People Like Us is a certifiable adult drama built atop sturdy thematic supports, a rare enough item these days. Sam (Chris Pine), a career-obsessed New York wheeler-dealer, is reeled back to hometown L.A. upon the death of his father, who had a multiplatinum record as a ’70s music producer/AR man…
Rock of Ages, a new star-clogged pop-musical diversion partly filmed in South Florida, is a cinematic event. It’s not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions — guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater — so thoroughly, mutually degraded. This mess originated…
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena is a tale of two apartments: a spacious chrome, glass, and marble luxury flat that might be anywhere in prosperous Western Europe, and a cramped unit in some exhausted-looking, distinctly Soviet-vintage apartment block with a view of a nuclear plant. Central to the movie is the distance,…
Arriving in theaters on the back of a portentous ad campaign, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus assumes the air of something more than a summer movie, a blockbuster with brains that links the genesis and the ultimate fate of mankind beyond the stars. It is, incidentally, the story of an ambitious mission…
If ever there were a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it is Snow White and the Huntsman. Had it trusted to the native charm of its cast and the sensory seduction of its often-astonishing images to humbly, naively retell its story, this Snow…
Spoiler alert:Chernobyl Diaries is toxic waste. Based on a premise by Paranormal Activity director Peli, Chernobyl Diaries tags along with a group of American backpackers visiting Kiev — the usual boring actors giving boring readings of boring dialogue, which constitutes our contemporary conception of realism. Signing up for a guided…
Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? Chances are, if you saw both MIB movies upon their original release you have little memory of the experience, as if our minds have been wiped with…
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Battleship, which I swear to God is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few years, the…
A group of disparate British retirees is lured to the Indian subcontinent for cut-rate surgery, low-overhead living, or reasons they hope to keep private. They find themselves together under the roof of the titular hotel. The cast is led by Judi Dench as a long-sheltered widow looking to stand on…
A significant portion of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland— and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed daily daytime soap, Dark…
The year is 1837. A newly crowned Queen Victoria, voiced by Imelda Staunton and animated in clay as a shrewish little turnip of a woman, decrees war on buccaneering. Well down her most-anted list is the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant), an only middling terror of the trade routes who’s a…
Making up for its 40-minute run time in turgidity and sheer size, To the Arctic, whose 70-mm IMAX presentation stretches postcard hokum to JumboTron size, is a travelogue doubling as an eco guilt-trip. Director Greg MacGillivray (Everest) buries the viewer in an avalanche of helicopter-view majesty while narrator Meryl Streep…
As in his directorial debut, Mid-August Lunch, Gianni Di Gregorio stars in this quiet comedy, this time as Giovanni, a man in his early 60s forcibly retired nearly a decade ago and whose only employment today is playing gray-haired errand boy to the still-active women who surround him. Giovanni lives…
The Holy Trinity of knockabout numbskull comedy—fritz-haloed Larry, yipping lummox Curly, and bowl-cut fascist Moe—are introduced as they’re ditched on the steps of an orphanage. Twenty-five years later, they’ve grown up to resemble, respectively, television comics Sean Hayes, Will Sasso, and Chris Diamantopoulos, unleashed on the unsuspecting world when the…
The 56th president of the U.S.A.’s do-gooder daughter, Emilie (Maggie Grace), is on a fact-finding trip to a prototype orbital big house where inmates are kept pacified in deep-freeze when she’s taken hostage in a riotous insurgency led by freshly thawed Scots psychopaths (Vincent Regan and Joseph Gilgun). The only…
A historical romance with a then-unheard-of price tag, James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic was the nearest thing to a Gone With the Wind-style cinematic event that the millennials could call their own. Now Titanic has bobbed to the surface yet again in a 3-D re-release, making a play for an audience…
This latest episode in the ongoing American Pie saga, handled by the Harold & Kumar writer-director team of Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, reunites the full original cast at their 13-year high school reunion, as the anticlimactic disappointments of the 30s have begun to sink in. Onetime band-camp nymphomaniac Michelle…
The fairy-tale movie is “trending” at present, with promise of all sorts of bandwagoning rubbish to come, but Mirror Mirror, one of 2012’s two Snow White films, is an enjoyable exception. This is because director Tarsem Singh is no mere follower, having done extravagant work in the realm of pure…
The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about love that in no way reassures that love conquers all. Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience,…
Nic Cage has been in a flurry of activity since the IRS closed in on him in 2009, and, like the proverbial stopped clock, his promiscuous work habits land him in an altogether watchable movie once a year. So, then, Seeking Justice: Cage is Will, a New Orleans high school…
In Silent House, a college-aged young woman, Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen), is on break and helping her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) renovate the remote, no-cell-phone-reception lake house where they once vacationed as a family. Then Uncle storms off after a round of fraternal bickering, Dad disappears with…
“There’s no one way to live our lives,” hopes the displaced, adrift couple at the center of Wanderlust. Shopping between the prefab identity options available to them — squeezed, stressed urban professionalism; suburban McMansion soul death; rural counterculture opting out — George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) are…
