Corinne (Vera Farmiga) desires total submission to Jesus Christ. She also wants loving support, adult discussion, and a vent for her talent as a thoughtful speaker. As director, Farmiga never caricatures fundamentalism and never pegs the main males as dim fools, just patriarchal and defensive. Corinne seeing bestial spirits feels …
How do we know it’s weak? Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and roguish Jack Nicholson pinball through the silly story, a sophomoric relationship comedy with little zaps of adulthood. Meet-cutes pile up, some smart lines zing, and a baby is inserted to domesticate the plot. Veteran director/writer James L. …
Martin Scorsese goes to town (Paris) with CGI effects and 3-D and the fantasy story from Brian Selznick’s book about Parisian orphan Hugo Cabret. Asa Butterfield is Hugo, maintaining the clocks in a train depot in 1930. Lonely, brilliant, and cute, he wins the friendship of a girl (delightful Clöe …
Craggy Willem Dafoe goes into the Tasmanian jungle to kill the rumored “last Tasmanian tiger” (thylacine), a marsupial like a striped dog, and also suspects that he, too, is being tracked. Daniel Nettheim’s film has good Down Under landscapes and tensions, but the eco-message and a faint romance don’t have …
A factually derived British comedy about Victorian invention fever and sexual repression, as prim doctors devise the first vibrator to treat the perceived plague of female “hysteria.” Maggie Gyllenhaal delivers a bravura performance as a feminist social worker who sees through the patronizing foolishness. Wilde and Shaw did such humor …
Brutal aliens pursue a fugitive teen to Earth, a crisis that rouses his special powers. Directed by D.J. Caruso (Disturbia) from a popular young-adult novel, it has conceptual traces of Superman, the Twilight saga, and TV’s The Fugitive. It offers cute bodies, ugly creeps, a dog, high school clichés, dewy …
Facile but enjoyable. George Clooney directed and stars as a presidential candidate, a glib liberal dream — apart from his Clintonian attraction to a naïve intern (Evan Rachel Wood), who seems to be running on the Live Bait ticket. As a silky machine of ambition, he excites other tough guys: …
She does it all: big-deal investment planning, motherhood, husband-care, cooking, endless e-mailing, and tireless posing as chick-flick star Sarah Jessica Parker, whose charm smile could have cheered up Stalingrad in 1942. She is surrounded by prettier women, but lonely biz wiz Pierce Brosnan is drawn to go-go Parker, while her …
Sylvain Chomet adapts and animates a never-filmed Jacques Tati story depicting a Tatiesque magician who goes from France to Scotland, where stony Edinburgh is lovingly cartooned. The whimsical wit and magical moments are barely developed from soft ideas. A brief glimpse of Tati’s classic Mon Oncle reminds us what is …
No relation to the cigarette or its famous promo bellhop. Not much relation to comedy, either, as manic Jim Carrey seeks to jazz up this “based on truth” story about a liar, con man and escape artist. He flipped from church-going marriage to brazen ‘70s cruising as a gay party …
A bully afflicts a boy, and a tougher kid full of congested fury comes to his aid. That’s the plot core, but Susanne Bier’s Danish movie is much richer than a PC tract about bullying. It shifts from Africa to Denmark and back, and the kids are as complex as …
The endless “religious” hell of the Middle East, seen in the life of a Lebanese Christian woman (Lubna Azabal) who escapes to a better existence in French Canada. Her stunned offspring uncover the story of their Mother Courage, but director Denis Villeneuve piles it on as a pyramid of rape, …
One of our finest Holocaust dramas. Robert Wieckiewicz is wonderful, but not posingly wonderful, as Poldek. The Catholic sewer-worker saved some Jews as the Nazis wiped out the ghetto in Lvov (then Poland, now Ukraine) in the year of hell, 1944. Capping a fine career, director Agnieszka Holland shows sewer …