If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys onstage is like soldiering through some extreme eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene over-scored, over-rehearsed, and overbearing. And it’s…
At first, before the murders, the story might sound like some nihilistic last-century tropical sitcom, what Sherwood Schwartz would have come up with if he’d been into Nietzsche. In 1929, German physician Friedrich Ritter, brain aflame with the promise of the superman, persuaded his lover, Dore Strauch, to abandon Berlin…
Looking for a chance to shout “Only in America”? Only in America — or an American movie — could the story of the first two Indian players to be signed to a major-league baseball team get spun as an L.A. sports agent’s journey toward realizing the importance of family and…
How much can you take away and still have a movie? Steven Knight’s Locke is an experiment in reducing contemporary screen storytelling to its irreducible essentials, which isn’t quite the same thing as being an “experimental” film, despite the ravishing early reviews from England. It shows us just one actor,…
Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, the other Spider-Man, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source science has dubbed “Parker…
Has it ever occurred to contemporary commercial filmmakers that maybe audiences could take a movie’s word for it that a character has been tortured? That perhaps implication and skilled acting could communicate the idea with sufficient power, and that we might all be spared the screaming and limb-breaking and slow-motion…
The most perfect works of art are those suspended between conception and realization, the ones that seize you up with how great they were gonna be. (Well, those and Busby Berkeley numbers.) Alejandro Jodorowsky’s daft, daring, surrealist, possibly impossible adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s spice-mining science-fiction novel that later proved…
Any Yanks concerned that the Brits outclass us may find relief in Alan Partridge, an import comedy that at first seems to stand as evidence of some over-there comic superiority. Compared to our broad Ron Burgundys, Steve Coogan’s local broadcast ass Alan Partridge stands as sharp, incisive parody, a desperate,…
As Bob Zmuda tells it, screenwriter Norman Wexler used to tote a briefcase full of thousands of dollars to pay off the many people that he pissed off each day. Zmuda — the comedian, writer, tall-tale dispenser, and longtime wrangler of Andy Kaufman — dished his best Wexler story on…
As Bob Zmuda tells it, screenwriter Norman Wexler used to tote a briefcase full of thousands of dollars to pay off the many people that he pissed off each day. Zmuda — the comedian, writer, tall-tale dispenser, and longtime wrangler of Andy Kaufman — dished his best Wexler story on…
Think back to the worst thing you did in high school. Shoplifting? Busted with a joint? Trespassing, all lit up on Boone’s Farm? Now, imagine you pulled your rite-of-passage nogoodnik routine in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the early 2000s. You get busted, the cops get involved, you get hauled to the…
First, the pleasant surprises. In puffing up the slight, absurd Mr. Peabody and Sherman shorts from Jay Ward’s The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into an 82-minute 3D save-the-timestream child-distractor, director Rob Minkoff and his many writers have preserved a few of the hallmarks distinguishing the Dada, deadpan, almost primitive original,…
“I’ve got a certain amount of fame, I’ve got money — I wish I could fuckin’ drive,” 86-year-old Elaine Stritch carps just a breath into Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, a gift of a documentary celebrating its subject’s brittle brilliance, still-here indomitability, brash comic truth-telling, and principled refusal to wear anything…
That Bible miniseries, originally aired on the History Channel, won notoriety by casting an actor who resembles Barack Obama in the crowd-pleasing role of Satan. The producers — Roma Downey, who plays Mary here, and Mark Burnett, who pioneered the watch-skinny-people-suffer genre with Survivor — insisted that this was a…
When we first meet the hero of Son of God, a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment, he’s approaching a fisherman with a classic boiler-room pitch: “Just give me an hour, and I will give you a whole new life,” Jesus (Diogo Morgado) promises Peter (Darwin…
Here’s the last thing I ever would have expected out of Pompeii, that sword-thrust of 3D gladiator-vs.-volcano madness coming right at your disbelieving eyeholes. An hour or so in, when Vesuvius exhausts its portentous rumblings and blows its top (3D!), I legitimately wasn’t ready. Yes, all that third-act destruction is…
Just as animated characters who look too human creep us out, could there be a phenomenon we might call the RomCom Uncanny Valley, a case when movie stars’ gorgeousness fully outshines our ability to believe their characters’ humdrum relationship problems? Radiant lovers make radiant love — and then argue about…
There are four good things we can say about I, Frankenstein, another muscles-and-rubble comic book adaptation just un-terrible enough not to alienate its core audience, yet never consistently grand or surprising enough to win over anyone else. First, Aaron Eckhart brings it, scowling like a champ beneath his jigsawed scar…
If it were the late ’70s, and you were a wunderkind film artist a bit embarrassed about your zeal for space-opera kids’ stuff, you went out and bagged yourself a great to class your movie up: Alec Guinness; François Truffaut; Max von Sydow done up like a disco gladiolus. That…
If you’re a person alive in this age, Ralph Fiennes has at some point probably made you hate him. As the Nazi Amon Goeth in 1993’s Schindler’s List, Fiennes embodied one of history’s great evils, somehow making being utterly detestable compelling. In Martin McDonagh’s riotous, under-regarded In Bruges, Fiennes spat…
The surprise in Grudge Match, the not-quite-a-comedy that pits Rocky Balboa against Raging Bull, isn’t that it has the chutzpah to posit a universe in which Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro have, since the early ’80s, been equally matched rivals. The surprise is in how easily audiences will buy it…
Solemn as a funeral march, humorless as your junior high principal, as Japanese as a grocery-store California roll, Keanu Reeves’ let’s-mope-about-and-kill-ourselves samurai drama has exactly three things going for it. First, the cockeyed sensuality of Rinko Kikuchi as a spider-puking evil witch who can transform herself into a fox, a…
