Oh, Lord. A 13-acre community garden in the heart of L.A., born out of the ashes of the riots? How could a mustache-twirling developer resist?
Big-screen reincarnation of the late-Sixties TV spy spoof, no longer a saboteur of a thriving genre, but just another copycat grave-robber. Diligent homage is paid to the original (“Would you believe...,” “Missed it by that much,” etc.), and the jokes are cranked out industriously, and both Steve Carell and Anne …
Director David Koepp once made a pretty good straight ghost story, Stir of Echoes, and with this he has made a pretty good comic ghost story. A misanthropic dentist (bringing to mind the always-looking-down-in-the-mouth punch line) has a near-death experience under general anesthetic for a colonoscopy, which for some reason …
An introspective attorney, in the midst of a high-profile murder trial, falls under the spell of a miniskirted coquette who would appear to have slept with half the male population of Monaco, including the lawyer’s taciturn bodyguard. Mildly amusing clash of personalities, and, in proportion, mildly disconcerting when it takes …
Worm’s-eye view of the Neapolitan underworld: obscure relationships and operations; occasional slaughter; broad expanses of banality. The unfamiliar actors and the vérité camera create a plausible impression that it’s all really happening, whether or not you can make much sense of it. Based on the nonfiction best-seller by Roberto Saviano; …
The truth-bending journalist, doper, drinker, gun enthusiast, and suicide (1939-2005), in words and pictures, the latter ranging from a fuzzy video of the TV game show, To Tell the Truth, to big-screen impersonations of him in Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the former …
Vegas poker tournament covered in a come-and-go mockumentary style. The gambling “types” — the cowboy-hatted veteran, the Internet novice, the in-your-face punk, the antisocial nerd, the tough-talking broad, the bottomed-out hophead, among others — are amusing in conception and in casting, but not so much in detail. The anticipated laughs …
Clint Eastwood, director, serves Clint Eastwood, actor, a nice fat one, a softball lobbed right down the middle of the plate and effortlessly belted over the fence: a sort of Grumpy Old Man version of Dirty Harry, a scowler and a growler (looking and sounding uncannily like a dog in …
Andrew Fleming’s low-budget indie about a lame-duck Drama teacher at West Mesa High in Tucson, forced to share classroom space first with the cafeteria workers and then with the girl volleyballers. The beady-eyed, seaweed-haired Steve Coogan is often funny as the affected artiste in a cruel and mocking world, and …
Two ideas prevail. The first may be summed up in the term “anti-superhero,” or if you prefer it, “super-antihero.” The hero, that is to say, possesses the full complement of comic-book superpowers, yet he boozes round the clock, goes days without shaving, dresses like a slob if not a bum …
Ill-named chiller by M. Night Shyamalan, not to be confused with the Swinging Sixties caper by Elliot Silverstein (title tune by the Supremes), unleashes a wave of inexplicable self-inflicted violence: a lunch-hour idler puncturing her carotid with a hair stick, a traffic cop turning his gun on himself, a steady …
Character portrait of a singular person, a primary-school teacher called Poppy, almost dementedly upbeat, seeing it as her mission in life to spread sunshine and joy wherever she goes. A tipsy giggler, a babbling fount of inanities (“Here we go, gigolo”), a constant commenter (“Never been here before,” she announces …
Stoner comedy (the sequel), with delusions of political comment, possibly admissible as scientific evidence of brain damage. John Cho, Kal Penn, Neil Patrick Harris; co-written and co-directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg.
The fourth installment in J.K. Rowling's series of children's books yields a two-and-a-half-hour movie which, for all its furious activity, gets virtually nowhere. It gets, more specifically, through the "legendary" Triwizard Tournament, only to arrive at the dampening admonition, "Dark and difficult times lie ahead." Potterites, under the freedom-of-religion pact, …
A black mark on the record of director Guillermo del Toro, whose record, which started out so clean with Cronos in his native Mexico and Mimic in the Hollywood system, looks now a bit ink-stained: Blade II, the first and second Hellboy, and nothing else that comes close to those …