Proof that the intellectually challenged are fun to watch even with subtitles. Commence with a dead cat, an overly-latexed actor buried beneath more wrinkles than a kennel filled with shar-peis, and a neck-breaking 20x1 zoom. It only gets clumsier. At his current age, our titular centenarian (Robert Gustafsson) flees a …
The graduating class of Lake Howell High meets for its ten-year reunion. The student body appears to have been created in a petri dish: Hitler couldn't have engineered a more physically unblemished graduating class. In addition to the Tatums (Channing and Jenna Dewan), there's Ari Graynor, Justin Long, Max Minghella, …
Hollywood continues to pay reparations for Gone With the Wind with this elegiac adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s autobiographical saga of a free black man forced into bondage for a dozen years. They might just as well have named it The Passion of the Slave. Chiwetel Ejiofor suffers well under the …
Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall launched a thousand YouTube Hitler memes. Any number of them are more insightful and engaging than this fact-based saga of a German worker who in November of 1939 miscalculated by that much an otherwise foolproof scheme to blow up the Fuhrer. Johann Georg Elser’s (Christian Friedel) botched …
Director Clint Eastwood goes from flying first class (Sully) to riding the rails in unreserved coach for another real-life tale of transitory heroism. And this time, instead of relying on Oscar-winner Tom Hanks to land his Airbus in the freezing waters of the Hudson River, he turns to the actual …
It’s being touted as his 100th starring role, but Jackie Chan’s heroics take a backseat to Winston Chao’s endless speech-making in this commemorative retelling of the birth of the Republic of China. Unless you have more than a working knowledge of the subject, this could conceivably be the longest two …
A pair of lifelong (albeit hair-triggered) pals, Hannah (Jenna Ushkowitz), famous for a stint on a Jersey Shore-style reality TV show and Brooklyn (Laura Ashley Samuels), a would-be Instagram influencer, make for enjoyable travelling companions in this raunchier variation on Romy and Michelle. Rather than a high school reunion, our …
Darlene Love is the Jackie Robinson of session groups, a black backup singer who worked furiously to crack the majors by lending her formidable talent (and tonsils) to everyone from Bobby "Boris" Pickett to the Chairman of the Board. Forced to "ghost" for Phil Spector under whatever band name he …
Knowing that it doesn’t take a man to raise a man, single mom Annette Bening duly deputizes surrogate “daughters” Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning, assigning them the role of dual consigliere to look after her 15-year-old son (Lucas Jade Zumann). Once the fastidiously worded dual voice-over narration commences, the characters …
Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill advance from high school to college, while the overall level of humor plunges from ninth grade to third. I laughed once: the action momentarily trips over itself to deliver a sternly graphic anti-drug message before quickly returning to the business of trying to milk laughs …
For what turned out to be his crowning work, Abbas Kiarostami, the perdurable experimenter opted, for the first time in his career, to try his hand at animation. Some segments were filmed in color, the majority in black-and-white. Not a word was spoken, there is but a single movement of …
A couple’s relationship is put to the test when her adorable relatives decide to pay a visit. Never heard that one before, probably because I gave up on network sitcoms decades ago. Julie Delpy’s follow up to 2 Days in Paris is so sickeningly sweet, theater chains will want to …
Long before fake news became the rage, the promises of fake press releases defined Hollywood hype. The deception lives on with the following heartless pledge: “For two couples, the future unfolds in different decades and different places, but a hidden connection will bring them together in a way no one …