There’s scant dialogue but plenty of eloquent storytelling in the five animated short films up for a 2013 Oscar, all of which — along with their live-action and documentary counterparts — will get a pre-awards-show release just over the county line at the Coral Gables Art Cinema beginning this Friday,…
The way to a queen’s heart is through Rousseau in A Royal Affair, in which church and state oppression can’t, at least for a time, quell enlightenment urges. From prostitute trysts and physician-conducted crotch examinations to wild-stallion rides through the lush countryside, everything is eroticized in Nikolaj Arcel’s historical drama…
Emotionally and psychologically textured melodrama suffers under the weight of its source material in The Eye of the Storm, Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White’s 1973 novel. Schepisi’s direction has a measured stateliness that, in conjunction with Kate Williams’ graceful editing, lends quiet, dreamy intensity to…
A stacked-deck theological inquiry filtered through a Titanic-by-way-of-Slumdog Millionaire narrative, Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone. It’s no shock that Ang Lee brings to his high-seas adventure graceful and refined aesthetics devoid of any unique signature or pressing emotion,…
Exhibiting great specificity about gay sexual mores — the phone sex hook-ups, the fear of AIDS, a dichotomy between carefree promiscuity and desire for stable monogamy — while also rooting its story in tumultuous universal emotions, Keep the Lights On details a long-term romance fraught with turmoil. Like his prior…
A rerelease whose cash-grab intentions are as transparent as the crystal-clear Sydney ocean, Finding Nemo 3-D exists only to relieve parents of money for a movie they undoubtedly already own. Disney’s double-dip of Andrew Stanton’s beloved 2003 adventure features absolutely no new content — save for the boisterous prefacing short…
A more hopeful reimagining of 2001’s portrait of man-machine relations, Robot & Frank envisions a near future in which automated servants aid the elderly in their twilight years. For retired cat burglar Frank (Frank Langella), memory loss is something to be denied, and the robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) with…
Yet another indie examination of humanity’s escalating technophilia, Small, Beautifully Moving Parts addresses its oh-so-contemporary concerns through the story of Sarah (Anna Margaret Hollyman), a Manhattanite obsessed with gadgets who finds herself unprepared for the news that she’s pregnant. Hollyman imbues her shaken protagonist with understated sensitivity, even when writers/directors…
The nonfiction formula pioneered by Spellbound leads to frustrating superficiality in First Position, a glossy documentary about a multicultural collection of young ballet dancers striving for awards, scholarships, and job contracts at the prestigious annual Youth America Grand Prix. Director Bess Kargman adheres to a now-familiar template in which glib…
The Way might lack the Chicken Soup for the Soul imprimatur, but writer/director Emilio Estevez’s travelogue tale of fathers and sons (starring his own dad, Martin Sheen) trades in a kindred brand of warm, soothing uplift that viewers might read as insight into the Sheen family saga; we did not…
Life is a series of constant adjustments to ever-shifting realities in Gun Hill Road, a Brooklyn-set indie about a criminal, Enrique (Esai Morales), who returns home after a three-year prison term to find that things aren’t quite as he remembered them. Specifically, wife Angela (Judy Reyes) is trying to end…
After ten years, seven movies, six Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, four directors, two dead parents, one grating house elf, and incalculable amounts of CG wizardry, pubescent growing pains, budding romances, and apocalyptic fire and brimstone, we’ve finally arrived: Bespectacled Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) squares off against amphibian-faced Lord…
Given that some of its talking heads are no longer of this world, How to Live Forever quite clearly fails to provide the answer to its titular objective. Worse, however, is that it only dispenses aphorisms that one soon suspects director Mark Wexler — who positions his documentary as a…
At the risk of being a Debbie Downer, watching Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer is akin to being trapped in the ADHD-addled mind of an adolescent hopped up on too much Ritalin. Adapted from Megan McDonald’s kids’ books, John Schultz’s tale mistakes hyperactivity for humor in recounting the…
After sinking into self-important tedium with its prior two overstuffed installments, Pirates of the Caribbean seemed destined for permanent burial at sea. And yet the soggy franchise and Johnny Depp’s foppish rapscallion return again for On Stranger Tides — to search for the fountain of youth, no less, a quest…
Anthropomorphizing its animal stars to a borderline-dubious degree, African Cats situates itself in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, where two four-legged mothers valiantly struggle to provide for and protect their young. On the northern side of the river that divides this gorgeous but pitiless land lives aging lioness Layla, whose…
Parrot sex is the narrative impetus of Rio, and yet there’s still little spark to this animated tale of a domesticated Minnesota macaw named Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) who’s reluctantly taken to Brazil by his clingy owner, Linda (Leslie Mann), to mate with the last of his kind, tough…
Gigantic form, diminutive content: Born to Be Wild 3D, presented in expansive IMAX and narrated by Morgan Freeman, offers a visually arresting, kid-friendly but cursory portrait of the altruistic efforts of two women to not only rescue orphaned baby animals but to then raise and ultimately release them back into…
A gleeful celebration of nonstop doping, Limitless offers up a dim Better Living Through Chemistry fantasy that refuses to rain on its own pill-popping parade. With long, disheveled locks and matching facial scruff, novelist Eddie (Bradley Cooper) struggles with writer’s block until he runs into his ex-brother-in-law, Vernon (Johnny Whitworth)…
Like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol before it, the characters in Mars Needs Moms boast the waxy complexions, unreal movements, and dead eyes of mannequins come to surreal, energetic life. With an unsettling Joan Cusack facial reproduction lending the proceedings a predictably creepy Madame Tussauds vibe, Mars…
The shaky-cam is coming, the shaky-cam is coming! Jonathan Liebesman directs his alien-invasion saga Battle: Los Angeles as if he were having a violent seizure, wedding whiplash faux-war-documentary aesthetics to a Michael Bay cocktail of ooh-rah military romanticism, quick-stroke melodrama, and seesawing CG mayhem. Called into duty after news reports…
A modernized riff on Beauty and the Beast that’s as subtle as its protagonist’s freaky facial blemishes, Beastly offers up an Apple-store-shiny high school crammed with catty cretins, blossoming love in a luxuriant rooftop greenhouse, and a wise, racism-enduring Jamaican maid (Lisa Gay Hamilton) as its de facto Mrs. Potts…
