Joke documentary, wherein cameraman John Bailey purports to shoot a film called Herzog in Wonderland, a behind-the-scenes documentary on German filmmaker Werner Herzog, purporting to shoot a documentary-within-the-documentary called The Enigma of Loch Ness. Herzog does a convincing and an amusing job of being Herzog, but the rest is barely …
A Pixar computer cartoon about a married-with-children team of superheroes in enforced retirement under the Superhero Relocation Program. The tweaking of superheroes has long since progressed beyond a mere trend into a full-blown state of cultural decadence, but there's no particular reason to hold it against this little tag-along. The …
A Pixar computer cartoon about a married-with-children team of superheroes in enforced retirement under the Superhero Relocation Program. The tweaking of superheroes has long since progressed beyond a mere trend into a full-blown state of cultural decadence, but there's no particular reason to hold it against this little tag-along. The …
Multi-character Irish stew, heavy on the working-class and criminal-class elements. It boasts, if that's the word, an antsy camera, an anemic image, a gaudy narrative, impenetrable accents, and across-the-board competent performances (Colin Farrell, Colm Meaney, Cillian Murphy, Shirley Henderson). Kelly Macdonald supplements competence with comeliness. Directed by John Crowley.
We've been through something like this before with Kevin Smith. It went by the name of Chasing Amy, and Ben Affleck was again Smith's on-screen stand-in as a Responsible Adult. Here those responsibilities extend to the filial and the parental, but only briefly the marital. (The sole time and place …
The second half offers no convincing evidence that Quentin Tarantino needed two installments to tell his scrambled tale. It convinces us instead that in its entirety the film is even worse than initially believed. For much of the time, it looks more like sweepings from the cutting-room floor than like …
A printed preamble tells of scholarly investigation to trace the legendary title figure to a real historical personage, a Fifth-century Sarmatian dubbed Artorius, who was posted by the Romans to hold the line against the Saxons in Britain. The film then authenticates this research by investing its hero (Clive Owen) …
Heavy-footed biopic on the controversial American sexologist Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson, suppressing his Irish accent into something not quite American and not quite British, but adrift somewhere in the ocean between). Writer-director Bill Condon apparently felt it was vital to establish his subject's upbringing under a puritanical father ("Electricity has …
East European absurdism set in the Budapest subway, staying underground the entire time and never coming up for air: a dark, dark, dark comedy with a soft spot for its existential drop-out hero, a member of the disrespected class of ticket-checkers. ("Everyone hates us.") Reward for him looms in the …
Advertised as "a new comedy unlike anything you have ever seen before." Uh-huh. Or perhaps ever wanted to. A hunk of martial-arts madcap in which a gang of axe murderers will form a celebratory chorus line after their mincing leader has felled a rival (felled him face-first by slicing off …
Solemn post-9/11 tribute to firefighters, although these are Baltimoreans rather than New Yorkers. The central one, Joaquin Phoenix, lies injured and trapped in a burning building as his life flashes before him. Or to be more exact, he consciously flashes back on his life at length and at intervals -- …
The Coen brothers' first-ever "unoriginal" work: a remake of a mid-Fifties British caper comedy by the underappreciated Alexander Mackendrick. In mitigation, the brothers throughout their careers have been so partial to the pastiche -- the neo-noir Blood Simple, the imitation-Hammett Miller's Crossing, the imitation-Cain The Man Who Wasn't There, the …
Romantic-comic trifle to do with two divorce lawyers of opposite sexes locking horns in the courtroom and bumping uglies in the bedroom. In essence, it asks Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore to be Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Moore is enough of an actress to respond to the challenge, however …
Matthew Vaughn, producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, tries his own hand at directing one of these tough and tricksy British crime thrillers: a brutal cutie. Well played by Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, George Harris, Kenneth Cranham, Jamie Foreman, Sally Hawkins, Michael Gambon, among others, but …