Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg rejoin forces, nineteen years later, for a fourth archaeological adventure. Ford, with his big-cat purr of a voice, remains an amiable fellow; and if he’s a bit jowlier beneath that crumpled face (like a wadded-up piece of paper retrieved from the wastebasket and mostly smoothed …
Marvel Comics superhero (vintage 1963) rerouted through present-day Afghanistan. Weapons manufacturer Tony Stark, alias “The Merchant of Death,” learns first-hand that his products sometimes land in the laps of America’s enemies, and to combat this he devises a personal suit of flying armor (a gold titanium alloy, actually, not iron), …
Retirement-home pablum about the warming relationship between an inquisitive eleven-year-old (interested in ghosts, interested in “what happens”) and the old crank, formerly The Amazing Clarence, who takes over the boy’s room. Vibrant color photography by Rob Hardy, and a vibrant performance by Michael Caine, perhaps too vibrant for the role. …
Martial-arts legend Jean-Claude van Damme, “the Muscles from Brussels,” casts himself in a new light: the comic-pathetic. Playing “himself,” in all candor a has-been Hollywood star, he first loses a custody fight in family court, then loses a role to Steven Seagal when the latter consents to cut off his …
Christian Petzold’s German translation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Of course James Cain held no patent on deadly love triangles, and indeed the cucumber harvest here brings to mind Elmore Leonard’s facsimile, The Big Bounce — not the dreadful movie remake of 2004 but the underappreciated …
The Jules Verne novel serves as a factual guidebook for a week of uncle-nephew bonding. The 3-D effects can be a bit crude (twice we get spat in the face, once drooled in the face), and it takes a while to reach the fun stuff (the flying fish, the flesh-eating …
Flashy adolescent fantasy about a bullied nerd who spontaneously acquires the supercool superpower of teleportation: the face of Big Ben one minute, surfing in Fiji the next, the head of the Sphinx the next. Hardly has this power been established, and hardly has the awkward teen morphed into Hayden Christensen, …
Social consciousness for kids, an orgy of benevolence, generosity, trust, fellowship, and so on, among the needy in Depression-era Cincinnati, with a few not-very-nice party poopers thrown in as object lessons. The lachrymose Abigail Breslin, in the title role of a ten-year-old cub reporter, has plenty of opportunity to promote …
Plump computer cartoon about a tubby panda (voice of Jack Black, tubby typecasting), an envious aficionado of the martial arts, dissatisfied with his lowborn “place” in the family noodle business. Wanting nothing more than to witness the anointment of the new Dragon Warrior, inheritor of the Secret of Limitless Power, …
Neil LaBute’s neighbor-from-hell thriller, no more than mildly provocative by his toughest standards (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, et al.), details the escalating ill will between a newly arrived interracial couple (Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington) and the long-ensconced, widowed black policeman next door (Samuel L. Jackson), …
The septuagenarian Dustin Hoffman secures a role he can really sink his teeth into, or sharpen them on: a jazz pianist manqué who makes do composing musical scores for TV commercials. (Funny-sad sight of him staring intently at the little screen to appraise his latest opus for OxiClean.) With his …
Adaptation of a mid-19th-century novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the bellwethers in the corruption of the Romantic Movement: the depletion of the heroic individualist and the ascendance of the femme fatale, the man-eater, the succubus, the vampire. The titular mistress, a native of Spain, land of Carmen (her literary …
Intermittently cute comedy on the wild and woolly early days of pro football, cute in some of the archaic banter, but not cute in the unrelieved drab brown color scheme or the indifferent and infrequent on-field action. It shows a lighter side of director George Clooney (Confessions of a Dangerous …