Self-betterment swill, to do with a cutthroat London bond trader (Russell Crowe, disconcertingly fey) who inherits from his uncle a rundown wine-growing estate in Provence, the happy stamping ground of his boyhood holidays, and who, returning there to sell the place, falls again under its spell -- and under that …
From Adam Sandler's Happy Madison production outfit, a losers' comedy below the standard of the head man. Now, that's low. So, Allen Covert, instead, takes the lead role of an overaged video-game tester reduced to living with his grandmother and two old cronies (i.e., crones). It would play like a …
Not unpalatable, but predictable and corny anti-gang message movie, based on the "TRUE STORY" (in preludial capital letters) of an experimental football program at Camp Kilpatrick juvenile detention center. Filmed in an in-your-face style by director Phil Joanou, with emphasis on coarse-grained closeups and pushy telephoto shots. Dwayne "The Rock" …
Well-tailored frights in a disjointed narrative, fattening the portfolio of director Takashi Shimizu. Elegant Jennifer Beals, in the shorter of two intertwined (and ultimately knotted together) storylines, does everything asked of her and more. With Amber Tamblyn, Arielle Kebbel, Edison Chen, Joanna Cassidy, and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Dito Montiel's brutish coming-of-age film, his first, set in Astoria, N.Y., in the Eighties, and partly in the present, so that dissimilar actors occupy the same roles (while the grown-ups in the Eighties stay in their same roles but get grayer). No doubt a "personal" film -- the central character …
Ryan Gosling has his arms full as a do-gooding, dedicated, young, white, liberal history teacher and girls' basketball coach at an inner-city middle school, a voluntary role model who develops a special friendship with a fatherless black girl and a rivalry for her affections with a neighborhood dope peddler. Oh, …
Computer-animated message movie about the pressure of conformity and (separate message) the plunder of nature, more specifically about a species of pop-song-singing penguins, into whose midst is born a "different," an aberrant, tap-dancing penguin (try, if you can, to put the pudgy trudging birds of March of the Penguins out …
Thonggrrrl14 makes a chat-room date with Lensman319, which is to say a fourteen-year-old, pixie-haired schoolgirl and a professional photographer eighteen years her senior, but predator becomes prey in this simple-minded, long-drawn-out ritual of revenge, essentially a two-character piece, an interminable tennis volley of his-and-hers faces, grueling, fatiguing, suffocating. With Patrick …
David Ayer resumes his self-appointed role as police watchdog, this time as director in addition to screenwriter (Training Day, Dark Blue). The man he has his eye on, a very disturbed veteran of the action in Afghanistan, is not already a policeman but soon hopes to be. When, however, he …
High crime and low in the Cayman Islands, with a motley cast of characters. A doubling-back storyline suppresses suspense, and the jumpy, manic visual style stirs up mainly annoyance. With Orlando Bloom, Zoe Saldana, Bill Paxton, Agnes Bruckner, Stephen Dillane, and Anthony Mackie; written and directed by Frank E. Flowers.
Ward Serrill's video documentary chronicles the story of Bill Resler, Seattle tax man turned girls' basketball coach, and of his prize pupil, Darnellia Russell, a black transfer from her neighborhood Garfield High to white-bread Roosevelt High: "Darnellia Russell is my only chance at being famous." The story spans her entire …
At first blush, a slick remake of the schlocky Wes Craven gorefest of 1977. But because the director (Alexandre Aja) is French in origin, besides being the offspring of a film director and a film critic, perhaps it's also an hommage. Perhaps, too, there's something of significance to be read …
Alan Bennett's much-decorated theater piece comes to the screen with its original stage director and cast intact: Nicholas Hytner, that would be, and Richard Griffiths, Stephen Campbell Moore, Frances de la Tour, et al. A permanent record, as it were, further decorated, for the occasion, with extraneous bits of rockin' …
Writer and director Nancy Meyers arranges an Internet home exchange, for two weeks at Christmastime, between two wounded women desperate to get away: a London newspaper columnist (Kate Winslet) with a cozy cottage in Surrey, and a Hollywood trailer-cutter (Cameron Diaz) with a modernist mansion in Beverly Hills. The agreed-upon …
The speculative investigation into the death of Superman -- i.e., the man who played him on television, George Reeves -- by gunshot on June 16, 1959, divides itself into the present-tense, but in no other sense tense, nosing-around of a shady private eye (Adrien Brody) and a past-tense review of …