Fifteen minutes after seeing The Proposal, I’d forgotten I’d seen The Proposal. Well, that’s not entirely true: By then, it had simply merged in my memory with a thousand other films just like it — those in which phony lovers bound together by dubious circumstances become honest-to-kissin’ couples in just…
First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Such, of…
Writer-director Rian Johnson fashions a universe in which time is a fluid thing — where everything takes place in a familiar today and an otherworldly yesterday, where the audience is at once agreeably comfortable and inexplicably unsettled. When his characters don’t look out of place in their derbies and dusters,…
It’s difficult for this longtime Trekkie to review J.J. Abrams’ relaunching of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It’s difficult to dispassionately dole out compliments and complaints per the job description. Because, yes, the professional critic understands: This is Paramount Pictures’ latest effort to jump-start a profitable but long-stalled franchise, to do for…
Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill makes mean-spirited tragedies that studios market as inane comedies because otherwise no one would pay a cent to see them. That’s more or less what happened to Hill’s The Foot Fist Way in 2008, two years after its Sundance twirl first caught the attention…
At the end of 2008, DreamWorks Animation bossman Jeffrey Katzenberg embarked on a cross-country tour, toting 20 minutes’ worth of Monsters vs. Aliens. The reason for his trek? To convince critics that 3-D movies are no longer the snake-oil salesman’s hustle, but the future of filmmaking — if not the…
Just as we thought the “bromantic comedy” had overstayed its welcome, the genre reaches its high point with I Love You, Man. The subtext is finally the text — it’s right there in the title. The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of…
Fanboys is meant for the dude who’s content to simply stare at an Imperial stormtrooper’s empty helmet for 90 minutes. It’s for the two childhood friends who parted ways back in junior high over a dispute about whether Captain James T. Kirk could kick Han Solo’s ass. And it’s for…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
As far as Jeffrey Katzenberg is concerned, there have been but two “revolutions” in the movie business: the mass introduction of sound with 1927’s The Jazz Singer (itself, a process 30 years in the making) and, a year later, the debut of The Viking, the first feature presented in Technicolor…
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19 — and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with the…
For so major a movie star — at least, once upon a time — Jim Carrey seems to make a lot of awfully minor films, several of them over and over again. Isn’t Yes Man, in which Carrey’s self-absorbed Debbie Downer green-lights every bad decision in an effort to reinvent…
First, a key spoiler: Cadillac Records is not the story of Chess Records, the blues label started in Chicago in 1950 by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess that featured among its stable of artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Etta James, plus many others who birthed…
To brand, then dismiss, Four Christmases as a disappointment would be giving it too much credit. The story of couple Kate (Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Vince Vaughn) who, fogged in on December 25, put their planned Fiji frolic on hold to visit their four divorced parents in the course of…
Those of us who adored Casino Royale, the 2006 reboot of the haggard, self-parodic James Bond franchise, had some trouble trying to decide where to place it among the series’ finest. Was it better than Goldfinger? Probably not, but close. The Spy Who Loved Me? Maybe so. From Russia with…
Paul Rudd wears the constant look of glazed-eye amusement; everything seems to tickle him, even that which annoys or frustrates or disappoints him. He’s frat-boy handsome and, therefore, almost anonymous when he stands in a movie-star lineup; in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things (2003), Rudd received a supposedly extreme…
Ostensibly, Zack and Miri Make a Porno should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words, it’s…
Pride and Glory doesn’t make any effort to disguise what it is: a barely-held-together string of vignettes lifted from every cop movie ever made (save, perhaps, Turner & Hooch). It serves up clichés bound together by a flimsy, bored-out-of-its-own-skull story about bad cops, black sheep, good sons, and a climactic…
There’s a whole lotta fucking going on in Choke, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s first-person novel about a sex addict named Victor Mancini with severe Mommy issues — fucking in a cramped airplane bathroom, on a barnyard’s itchy haystack, in a grimy toilet stall, in a hospital chapel even…
It takes a good while for Ricky Gervais to warm up in Ghost Town; it takes even longer for the audience to warm to Ricky Gervais. During the opening minutes of Ghost Town — an occasionally effective mash-up of Ghost, The Sixth Sense, and The Frighteners — Gervais, as Bertram…
In its final 10 minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise, and nonsense, and those are 10 perfectly enjoyable minutes. It’s hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the 80 or so…
The Rocker bears the decidedly unmistakable odor of something made in 1983 and left on the shelf a good 25 years. That isn’t to suggest that it’s fetid product in need of tossing out: Parts of it are genuinely delightful, and Rainn Wilson doesn’t squander his first feature-film starring role…
