Rebecca Miller’s fourth feature may be the only film you’ll ever see with both Cornel West and Monica Bellucci in minor roles. But it is also immediately recognizable as the millionth iteration of a sheltered, middle-aged suburban housewife who has a slight crackup and decides she better get her ya-yas…

Like director Brian Levant’s last two outings — 2002’s Snow Dogs, 2005’s Are We There Yet? — The Spy Next Door is immediately forgettable family entertainment, suitable for release only in the dung-heap month of January. Jackie Chan, game as ever, stars as Bob Ho, an undercover CIA agent from…

Jim Sheridan’s remake of Danish director Susanne Bier’s 2005 original on the familial and psychic trauma caused by Operation Enduring Freedom feels like Operation Endurance. Marine captain and stalwart head-of-household Sam (Tobey Maguire), married to his high school sweetheart, Grace (Natalie Portman), and proud pop of two adorable daughters, returns…

Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to the…

This film aims wide and misses, its satire of the contemporary-art scene seemingly lifted from the transcripts of late-’80s Senate debates about the NEA. It centers around two highly competitive brothers: Josh (Eion Bailey), a successful painter of dull hotel art; and Adrian (Adam Goldberg), a perpetually indignant, brow-furrowing composer…

Gone are Leroy’s cornrows, short-shorts, and leg warmers: The anodyne adolescents in 25-year-old Kevin Tancharoen’s directorial debut (written by Allison Burnett) suggest not the charismatic, street-smart pupils at Performing Arts, but the Up with People squares. Like all good drama queens, the students in Alan Parker’s 1980 original Fame TV…

Coco Before Chanel opens in 1893 with a grim scene of a 10-year-old waif, Belle Époque Coco, and her sister unceremoniously dumped at an orphanage, and it ends around World War I, a few years before the Chanel empire is launched. It stops well short of the most shameful era…

“The sap pollutes the water, and then they die,” florist Eloise (Jennifer Aniston) upbraids her employee on the importance of cauterizing stems. A similar befouling occurs in the directorial debut of Brandon Camp, who, with Mike Thompson, co-wrote Love Happens — which is not so much a romance as it…

If you are the director, producer, writer adapting your own stage play, and co-star of a film, you really show how bad you can do all by yourself. Usually thrilling in their lunacy, most Tyler Perry movies can at least keep up their momentum through the combination of an overstuffed…

In the early ’00s, I worked as a freelancer for a publication two floors below Vogue — pre-Devil Wears Prada. Each sighting of Anna Wintour, no matter from how great a distance, was terrifying enough to immobilize me for a few seconds, leading to a sweaty paralysis when I found…

If you remember Woodstock, you probably weren’t there,” the expression goes. And if you were, can you please stop gassing on about it? Aquarian Nostalgia™ is the most oppressively sanctimonious and dull stripe of reminiscing. Sure, the three free days of peace and music at Max Yasgur’s farm passed without…

I love beauty — it’s not my fault,” the perpetually orange, shellacked septuagenarian Valentino sniffs to reporters backstage at his spring prêt-à-porter show in February 2007. Filming the last year of the designer’s reign — Valentino retired in September 2007 after 45 years in haute couture — dedicated follower of…

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. Matthew McConaughey stars as NYC celebrity photographer Connor Mead, a horndog who tries to convince his kid brother, about…

The Golden Boys You can feel yourself growing older in the 90 minutes it takes to watch this horrid piece of filmed dinner theater starring Rip Torn, Bruce Dern, and David Carradine as a trio of crusty former sea captains living under the same roof in 1905 Cape Cod. Based…

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 middle-class…

Duplicity It’s little surprise that, for his second film as director, Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy leans heavily on his favored tropes of international espionage and cutthroat capitalism. The surprise is that Duplicity is a comedy — about two people who love each other more than they could ever trust…