With post-Goodfellas crime-movie tropes dyed for St. Patrick’s Day, this Ballad of Danny Greene attempts to enshrine the Irish-American strongman, a real-life folk hero among Mob-lore nerds and Cleveland Teamsters for his Rasputin-like resilience through multiple assassination attempts. Kill the Irishman aims to come out bumping chests in upstart insouciance,…
Something Borrowed is based on a 2005 work of chick literature by Emily Giffin. It was directed with extraordinary impersonality by Luke Greenfield (Rob Schneider’s The Animal), and produced by Hilary Swank in collaboration, apparently, with the restaurant Shake Shack — one of the lifestyle brands prominently featured in this…
This one perfect moment.” “That soul-crushing mistress.” “Our forever night.” These and other understated definitions are obsessively applied to a certain dreaded/anticipated ritual throughout Prom, a timely pop product set in a suburban high school during the last weeks before summer break and destined for the immortality of Vitamin C’s…
Why won’t you die? There is a particular sort of stupid-acting-smart movie experience that can be achieved only through the reunion of David Arquette, Courteney Cox, and Neve Campbell. Updated for 2011 with ad nauseum cell-phone app and webcam references — none of which are integrated into the narrative with…
Set in the months after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, The Conspirator follows the consequences of the fatal shot at Ford’s Theater — specifically, the trial of Mary Surratt, owner of a D.C. boarding house. Surratt was presented before a military tribunal as the den mother in the…
Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic, streaked with carelessly contemporary-sounding blue humor, blunt profanity replacing the naughty-naughty, tankard-sloshing, heaving-bosom ribaldry that goes with the period setting. The scene: a generic medieval realm from an EverQuest or Forgotten Realms module…
There is a great deal of prowling motion in Insidious: a recurring sideways dolly outside a haunted house, a trench-coat-clad cacodemon pacing outside a second-story window. It’s the restless motion of a movie stalking its prey — you, dear viewer. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are moving their family into…
Ink still wet on his MIT degree, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in hometown Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHSes of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt reencounters…
Genre-unto-himself Nicolas Cage’s latest displays much the same tattoo-parlor hellfire imagery as Ghost Rider, but this is the hard-R version, with Johnny Blaze’s jellybeans from a goblet in the earlier film now replaced by a cold after-work beer drunk from a human skull. Cage plays a black-denim God’s Lonely Man,…
Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are two domesticated husbands whose long marriages (to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, respectively) have achieved somnolent routine in suburban Providence, Rhode Island. Yet the wives worry. Rick is a girl watcher; Fred masturbates in the privacy of their parked Honda Odyssey…
The Bieber movie, a concert experience and origin-myth documentary, is not good — not that it needs to be. It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off, and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing “At Last” while Bieber’s glossy…
The Roommate is exactly what you thought it would be: a plagiarized, campus-set Single White Female pitched to teens. The Roommate traces over scenes from Barbet Schroeder’s sleepover classic with no notable improvement (the big-gasp “This girl is crazy” moment moves from the hairdresser’s to a tattoo parlor; the menaced…
The Rite is the latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession as a major plot point. This doesn’t mean the subject is wrung out — its continuing resonance with audiences hasn’t been effaced by secular pop psychology or modernization…
The fifth collaboration of director Margarethe Von Trotta and actress Barbara Sukowa, Vision continues the proto-feminist canonization of Blessed Hildegard von Bingen (Sukowa), 12th-century Benedictine magistra, scientist, visionary composer, and literal receptor of visions. Cloistered at age 8, Von Bingen grows into hardball politicking in the Holy Roman Empire as…
Generously bankrolled, then shelved, by an imperiled Weinstein Co. and peopled with Oscar nominees, All Good Things might be called an upscale version of straight-to-cable true crime crap — only that would make it sound more entertaining than it is. The fiction feature debut of Andrew Jarecki, director of 2003’s…
Season of the Witch begins in a Crusade taking place after the Crusades, in a 14th century For Dummies about as immersive and real as the Ohio State Renaissance Festival. Disillusioned, defected knights Behmen and Felson (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) retreat home across a hotchpotch Europe, and turn off…
Just in time for the whole family to file into the multiplex on a silent Christmas night when there’s nowhere else to go: a return to the magnified dysfunction of the Focker household, and the cozy holiday glow of some paychecking celebrities. After a temporary truce, Ben Stiller’s mensch male…
Disney took up C.S. Lewis’ seven-volume (!) Chronicles of Narnia project in the giddy post-Lord of the Rings atmosphere. But after failing to return the requisite billions, this third adaptation comes underwritten by a new studio, 20th Century Fox, and with a new director, Michael Apted, working from one of…
Faster is a glossy B made from three twining badmen stories: There’s pneumatically-muscled ex-con “Driver” (Dwayne Johnson), sharp-dressed hitman “Killer” (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and self-explanatory “Cop” (Billy Bob Thornton). Driver stomps out of prison with a list of the people who put him there and a sworn mission to cross them…
Adapted from Valerie Plame and Joseph C. Wilson’s memoirs, the unsurprisingly validating Fair Game begins as a timeline-hopping international thriller of the countdown months to the second Iraq War. Covert CIA operative Plame (Naomi Watts) and ex-ambassador husband Wilson (Sean Penn) are proverbial ships passing in the night, shuttling from…
SyFy Network house director Steven R. Monroe remakes Meir Zarchi’s 1978 quintessential revenge-rape/rape-revenge film. Jennifer (Sarah Butler) rents a cabin in black-mud, backwoods Louisiana to work in peace on her second novel. An encounter with a local gas-station attendant (Jeff Branson) that crackles with class anxiety starts him and his…
Modish blankness tries to pass for clarity in Let Me In, Cloverfield director Matt Reeves’ Americanized remake of the Swedish boutique hit Let the Right One In. Reeves faithfully adopts the international-style flatness of Tomas Alfredson’s film, a mixture of “philosophical” long shots, brittle scoring, spartan cutting, and slowed-pulse performances…
