Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are Beautiful People in Love who just want to be together, darn it. But The Chairman (i.e., God) has other plans — or rather, The Plan. So the Chairman dispatches his agents (including Terence Stamp and Mad Men’s John Slattery) to keep the lovers apart. …
Who's up for an existential road trip in an old Mercedes convertible? Colin Firth turns in an understated performance as Wallace Avery, a thwarted, once-promising golfer who sets out to make a new self for himself somewhere else. (Small wonder: he lives in Florida, but it feels like someone hit …
Didactic poli-sci lesson on How the System Works, entertainingly illustrated by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols. The titular war is the one between the Soviets and the Afghans in the Reagan era, and Charlie Wilson is a nonfictional Texas congressman (played with supreme complacency by Tom Hanks) who, …
Annual family gathering (parlor games, touch football, talent show), complicated by romantic rivalry: two brothers, a widower with three girls and a reformed womanizer, both smitten by a worldly Frenchwoman. A showcase for Steve Carell's self-consciousness, somewhat more sympathetic than Dane Cook's luggishness. Juliette Binoche looks as if she could …
Working-girl comedy in the vein of, oh, say, Working Girl, the eager, gifted, underemployed, and underpaid secretary ("A million girls would kill for that job") and the imperious, capricious, queen-bee boss. An ice queen, more descriptively, with snow-white hair, just a bit of sludge showing through at the neck, and …
Emily Blunt is so honestly appealing that she saves moments, but nothing can save the film. Director Nicholas Stoller wrote this glib junk with actor Jason Segel, who has many moments of stupid, fumbling vulnerability as a young chef resentful when teacher Blunt outpaces him. Engaged, they push off marriage, …
Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ novel (the source is worth mentioning, given the morose chunk of voiceover that opens the proceedings and the appearance of high-octane lines like “she loved you in ways that people only dream of being loved” — this said to a distraught husband immediately after …
A Shakespearean herald reading the play’s old prologue is comically yanked at the beginning. So much for the literary roots, and despite mostly British accents, the wit leans to “Adios, loser,” “Let’s kick some grass,” and a “pansy” joke as garden gnomes fill out plastic remnants of the Romeo and …
Affectionate and amiable portrait of a fading mentalist (a blissfully hammy John Malkovich) modelled on The Amazing Kreskin, whose fortunes have been on the downslide since Johnny Carson left The Tonight Show. Colin Hanks, as a law-school dropout hired to be the new road manager, is our innocent eyes and …
You can, with CGI effects and scale models, make Jack Black far bigger than everyone else and even have him pee on Blenheim Palace. But he remains a bloated teddy bear, a hip doof from School of Rock doing silly stuff at the expense of Jonathan Swift’s classic social satire. …
Wraparound treatment of the characters from Snow White and the Huntsman (some of the story occurs before the original, some after) that isn’t exactly good, but is definitely better than might be expected. The story borrows from Frozen — semi-close sisters, one of whom has a chilly heart and abilities …
Steven Sondheim's musical theater meditation on the complication, compromise, and carnality that adulthood brings to the fairy-tale world of children's fairy tales, gently Disneyfied for younger audiences eager to sing along. (Don't fret when Johnny Depp's leering Big Bad Wolf lifts his leg to block Little Red Riding Hood's progress; …
Chick-Lit trifle, after the Karen Joy Fowler best-seller, about six contemporary Sacramentoans, five women and an odd man out, who meet informally to discuss the six great Austen novels, one per month, and to demonstrate the books' continued relevance by unconsciously patterning their lives after them. Not too awfully disagreeable, …
A nifty idea botched by writer, director Rian Johnson's (Brick) unnecessarily dense plotting. (A calculatedly confusing storyline does not a good movie make.) Tickets should come with a road map (or a comic book adaptation) wrapped around them to help guide audiences through this. In a dystopian universe that resembles …
The love and honor that director Rob Marshall and all concerned bear for Walt Disney’s beloved original is palpable throughout this supremely well-meaning sequel, which finds the numinous nanny (played here with smirking sternness by Emily Blunt) returning to her post just as one of her charges — now grown-up, …