Increasingly bushy-haired oil-rig men, their plane downed in an Alaskan storm, face extremely hairy wolves. No contest. As desperate men are picked off, Liam Neeson becomes even more the bravely stoical loner than he was in Schindler’s List. Joe Carnahan directed with strong weather effects, okay acting, and deaths not …
Griff (Ryan Kwanten) is a bullied Australian nerd who finds relief as a suited superhero in dark alleys. He meets a brainy nerdette (Maeve Dermody), and their romance comes into focus as they work on becoming invisible. The stars are okay, the effects are quaint, but writer-director Leon Ford depends …
Brendan Gleeson dominates as Irish country cop Gerry, a smart slob who loves whoring, drinking, shopping guns, and making funny quips. Like most of the Gaelic rustics, he is hip to American films and music, and in a mildly racist way, Gerry welcomes the stiffly formal FBI man — played …
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. …
Esai Morales is very good as the hard macho con paroled home to a Puerto Rican section of the Bronx. Harmony Santana, a transgender teen actor, is beyond very good as the son whose vulnerable hunger to become a woman infuriates the father. An excellent cast, including Judy Reyes as …
Here is your chance to see a penguin pee upside down, to hear Brad Pitt and Matt Damon as brave krill eager to escape the swarm (“Goodbye, krill world”), and to hear a kid penguin sing a Puccini aria with lyrics such as, “Life’s just a big pile of crazy.” …
Wintry Norwegian hills sprinkled with quaint ironies, as director Anne Sewitsky tricks up this vaguely comical tale of marital discord. An urban couple moves to the sticks, seemingly for robust choir singing. A rustic wife frets about her moose-hunting husband, secretly gay. An adopted Ethiopian kid is mute, but a …
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 …
The epic chronicle ends, after eight films that filled a decade. The over $7 billion in movie lucre it will finally receive is far less important than the many millions of fans who have loved the storytelling abundance, the beautiful splurges of craft, the three growing heroes (Daniel Radcliffe, Emma …
A Norwegian thriller “inspired” by American thrillers, now set for a Hollywood remake. Aksel Hennie plays a top corporate recruiter in Oslo who, to maintain the lifestyle of his tall Viking wife, steals an illicit Rubens painting. He spirals into a terrible mess, including a fully loaded outhouse. Credible actors …
A tricky and stylishly crafted movie from Montreal’s Xavier Dolan about a love triangle of which one side (surfer-ish blond hunk Niels Schneider) is the most desired but least loving. Drooling for him are a gay hipster (Dolan) and his sardonic, straight friend (Monia Chokri) in a splatter pattern of …
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 …
Keanu Reeves is like a streamlined Gregory Peck from a quiet planet where everyone has slow thoughts, and his performance of Lopakhin in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard has the pathos of a soulful coma. Back in Buffalo to rob a bank next to the theater, Reeves is swept by love …