Smart people got no reason to live — and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point still stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow — one of those Sundance premieres starring famous people slumming it in dingy Indieland — the smart people ain’t doing much…
For a movie built around questions of failed ethics and duplicitous behavior, Street Kings is just as dishonest as its characters. Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense…
If you turn the first page of Scott Smith’s The Ruins, a friend said astutely, you won’t put it down — but if you know what it’s about beforehand, you won’t pick it up. So let’s just say that if this reworking never approximates the abandon-all-hope ferocity of Smith’s hair-whitening…
When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star” — note not even a question mark at the end — you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the postpubescent variety are…
An unusually blunt melodrama by David Gordon Green, melodious poet of sentimental delicacies such as George Washington and All the Real Girls, Snow Angels introduces a pair of gunshots and then follows with a flashback narrative to account for them, cross-cutting between the emotional bludgeoning of two unhappy couples. Louise…
Mick Jagger’s most essential physical feature, according to Martin Scorsese, is his bellystache. On the poster for Shine a Light, the big-shot director’s Rolling Stones concert film, Sir Mick is frozen in midsong aerobics, his back arched, his half-shirt raised, that yawning navel and faint hairline more prominently showcased than…
Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington’s shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it’s only natural that Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a series of Iraq-themed films that can be set neatly alongside their Vietnam-era counterparts. Just as the initial wave of angry anti-Vietnam documentaries (In the…
Ben Mezrich’s 2002 best seller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions was a smart narrative about … well, you saw the subtitle, right? Mezrich more or less recounted a fantastic tale spun by an old acquaintance from Boston, an MIT…
Film noir and melodrama cast a long shadow over Ira Sachs’s look back at the rotting heart of the Fifties nuclear family, but his movie rarely breaks a sweat. Slow, deliberate, and russet to a fault, this quietly controlled chamber piece, based on a 1959 murder mystery by British writer…
Rare is the star vehicle that is as poorly matched to its star as Drillbit Taylor, which casts Owen Wilson as a homeless Army deserter and con man, able to fool people into believing he’s both a substitute teacher and a master of hand-to-hand combat. It’s a part that requires…
Remember that scene in The Warriors where the Turnbull ACs chase the heroes in a pimped-out bus? Whoa! And remember that part in Escape from New York where Snake Plissken pulls the switcheroo on the commander-in-chief? Cool! How about that showdown in The Road Warrior with all the modified hot…
No Country for Old Men (Paramount) “A horror comedy chase” is how a grinning Tommy Lee Jones describes No Country for Old Men in the making-of — meanwhile, his fellow actors add to the list such adjectives as “a very primitive ride,” “a rabbit chase through Texas,” and “a very…
For the crime of obliterating high culture, for the crime of getting off on vicarious degradation — and, above all, for the crime of sitting through any movie that resembles the one he’s (re)made — Michael Haneke sentences you (me, us) to Funny Games. Scratch that: to a second fucking…
The English media has spent the better part of a year back-and-forthing over the true-or-false plot points of the 1971-set Bank Job, a movie about the plan to steal nudie pics of Princess Margaret from the bank vault in which they were stashed. More important, and about bloody time, The…
. . . And Justice for All: Special Edition (Sony) Appleseed Ex Machina (Warner Bros.) August Rush (Warner Bros.) Bee Movie (DreamWorks) Black Widow (Fox) Dan in Real Life (Buena Vista) Def Comedy Jam: D.L. Hughley (HBO) Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes Volume 3 (Fox) Hitman (Fox) Housewife, 49 (Acorn)…
Into the Wild (Paramount) Sean Penn waited a good decade before adapting Jon Krakauer’s book about Chris McCandless, who graduated college in 1990, then disappeared into the American unknown, re-emerging as Alexander Supertramp before his final, tragic farewell in the Alaskan wilderness in ’92. Penn’s patience is evident in every…
Archie’s Funhouse: The Complete Series (Classic Media) Army of the Dead (Maverick) Arranged (Film Movement) Ben 10: The Complete Season 3 (Turner) Billy Wilder Film Collection (MGM) Dead Moon Rising (Anthem) Half Moon (Strand) Lonesome Dove: Season One (Echo Bridge)Magnum P.I.: The Complete Eighth Season (Universal) Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium…
Semi-Pro is much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn’t nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had…
Mataharis: Three women who work as private eyes at a Madrid detective agency find that their cases illuminate troubling aspects of their own lives. Ines (María Vázquez) goes undercover at a factory and winds up enmeshed in a power play between the company and union workers opposed to its outsourcing…
Obsessed with gaining the profitable favor of King Henry VIII (Eric Bana), the Duke of Norfolk’s original plan was to have niece Anne (Natalie Portman) become Henry’s mistress and give him the son — and heir — that his wife, Katherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent), has not. After Anne overplayed…
Barbie: Mariposa and Her Butterfly Friends (Universal) Comanche Moon (Sony) Day Zero (First Look) Extras: The Extra Special Series Finale (HBO) Family Affair: Season Five (MPI) The Fugitive: Season One, Volume Two (Paramount) Goya’s Ghosts (Sony) Highlander: The Source (Lionsgate) Jesse Stone: Sea Change (Sony) The Last Emperor: The Criterion…
La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon): The festival’s opening-night selection is the feel-good tale of a nine-year-old Mexican boy’s odyssey to reunite with his mother, who has lived in Los Angeles for four years. The film is part adventure story, part study of the hardships engendered by illegal immigration…
