Egg, meet sperm. Sperm, my mother.” And so it is that 10-year-old Henry James Herman (Jason Spevack) introduces his mother, Patricia (Toni Collette), to Slavkin (Michael Sheen), the college professor whose sperm-bank donation helped create Henry. With the second-highest IQ score in recorded history, Henry is a certified genius whose…
The Lucky One is the seventh movie based on a Nicholas Sparks book — two more are in preproduction — and, well, it’s no Notebook. In fact, it’s the most leaden of the bunch. Zac Efron stars as U.S. Marine Sgt. Logan Thibault, who’s on his third tour of Iraq…
Die-hard horror fans (including this one) generally spend their adult lives hoping to re-experience the fear and awe they derived from the scary flicks they saw as kids. Which may be why Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro was inspired to co-produce and write (with Matthew Robbins) a remake of…
An earthquake has opened an undersea chasm, unleashing a gazillion piranha fish near an Arizona resort town that just happens to be jammed with spring-break partiers anxious to frolic in the pretty blue lake. Horny horror-movie revelers tend to deserve what’s coming to them, a sentiment French-born director Alexandre Aja…
“No Damn Trespassing, Beware of Mule!” warns the hand-carved sign posted near the high-country cabin of Tennessee recluse Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), whose abrupt decision to reengage with the larger world propels Get Low, an imperfect but rewarding film. It is 1938, and Felix, who’s been in a self-imposed exile…
First off, forgive us for not having the budget to upgrade this summer movie preview to 3-D. Rest assured, there are plenty of eye-popping (brain-numbing?) epics in the preview list that follows, but to our pleasure and surprise, there is a surplus of attention-worthy 2-D flicks too. Happy summer, movie…
“It’s Dad. He’s got a knife.” So do many of the dads in the Midwestern town of Ogden Marsh, where men and women alike are suddenly developing blank stares and homicidal urges. The boy hiding in a closet with Mom, while Dad stalks them with that kitchen knife, is destined…
Completing his multifilm vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German-born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower, and a priest-filled Vatican City in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow (2004), taking down…
We call it soccer, but for the Brits, it’s football, and it’s damned serious business. From 1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), a manager/coach from the tiny town of Derby, and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into division champs. That success wasn’t nearly…
Serial killer Michael Myers, it turns out, has mother issues. In this disappointing sequel to his intense and much underrated 2007 remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween, rock star turned filmmaker Rob Zombie sends Michael (Tyler Mane) on another killing spree at the urging of his now-dead mom (Sheri…
Credited as the first “action figure,” G.I. Joe came to life in 1964 as Hasbro’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie doll. There were actually four Joes — one for each branch of the armed forces — and in the imaginations of boys everywhere, they fought Nazis. Forty-odd years later, the Joes…
The cinema is not a slice of life but a piece of cake,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, and if that’s true, then summertime is when we gorge — unhealthily, most of the time, on ear-splitting smash-’em-ups and nerd-filled sex comedies. This year’s summer movie season is sure to contain its…
If the dream of every comic is to have his humor live on long after he’s left the stage, then the late Bernie Mac has exited this world on a high note. Soul Men, a comedy completed shortly before Mac’s untimely death in August, is no classic, but the comedian,…
Despite his reputation as that rarest of creatures — a Hollywood intellectual — new evidence suggests that Steve Martin reads… prepare yourself… thrillers and spy novels. Or at least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from the “Story by” credit the comedian receives on Traitor, an uneven yet engrossing…
Hollywood’s Endless Superhero Summer rolls on with the arrival of Hellboy II: The Golden Army from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, but before this review goes any further, I must confess — head hanging low in shame — that I haven’t read a comic book since I was 12…
When you sleep with the king, it ceases to be a private matter.” And so it comes to pass that young Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) must stand before her father, Sir Thomas (Mark Rylance), and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), and report the nitty-gritty details of having…
As one of what novelist Stephen King calls his Constant Readers, I was as jazzed as every other monster-lovin’ geek when word came that filmmaker Frank Darabont was making a movie of King’s classic novella The Mist. Cynics suggested that after tanking big time with his Frank Capra homage The…
There have already been critical rumblings about the extreme violence in Shoot ‘Em Up, but it’s hard to get too worked up about a film whose very title announces its maker’s intent and that opens by raking the New Line Cinema corporate logo with machine-gun fire (a gesture long overdue)…
Chris Tucker still believes in Michael Jackson. You can tell, because in the very first scene of Rush Hour 3, the actor-comedian squeals melodically, grabs his crotch, and throws his arms up to the heavens. All that’s missing is a giant offstage fan to make Tucker’s shirt billow out behind…
