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,…
Jim Jarmusch’s anonymous antihero hitman (French-Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé), identified in the credits of The Limits of Control as the Lone Man, exists only in terms of his unspecified mission. The Lone Man is introduced in an overhead shot doing tai chi in an airport toilet stall, then taking…
Angels & Demons is still no more than another treat for wacked-out male conspiracy theorists, mind you, and at 138 minutes, it’s a scant 10 minutes shorter than The Da Vinci Code. But the movie clips along, tricked out with state-of-the-art hardware and a hotter, brighter partner for Hanks in…
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…
“Things,” as Dwight D. Eisenhower once observed, “are more like they are now than they have ever been before.” But why? Is something better possible? Could there be another way of looking at life — or movies? Ideas beam out from Astra Taylor’s engaging new philoso-doc Examined Life; the viewer…
Following closely behind a film that perfects a concept isn’t easy. Try to imagine a moviemaker sinking a big boat in the wake of Titanic, or racing Trans-Ams right after Smokey and the Bandit. That’s what X-Men Origins: Wolverine faces in its final minutes, during that quintessential comic movie moment…
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most clichéd genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting, and visual beauty. Though, on paper, its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson — their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white…
Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com, with Matthew McConaughey, who, 18 years Efron’s senior and slightly butcher, has just a few more years of prettiness…
The Soloist opens with newspapers thudding onto lawns, a quaint sight that makes the movie practically a period piece, even though the events that inspired it took place within the past four years. An old-fashioned tale for a new-fangled world, the movie turns on a series of columns begun in…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
This much is for sure about the makers of the new Zac Efron picture 17 Again: They know their audience. Scientifically engineered for maximum shriek-and-squeal value among Efron’s legion of distaff tween fans (and no small number of lonely-heart cougars and gay men), the movie opens on His Zackness’ sweaty,…
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…
Martin Scorsese may be presenting Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, but this corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like Mean Streets cubed. Detailing daily life inside a criminal state, it’s a new sort of gangster film for America to ponder. Gomorrah takes its punning…
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for the leg warmers and knee socks clinging to lower extremities than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather, like the apes at the start of 2001,…
With the molded-rubber face of Savalas, the basso profundo of Stallone, and the name of an underdog gas alternative, Vin Diesel’s already-dubious ripped-tough-guy star has dimmed enough to warrant a return to the car-chase series that made him — and made him money. In the latest, notably slack Fast &…
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…
Whether it’s the amnesiac super-spy of the Bourne franchise or the weary law-firm fixer of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy specializes in characters who wear so many masks that, memory loss or no, they scarcely know who they are any more. Guided by instinct, his soldiers of fortune patrol a ruthless…
“That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator. Such blanching is the reaction Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will be typical. Permissibility has…
The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year (if not the century), Watchmen is neither disastrous desecration nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse’s adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address…
Sometimes, less really is more. Modest but cosmic, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is a movie whose sad pixie heroine, Wendy (Michelle Williams), already skating on thin ice, stumbles and, without a single support to brace herself, slides into America’s lower depths. Introduced calling for her dog, Lucy, Wendy loses…
Haven’t we been here before? The inbred mutant offspring of Crash and Babel, writer-director Wayne Kramer’s Crossing Over treats the subject of illegal immigrants coming to (and from) Los Angeles with the same vulgarity that Kramer brought to his 2006 children-in-peril thriller Running Scared, this time (barely) concealed under a…
