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…
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…
Not quite The Further Adventures of Cain & Abel, the second coming of Beavis & Butt-Head, 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, director of Y Tu Mamá…
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,…
Director Kirby Dick doesn’t actually stick his camera under any Capitol Hill bathroom stalls in the new documentary Outrage, but his goal is more or less the same: to catch conservative, family-values politicians with their pants down. Armed with a chorus of incriminating voices from across the alternative press and…
Summer Movie Salvation
Angels and Demons Has a Need for Speed
It’s difficult for this longtime Trekkie to review J.J. Abrams’s 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…
Without fail, the dullest installment in any superhero movie franchise is the origin story, during which audiences eagerly awaiting The Big Bad Guy have to suffer through, yaaaawn, scenes of childhood trauma, romantic tragedy, and other expository effluvia, by which point the closing credits are fast approaching. Alas, the X-Men…
John Waters Brings His Filthy World to MGLFF
How long does it take Sasha to get fierce in this almost-tongue-in-cheek Fatal Attraction retread? Too long — and even after Beyoncé Knowles (who executive-produced, as did her daddy) delivers the promising line “I’ll show you crazy!” to Lisa (Ali Larter), the predatory temp who’s been messing with her asset-manager…
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…
Writing about A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, the 2006 debut film by director Dito Montiel, I likened it to the sort of crude but fascinating object one might find in an exhibition of naif art. Adapted by Montiel — a former hardcore punk musician — from his autobiographical novel…
A glue-huffing variant on the gimmick-noir D.O.A., 2006’s Crank was a riotous demonstration of the actionvore’s dilemma: The harsher the swill you consume — “swill” in this case meaning an AYCE strip-bar lunch buffet of mindless splatter, bone-jarring crashes, and beyond-gratuitous T&A — the harder it is to get high…
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…
It’s almost foolish to review Hannah Montana: The Movie as anything other than the latest cog in a cultural phenomenon/mass-marketing juggernaut. The film itself certainly doesn’t aspire to anything more. A brightly colored yet cheap-looking affair (director Peter Chelsom doesn’t even try to push beyond the material’s TV roots), the…
Dead Bodies and Buried Ledes in State of Play
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…
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…
South Florida native Brian Hecker’s uncomfortably strained directorial debut — a semiautobiographical comedy about a high school senior who can’t find a prom date — foolishly believes that Windsor fonts, swing-era songs, and Jews are enough to invoke Woody Allen’s wit. It’s a quirky indie, you see, as nerdy class…
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,…
Renny Harlin has an unjustly terrible reputation, but with the right material (Deep Blue Sea, Mindhunters), he’s very good at delivering stylish, knowingly ludicrous entertainment — that is, if he goes for hard R material, like the lurid deaths that fuel his best films. 12 Rounds is a wan PG-13…
