Following up his Beijing Olympics opening-ceremony mega-production, Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple by dressing it up in flamboyant silk and translating it to Mandarin. The honky-tonk of the Coens’ Southwestern noir becomes a noodle-shop compound on the edge of a Western China painted desert, sometime in the…
Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn’t have the clean, fable-like arc of its predecessor. The buccaneer charisma of Michael Douglas’ signature role as Gordon Gekko obscured the moral soul of Wall Street. But everything now is so much murkier. Money Never Sleeps employs whiz-kid proprietary trader Jake Moore…
Directing himself as a verifiable big-movie lead after some time in supporting-actor Triple-A ball, Ben Affleck models a full line of warm-up suits to play Doug MacRay, a second-generation blue-collar stick-up man, the brains of his four-man bank crew. The setting is Charlestown, the square-mile majority-Irish Boston neighborhood that’s half-gentrified…
With a small, well-chosen cast, sly script, and slippery, ambivalent characters, The Last Exorcism gives a welcome twist to the demonic-possession movie revival. A fourth-generation minister, Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) of Baton Rouge’s Church of St. Mark was groomed for the pulpit. Onetime child preacher Cotton has grown out of…
Writer-director team Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer continue to act as the drain trap to our pop-culture toilet. The Date Movie and Meet the Spartans collaborators have made a career of low-overhead channel-surf bricolages catering to ninth-graders with nothing else to do on a Friday night, movies not meant to…
If the money’s right, we don’t care where the job is.” So explains the leader of hired-gun task force The Expendables, Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone). This credo lands Ross and his team (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Randy Couture, and Terry Crews in “The Carl Weathers Memorial Role”) in…
After obligatory helicopter views of New York’s skyline open Adam McKay’s The Other Guys, we’re introduced to Danson and Highsmith (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson), a duo of headline-grabbing, unflappable supercops who keep the city exciting, if not safe, with law enforcement by the Michael Bay book. The Other…
James Ivory and cast make every scene flutter with feeling in this adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel, written for the screen by Ivory’s collaborator of 50 years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Omar (Omar Metwally), an American PhD student, shows up unannounced at a secluded Uruguayan country estate to petition the…
Named for the last good outing by Walt Disney’s rodent mascot, this Bruckheimer-produced Apprentice pays homage to Mickey’s dancing mops but draws more from modern road-tested blockbuster elements: Spidey’s nerd-turned-superhero wish fulfillment and Harry Potter’s boy wizardry. Nicolas Cage plays Balthazar Blake, a 1,300-year-old understudy of Merlin who finds his…
Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche of writer/director Christopher Nolan, an American action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass consensus with The Dark Knight. Nolan’s follow-up offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes, and GQ-style leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows —…
This Robert Rodriguez–produced sequel goes back into the bush to follow 1987’s Predator—a sci-fi horror that put the multi-megaton American stud-soldiers of Reagan-era action in the infra-red, stalking POV of a higher-tech galactic Superpower. This time, U.S. black ops turned soldier-of-fortune Royce (Adrien Brody, knotty with new muscle) literally plummets…
By Nick Pinkerton You’ve probably seen the poster for Grown Ups, with its stars—Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Kevin James—barreling down a waterslide. Or is the verb I’m looking for “coasting”? Grown Ups begins with a flashback to a 1978 boys’ basketball championship, where the starting…
Bracingly inept, Chef Boyardee spaghetti western Jonah Hex is the rare 80-minute movie that you can’t even call “taut.” Rather than teasing out curiosity about its outcast hero’s past, Jonah pelts the viewer with clumps of exposition, including a hasty comic-book-graphic origin montage illustrating the strange case of Hex (Josh…
Like its predecessor, 2010’s The Karate Kid begins with an uprooting. Young Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother are introduced in their Detroit apartment, now packed into boxes. Ralph Macchio shipped off to the Valley; Dre is going to China. A skate kid behind on his growth spurt, Dre…
Brad Anderson’s long-running saga of the melty-looking Winslow family and the gangling, interfering Great Dane that should’ve been put to sleep ages ago gets a film treatment, and once-mute Marmaduke gets expressive CGI-arched eyebrows and a voice provided by Owen Wilson. Relocated from Kansas to Orange County by master Phil…
As Iron Man 2 begins, Tony Stark — mechanical genius, Forbes 400 perennial, the pop-star CEO of Stark Industries — has dropped any pretense of a secret identity. Stark is garishly “out” as Iron Man, performing a one-man air show before touching down to host his Stark Expo, which transforms…
If audiences are willing to pretend that they’ve never seen Freddy Krueger—and the crowd I was with was primed—at least give them the privilege of a tease. Unfortunately, this remake of Wes Craven’s 1984 horror staple pops its cookies early, with barely a glimmer of suburban sunshine to contrast the…
The social-networking site Gay.com presents a triple bill of same-sexer-themed movies. In descending order, from middling to empirically bad: Watercolors — the most professional job, and the only one that takes a stab at Eros — is a My First Time jock-on-nerd love affair done with chiaroscuro cinematography and awful…
A decade too old to convincingly be called “boy,” Sam “Mr. Greenscreen” Worthington is poorly cast as reluctant-demigod Perseus — as was Harry Hamlin in the ’81 Clash of the Titans — but the appeal of sumptuous blockbuster Hellenism remains with the Gods (Liam Neeson as Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as…
Another wholesale dystopian future, just like the last one. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker are two repo men punching their timecards for The Union Inc. Their job is to hunt down those recipients of synthetic organ transplants who’ve fallen behind on payments, then retrieve company property at the point of…
Putatively a new romance starring Robert Pattinson, Remember Me begins like a vigilante movie: a Brooklyn subway platform, 1991; a racially charged stickup; an 11-year-old girl watches her mother get shot. It’s the first sign that here is a film that won’t content itself with just charting the little measures…
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby’s parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory…
