Super-ultra-maxi-quirky comedy of dorks, kooks, freaks. Jared Hess, the director of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, out to top himself, scrapes bottom. The credits sequence of old science-fiction paperback covers creates a hospitable climate; and Jemaine Clement as the swell-headed puffy-haired author of such fiction, a relatively recognizable and realistic …
Dickens’s Christmas Carol rewritten as a sex comedy, holding gallons less water. The girl-juggling glamour photographer, a seriously slimy Matthew McConaughey, learns overnight that he is, and always was, a one-woman man. Jennifer Garner is the high-achieving hardbodied hottie who has been cooling her heels for the heel. With Michael …
Like Transformers, this enterprise — this franchise — has put the merchandising first, succeeding as opposed to preceding a line of toys. (Trademark Hasbro.) The movie, opening deflatingly in 17th-century France before advancing to a science-fictional “not too distant future,” is a live-action cartoon from the maker of The Mummy …
The title describes the services offered by a high-end Manhattan escort played by a sleepy porn star, Sasha Grey, in her aboveground debut. Those subterranean credentials should not lead you to expect any special degree of explicitness in the sexual activity, of which there is next to none. There is, …
Where did we leave her — the girl with the dragon tattoo who played with fire? Ah, yes, a bullet in her head and the fiend who put it there still at large. Most of the arduous plotting and the masochistic feminism are behind us. What remains is mostly mop-up. …
The second in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy finds our pierced, tattooed, Goth-haired “girl” framed for the murders of two reporters at work on an exposé of sex trafficking. It’s a solider case than the first one, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but still lurid, seamy, sleazy; and the sex-trade …
Homegrown adaptation by Niels Arden Oplev of the international best-seller by Stieg Larsson, from the Scandinavian wave of detective novels. The movie, like the book, is long: two and a half hours with almost half an hour of anti- or post-climax. In the early going, it juggles two separate cases …
A gruff American loner hires a gregarious Senegalese cabbie to drive him, one way, to Blowing Rock in the Blue Ridge Mountains at a future date. One way? Why? The cabbie’s curiosity, to say nothing of his humanity, gets the better of him, and an odd couple begins to be …
Bad camerawork, no worse than the documentary norm these days, rough, shaky, often out of position, but the film is nevertheless an engrossing and entertaining investigation of the "problem" of African-American hair, the size of which problem may hitherto have eluded you. Our on-screen investigator is a bemused, amused, nonjudgmental, …
A bad-hearted barkeep (Brian Cox) takes under his wing a homeless failed suicide (Paul Dano), to pass along his knowledge of the business and his hostility to his fellow man. A collection of unamusing and unconvincing crotchets in a bloodless sallow image. Written and directed by Dagur Kári.
Write hard, direct hard, act hard. Laugh light, if at all. Neal Brennan’s high-pressure capitalist satire, on a travelling team of mercenary car salesmen summoned to Temecula for a Fourth-of-July blowout, takes continual leave of sense and senses in pursuit of jokes. With Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames, David Koechner, Kathryn …
Affectionate and amiable portrait of a fading mentalist (a blissfully hammy John Malkovich) modelled on The Amazing Kreskin, whose fortunes have been on the downslide since Johnny Carson left The Tonight Show. Colin Hanks, as a law-school dropout hired to be the new road manager, is our innocent eyes and …
Far in the future, a young boy named Simon digs holes in an underground settlement called Giha Village. With his older brother figure Kamina and a young woman named Yoko who’s fallen underground from the surface, the three set out to pursue their dreams of the surface world. As the …