Sledgehammer comedy about four buddies (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha) who go to Vegas for a bachelor party and wake up the morning after with no memory of the night before, a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and the mystery of a missing …
Singing sensation Hannah Montana, “the most popular teenager in the world,” has a secret, an ordinary life as a normal high-schooler under her real name of Miley Stewart (played by Miley Cyrus, alias Hannah Montana), daughter of a down-home Tennessean, Robby Ray Stewart (Billy Ray Cyrus). Only a blond wig …
Part VI — Pot VI — comes close to a complete cheat. The once child actors, children no more, are developing faster than the story, and indeed the foretold war with the Dark Lord tends here to be crowded out by assorted amorous hankerings among Hogwarts classmates. (Those broomsticks for …
Tempest in a teapot: two undefeated Ivy League rivals meet in the final game of the football season, 1968. (Vietnam-era politics come into it, but only slightly.) Dozens of players from both sides, including Tommy Lee Jones for Harvard, but not including star running back Calvin Hill for Yale, share …
A bedevilled family housed in a converted funeral home: flickering lights, banging doors, charbroiled ghosts, a malignant shower curtain, and whatnot. It has the advantage of being a “true story,” thereby curtailing certain kinds and degrees of excess. There is, even so, a routineness and a staleness about it; and …
As an explanation of romantic incompatibility, the catchphrase title is stunningly unilluminating, no matter which of its six words is stressed. (On screen, the third one stands out in green from the white of the rest, but that seems an arbitrary reading.) Satisfied with the what and incurious about the …
Fanciful, tasteful children’s film, from the Lois Duncan book, about two foster kids who secretly transform a derelict hotel into a shelter for stray dogs (the homeless housing the homeless), and more than a shelter, a veritable amusement park. Nicely individualized dogs; tolerable kids; touches of real imagination in script …
An “eco-comedy” produced for television, this Canadian documentary began making the film festival rounds in 2010. Director, narrator, and all-around pervasive presence Jon Cooksey’s bombastically weisenheiming classroom film confirms how much fun saving the world can be, especially when armed with colorful computer graphics and ancient public-access television green screen …
A deferral of extinction and a detour to a subterranean tropical paradise, save some rapacious reptiles and a river of molten lava. The intermittent enlivener of the two earlier installments, the obsessive squirrel, is now as tedious as everyone else (in a mating dance, to a Barry White tune, with …
The dorky valedictorian of Buffalo Glenn High School reveals in his commencement speech his hidden passion for the head cheerleader. So begins a long night of teen hijinks (or lojinks, better), played for maximum falsity, minimum humanity. With Hayden Panettiere, Paul Rust, Jack T. Carpenter, and Shawn Roberts; directed by …
A guy comedy with an original angle. A woman’s man with a well-developed feminine side suddenly feels the lack of a male comrade when the time comes to pick a best man, belatedly casting about for a buddy to cultivate. The lapses in taste — no, the eager, steady assaults …
A Terry Gilliam exercise in excess, as dense, as heavy, as torpifying as a Christmas fruitcake. (Or as Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Brothers Grimm.) The muffled narrative, revolving around an immortal travelling showman, his magic-mirror portal to the realm of imagination, and his deal with the Devil, …
Investment advice from the mouth of a seven-year-old babe, relaying tips from invisible friends beneath a security blanket. Eddie Murphy, as the profiting father who learns to value his daughter for more than money, seems often foolish, occasionally peevish, never actually funny. With Yara Shahidi, Thomas Haden Church, Nicole Ari …
Steven Soderbergh, working from fact, details an impenetrable case of corporate skullduggery blown open by an ambiguous black-hatted whistleblower: a kind of anti-Hitchcock suspense comedy, grudgingly putting any cards at all on the table, keeping the surprises coming only by keeping us in the dark, flouting the Master's tried-and-true method …
Quentin Tarantino takes no more than the risible title from Enzo G.Castellari's Dirty Dozen knockoff of 1978, and respells, misspells, that. (Did he ponder Basturds as possibly funnier?) Much of the movie, a revisionist revisitation of the French theater of operations in the Second World War, is unapologetically, unsanctimoniously silly. …