As personal assistant to the U.S. ambassador to France, Richard Stevens (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) can keep himself in well-tailored suits and keep his terrific-looking kittenish girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak) in a nice Paris apartment. This is the basis for director Pierre Morel’s delicate study in transatlantic manners, From Paris With Love…
“Did you shoot my daughtah?” is the question posed, in flat-voweled Bostonian, in the trailer for Edge of Darkness. And Mel Gibson, much-bereaved and much-vengeful, from Hamlet to Ransom to Revolutionary America, sets out to settle another score. Gibson is Thomas Craven: veteran, homicide detective, lonesome widower. His daughter, a…
Yesterday’s honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico, bowling alley. It’s another in a string of low-pay, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands half his age, grinding the greatest hits out of an old Fender Tremolux, including his breakout — with the chorus “Funny how falling feels like…
This is the first release by CBS Films, and looks it. “Did you see Harrison Ford has a TV show coming out?” asked a friend who’d seen a prime-time commercial for Measures. Given the Movie of the Week lighting, the mistake is understandable. John Crowley (Brendan Fraser) is, for the…
Directors Allen and Albert Hughes were raised by an Armenian mother and African-American father. With such a background, it would be difficult not to have feelings about the church. The Hugheses’ fourth film, The Book of Eli, centers on the Christianity that was at the margins of their previous films — hypocritically misused by Bokeem Woodbine’s bush-crazy Marine turned pulpit-pounder turned stickup man in Dead…
Seventysomething Melvin Van Peebles plays the lead role from age 15 to 45 in this homely home-video-art love story. He’s opposite actors who are, in every case, younger, making the scenes of teenaged sexual discovery particularly eyebrow-raising. Like practically everything in the movie, the device really “works” only on a…
Aron Gaudet’s documentary is a combination of sure-fire lump-in-the-throat subjects: soldiers returning from war and elderly folks contemplating The End. Traces of Death is easier to watch. The film stars a trio of Maine retirees, who make themselves available, all hours, day and night, to greet, shake hands, and thank…
More Than a Game follows Akron’s Fab Four (later Five) kids on the basketball court, from their “Shooting Stars” traveling youth team into high school and a run of championships. The reason this documentary tells their story — instead of that of the team that miraculously upsets the by-then-nationally recognized…
Couples, retreat. In the latest from Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (co-starring and co-writing), we learn that one compelling reason to make a life commitment is so you will always have someone to eat with at Applebee’s. The movie’s cumulative idea is that, forgetting the delusions of midlife panic, this…
A montage of news footage crisply introduces the not-too-distant future, where the world’s white-collar professionals live vicariously through plastic-smooth swimsuit-cut surrogate bodies, psychically remote-controlled by flesh-and-blood selves abandoned to storage and pallid vegetation. These superdurable avatars are free to live in (somewhat timidly imagined) consequence-free hedonism. No real victims means…
The Invention of Lying’s plot hook sounds like a pileup of Jim Carrey/Tom Shadyac concept comedies. The assumption is that there isn’t much crossover between the Liar, Liar and the Ricky Gervais fan base. Gervais’ fuzzy parable exists in an alternate universe where nobody has made a word for “truth,”…
Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to Hell, Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name (namely, the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling camera and viscous ickiness back and serving…
Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…
“That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator. Such blanching is the reaction Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will be typical. Permissibility has…
Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex daycare as “Mo” Folchart: an antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts they’re reciting from. Mo has abstained…
For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind, very… very… slowly. Yustman plays Casey, a…
Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation — though it moves fluidly enough and its drawings have a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of the cross-promoted-to-saturation CGI-‘toon juggernauts — but because it translates a sensitive, introspective, true-to-life, “adult” comic story into moving pictures…
Since promising Armageddon in the leadoff bars of Straight Outta Compton, star-producer Ice Cube has been one canny career man. In recent years, he’s pulled up stake in the foundering rap game and doesn’t seem to think twice about the cred damage that could come from pratfalling through PG family…
