About as unremarkable as a film about talking animals organized into competing intelligence agencies can be, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore overcompensates for its preschool premise (I don’t know if you’ve heard, but these house pets — they don’t like each other) with a steroidal story line…
What might strike American viewers as the most quizzical thing about Looking for Eric, Ken Loach’s humble ode to soccer heroes and coming of middle age in Manchester, is not its footie fixation but the unholy fuss kicked up by the possession of a single handgun. Hidden under the floorboards…
The postscript for Entre Nos explains that it’s based on codirector Paola Mendoza’s own story of eking out a living on the streets of New York. Unfortunately, that postscript is more affecting than anything that made it to the screen. In the film, Mendoza plays her Colombian mother, and her…
An almost miraculously photographed showcase of some of the seven seas’ least seen and most incredible specimens, Disney’s Oceans (a follow-up to last year’s Earth) lets its subjects speak for themselves. Timed to coincide with Earth Day, the film’s preservationist agenda is mostly implicit in its wonder at these strangest…
Billed as a “collective feature film,” New York, I Love You is the second in the “Cities of Love” series, an idea that has so far proved better in theory than execution. As with its predecessor, Paris je t’aime, there are hits and misses. Producer Emmanuel Benbihy decreed that each…
The first credit to roll for Sorority Row, director Stewart Hendler’s highly unnecessary remake of a 1983 slasher, is for a character known as the “bra-clad sister.” A few entries down are “slutty sister,” “ditzy sister,” and “sarcastic sister.” I’m not sure you need to know much more than that…
Bart Got a Room South Florida native Brian Hecker’s uncomfortably strained directorial debut — a semi-autobiographical 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…
Casting Nicole Kidman as The Golden Compass’ glacial, intractably smooth megalomaniac Mrs. Coulter was the deal breaker for director Chris Weitz, who adapted this first installment of British novelist Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy — Kidman was his first and only choice. Despite the book’s description of the nefarious…
Banking on the career choices of Vince Vaughn garners increasingly erratic returns, which is ironic, given that he has finally settled on (or surrendered to) a consistent onscreen persona: his own bad self. Uneasy from the beginning, Vaughn avoided the superstardom that seemed within reach after Swingers by trying on…
Killer timing! Manda Bala (“Send a Bullet”), Jason Kohn’s vivid, lean-and-hungry documentary about São Paulo’s fatalistic food chain of extreme poverty, violence, unmitigated corruption, and overwhelming wealth arrives just as Vanity Fair’s “Viva Brazil!!” issue hits the stands. Can’t we find a new country to fetishize? Trading once again on…
