A very, very loose and highly symbolic adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void is both a lame fusion of stoner lifestyle, sexual fetish, and philosophical inquiry and a technical achievement that can’t be as easily dismissed. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a young, drug-dealing…

Programmatic by design, Burlesque flattens singer Christina Aguilera’s inherent thorny appeal — the persona that’s at once obnoxiously “provocative” and sympathetic — by laughably casting her as the 21st-century, torch-signing equivalent of Ruby Keeler in a hodge-podge of Busby Berkeley plots, with none of the Depression-era style or social critique…

In the climax of Morning Glory, Rachel McAdams is dressed in the kind of cocktail dress a screen heroine wears when a slow-building love plot is coming to a head; it is the perfect costume for, say, leaving one suitor to run across Manhattan to another. Which McAdams’ Becky ultimately…

In Due Date, a skinny, scowly, and dryly self-referential Robert Downey Jr. meets a chubby, beardy, quasi-autistic Zach Galifianakis boarding a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Downey Jr. plays Peter, a Bluetoothed architect with a very pregnant wife (Michelle Monaghan) waiting at home for him; Galifianakis’ Ethan is a…

Paul (Ryan Reynolds), an American truck driver for a KBR-type contractor in Iraq, is captured in an insurgent attack and wakes up buried in a coffin, totally defenseless but for a Zippo, a pencil, a flask, a flashlight, anti-anxiety meds, and someone else’s cell phone. He uses the latter to…

Set up on a blind date by their married best friends, Holly (Katherine Heigl) and Messer (Josh Duhamel) show each other the worst of themselves. (“You look like you read,” he says disparagingly. Trust me, she doesn’t.) They separate in a huff before making it to dinner. Soon, the best…

Things you should know going in: Mexicans like hydraulics in their cars, and white people assume all Mexicans are janitors or gardeners. Created by Robert Rodriguez for Danny Trejo, Machete is a leather-faced, ex-Federale turned down-and-dirty hitman turned violent crusader on behalf of his fellow illegal immigrants. Machete is hired…

“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” says John Cusack in High Fidelity, a very good romantic comedy about a 30something man who can’t maintain a relationship, partially because he’s holding on to stale record-nerd dreams. Going the Distance is a not-very-good romantic comedy about…

A loose adaptation of a Jeffrey Eugenides story called “Baster,” The Switch stars Jennifer Aniston as Kassie, who, having failed to find a husband by age 40, informs her sad-sack best friend, Wally (Jason Bateman), that she’s on the hunt for a sperm donor. Though wholly devoted to Kassie, Wally…

Lusciously shot by Oscar winner Robert Richardson (The Aviator, JFK), Eat Pray Love delivers a sensory overload as intense as Inception’s. But it’s heavily calibrated to stir the hearts, loins, and tear ducts of women for whom love handles and spiritual bankruptcy are of equally pressing concern. Julia Roberts’ Liz…

In Sally Potter’s 1993 Marxist-punk-tinged Virginia Woolf adaptation, Tilda Swinton plays the titular British lord blessed with eternal youth who, after failing in the world of men and balking at his preordained role in imperialist war, suddenly shape-shifts into a woman. With Orlando now being reissued in theaters, Swinton’s current…

Salt, a spy flick rewritten for Angelina Jolie after Tom Cruise dropped out, has been publicized as the cinematic equivalent of the 19th Amendment: finally, a level playing field for female action stars! This is mostly bullshit, of course — Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is not the first action hero to…

So one-sided that it nearly validates what the right says about Hollywood’s liberal crusaders, Oliver Stone’s essay/lecture/travelogue South of the Border is propaganda in the form of a home movie, documenting Stone’s summer vacation spent in the collegial company of the figureheads of various South American states. About ten minutes…

Coco Chanel. Igor Stravinsky. Two iconoclasts whose contributions to their respective artistic fields left an indelible mark on the 20th Century. Did you know they used to bone? After a lengthy staging of the disastrous 1913 premiere of “The Rite of Spring” (the sole sympathetic set of ears in the…

Blond and spineless, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) has a secure fact-checking job and is engaged to Victor (Gael García Bernal), a hunky restaurateur of indeterminate exotic origin who dangles hot, fresh fettuccine into her mouth in a totally nonthreatening, not-at-all-9½ Weeksish way. But Sophie’s not satisfied: She really wants to write,…

Is it an accident that Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood plays like a rousing love letter to the tea party movement? It’s certainly something of a surprise. When the movie was announced in 2007 with the title Nottingham, reports suggested that it would sympathize with the normally vilified Sheriff of Nottingham…

Kick-Ass sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenaged mind. Tired of being mugged by high school thugs in a Manhattan that’s notably scummier than the real thing, our hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, a hot young thing given a perm-and-glasses nerdover) wonders, in a hilariously put-on and…

There’s an obvious stunt element to the casting of The Runaways: a punked-up, barely legal Kristen Stewart and a still underage, barely dressed Dakota Fanning begging for street cred by playing dress-up as, respectively, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, front girls of the oversexed ’70s-era teen proto-punk sensation the Runaways…

“We are not these people! We are a boring couple from New Jersey!” complains Claire Foster (Tina Fey) to her husband, Phil (Steve Carell), in Date Night. Phil and Claire are middle-class, suburban parents whose plans for a night on the town are thwarted when they’re pulled into a web…

Cop Out establishes its movie lineage right away, with a slow-motion toe-to-head tilt up, set to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn.” Black-cop/white-cop buddies Jimmy and Paul swagger stone-faced toward the camera. Director/editor Kevin Smith immortalizes his heroes as stock crime-flick badasses in their very first frame. Smith complicates…

In Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall’s personal cinematic high score, the opening credits close (and the closing credits open) with the voice of a street freak, barely noticeable in wide shot, chanting an absurd mantra — “Welcome to Hollywood, land of dreams!” Twenty years later, Marshall dips into the same…