death and beyond. The screenplay by Peter Morgan, known for such docudramas as The Queen and Frost/Nixon, touches upon, gives voice to, a variety of common …
Guy-jinks involving three middle-aged buddies and a nephew who, for R&R, repair to a rundown mountain resort, the playground of their salad days, where a malfunctioning hot tub transports them magically (as opposed to science-fictionally) back to 1986. They still look middle-aged to us and themselves, but everyone else sees …