Consumerist satire wherein the ideal family of four is really an assembled sales team — a “unit” — planted in an affluent community to arouse envy and rivalry in their neighbors. Details of the operation are sketchy at best, but it works well enough as a metaphor. The satire goes …
After the gravitas of Mysterious Skin, Greg Araki is content to fumble about for cardboard-cutout cult status. Filmed in colors so vibrant that every shot waves like a rainbow flag, the story involves some senseless to-do about “complex” sexuality, global annihilation, and the hostile takeover of a black-robed cult. The …
The remake moves the action and the fatherless undersized hero to Beijing (“It’s not karate, Mom!” “Okay, kung fu, karate, whatever”), where it seems less wonderful that the apartment-house handyman is a martial-arts master. Especially when the handyman is played by Jackie Chan, lying low. The underdog regimen, on a …
Alias Smart-Ass, a black comedy marking another advance in the decadence and self-consciousness of superhero mythologies. The central premise of a teenage comic-book geek (Aaron Johnson) donning a green wet suit with ropy yellow trim to act out his crime-fighting fantasies, prosaically dubbing himself Kick-Ass for the purpose, is not …
Carefully drawn family portrait in a rough, grainy, indifferent image, a “nontraditional” family let’s swiftly say: two lesbian “Moms” or “Momses” with a biological son and daughter old enough to be curious as to the identity of their sperm-donor dad, who turns out to be a health-food restaurateur and organic …
Doug Block’s touching, intrusive, but not creepily voyeuristic home-movie portrait of his daughter Lucy, now grown and ready for college. She resists his obsessive filming but is also complicit and a true star. Her mom is wan, envious, often wise, and the movie has an inviting coziness laced with smarts.
Second screen version (after Burt Kennedy’s grindhouse one in 1976) of Jim Thompson’s kinky crime novel, kept in the original Fifties period, with the choirboyish Casey Affleck, and his quaky, croaky, pubescent voice, in the part of the psycho deputy sheriff of a West Texas small town, outwardly much less …
Senseless romantic action comedy about a beautiful nerd-girl who, on the rebound, unwittingly marries a CIA assassin with a $20 million bounty on his head. Katherine Heigl keeps right on cranking up the charm despite the hopeless situation and the narcissism of her co-star, Ashton Kutcher. With Tom Selleck and …
Documentary of an elite cooking competition in Lyon, France. In this highly pressurized event, chefs create sweet treats of Proustian nuance and flamboyant kitsch. The fall of a confectionary sculpture feels almost like a national tragedy. Along with sugar, the star is the tight fraternity of cooks, and the movie …
As masters of speech, British actors stutter superbly (think of Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius). This lovably intricate, humane film from Tom Hooper and writer David Seidler dramatizes how the unexpected king, George VI, overcame his handicap in uneasy 1936. There is wonderful acting rapport between Colin Firth’s stiff, shy, …
Bibulous burlesque of the espionage thriller, wherein the video-game action, the hail of bullets, the blossoms of fire, the flurry of fists, pose no threat to the impervious superspy, protected by the patron saint of stuntmen, free to behave like a total sociopath, a textbook charming one for sure, but …
M. Night Shyamalan has a go at an old-fashioned Saturday-matinee children’s film, a live-action adaptation of the Nickelodeon cartoon series about the boy avatar who alone has the power, if he can learn to master it, to command all the elements of the four rival realms of Air, Water, Earth, …
Pseudodocumentary horror in the Blair Witch tradition, far below the high-water mark of Cloverfield and even the not as high one of Paranormal Activity, the premise of which has a fast-talking, Bible-thumping charlatan (Patrick Fabian) intending to “expose exorcism for the scam it really is” but encountering, with a film …
Miley Cyrus gets to shed her Hannah Montana alter ego for an insipid summer romance, thick with pop songs and montages, from the sparkless pen of Nicholas Sparks. The central character, a one-time piano prodigy accepted into Juilliard on past performance, though she hasn’t touched a keyboard in years, goes …
Canadian-made documentary on the world’s largest human migration, the annual trek of 130 million migrant workers from their urban sweatshops to their rural roots, for the Chinese New Year. An uncommonly well-crafted documentary, more attentive than most to basic cinematic concerns such as composition and rhythm, but still heavily reliant …