The Ugly Truth: Katherine Heigl Needs a New Role

In the lushly produced but dispiriting new comedy The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl stars as Abby Richter, a successful but hopelessly uptight TV producer who is also perpetually single. Ever efficient, Abby does background checks on the men she meets, and takes along on the first date a 10-point checklist…

Departures: It’s Hard to Stay Mad at This Surprise Oscar Winner

The stately Japanese movie Departures comes into theaters trailing some justified ill will for having trounced the critical favorite, Israel’s Waltz with Bashir, for Best Foreign Film at last year’s Academy Awards. It’s not hard to fathom what Academy voters, who skew mature, saw in Departures, an earnest appeal for…

Brüno: Sacha Baron Cohen’s in Queerface, but What’s His Real Target?

“Heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Playhouse of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce — a piece like Turds in Hell, which offered a farrago of sodomy, sadomasochism, incest, coprophagia, bestiality, homosexual behavior…

Larry David Can’t Salvage Woody Allen’s Whatever Works

Character is destiny — at least for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Allen’s exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia opens with a snatch of Groucho Marx singing his trademark paradoxical assertion (“Hello, I must be going”) and is powered almost entirely by the presence of a single, larger-than-life, and less than likeable,…

Transformers 2: Michael Bay Can’t Live Up to Michael Bay

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up as entertainment — and be grateful. This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for…

Rudo Y Cursi is Not the Kind of Sports Movie Where Everyone Wins

Not quite The Further Adventures of Cain & Abel, the second coming of Beavis & Butt-Head, King Kong vs. Godzilla Redux, or Peyton Meets Eli, but energetic fun nonetheless, Rudo y Cursi is a multiple brother act: It’s written and directed by Carlos Cuarón and produced by elder sibling Alfonso,…

My Sister’s Keeper Is Honest About Illness and False About All Else

Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald’s parents didn’t just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate. From a 2004 Jodi Picoult bestseller, My Sister’s Keeper mashes Death Be Not Proud with Irreconcilable Differences. When Kate…

The Proposal: Once More Down the Aisle

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…

Away We Go: Dave Eggers Makes His Screenwriting Debut

Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’ solipsistic, terminally-apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational,…

Peter Pans Head for the Strip in Todd Phillips’ The Hangover

What Fletch was to plaid-checked water-cooler wits in the ’80s, what National Lampoon’s Van Wilder was to college-bound douches at the dawn of Dubya, that’s what 2003’s Old School is to Gen-X frat rats — a secret-handshake movie. A shaggy, intermittently hilarious wish-fulfillment nightmare about sorta dissatisfied, sorta middle-aged dudesters…

Up Soars In Entirely Unexpected Ways

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…

Drag Me To Hell: Sam Raimi Makes One Hell of a Comeback

Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to Hell Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name (namely, the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling camera and viscous ickiness back and serving…

Ramin Bahrani’s Quietly Profound Goodbye Solo

At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine, and Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing and…

Cannes Film Festival 2009: This Time, It’s Visceral

CANNES, France — Memorable for its in-your-face sensationalism, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival opened with the 3-D computer animation Up, saving the “Yours” for the final minutes of the competition’s penultimate movie, Gaspar Noé’s “psychedelic melodrama” Enter the Void. The sad, tawdry, monstrously inflated tale of two traumatized club kids…

Terminator Salvation: Don’t See This Film if You Want to Live

Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…

The Brothers Bloom Is No Joke, Despite Its Stylish Trappings

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,…