Marketed as a guitar summit between The Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White, Davis Guggenheim’s affectionate, intermittently insightful behind-the-music doc is more electric triptych than meeting of the minds. Yes, the trio gather ’round the soundstage amps to teach each other a few tricks, but it’s anticlimactic — save for…
Mike Judge began writing the screenplay for Extract not long after Office Space opened and closed in a matter of weeks in the late winter of 1999. The two movies were always intended as bookends, with Extract countering the earlier film’s woe-is-me tale of the put-upon Prole. But in between…
This deliriously foul-mouthed political satire is set sometime between 2002 and the day after tomorrow; hard to say, given that the country with which U.S. and U.K. pols want to go to war is unnamed save for its location in, you know, the Middle East. The prime minister and president,…
On the surface, (500) Days of Summer really is no different from, oh, let’s say The Proposal, in which Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock spun box-office gold from romantic comedy’s refrigerator fuzz. Former music-video maker Marc Webb’s feature debut is as conventional as any made-for-cable rom-com, down to its soft-indie-rock…
Fifteen minutes after seeing The Proposal, I’d forgotten I’d seen The Proposal. Well, that’s not entirely true: By then, it had simply merged in my memory with a thousand other films just like it — those in which phony lovers bound together by dubious circumstances become honest-to-kissin’ couples in just…
It’s difficult for this longtime Trekkie to review J.J. Abrams’ relaunching of the USS Enterprise. It’s difficult to dispassionately dole out compliments and complaints per the job description. Because, yes, the professional critic understands: This is Paramount Pictures’ latest effort to jump-start a profitable but long-stalled franchise, to do for…
Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill makes mean-spirited tragedies that studios market as inane comedies because otherwise no one would pay a cent to see them. That’s more or less what happened to Hill’s The Foot Fist Way in 2008, two years after its Sundance twirl first caught the attention…
The Haunting in Connecticut There’s no rest for the dead — or the living — in this laughably hokey haunted-house hand-wringer based on yet another Amityville-style “true story” peddled by an enterprising family eager to turn a bum real estate deal into a pop-culture gold mine. The trouble begins when…
At the end of 2008, DreamWorks Animation bossman Jeffrey Katzenberg embarked on a cross-country tour, toting 20 minutes’ worth of Monsters vs. Aliens. The reason for his trek? To persuade critics that 3-D movies are no longer the snake-oil salesman’s hustle but the future of filmmaking — if not the…
Just as we thought the “bromantic comedy” had overstayed its welcome, the genre reaches its high point with I Love You, Man. The subtext is finally the text—it’s right there in the title. The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms: the…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into German aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19 — and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with…
First, a key spoiler: Cadillac Records is not the story of Chess Records, the blues label started in Chicago in 1950 by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess that featured among its stable of artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Etta James, plus many others who birthed…
Those of us who adored Casino Royale, the 2006 reboot of the haggard, self-parodic James Bond franchise, had some trouble trying to decide where to place it among the series’ finest. Was it better than Goldfinger? Probably not, but close. The Spy Who Loved Me? Maybe so. From Russia With…
Ostensibly, Zack and Miri Make a Porno should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words, it’s…
Pride and Glory doesn’t make any effort to disguise precisely what it is: a barely held-together string of vignettes lifted from every cop movie ever made, save, perhaps, Turner & Hooch. It serves up clichés bound together by a flimsy, bored-out-of-its-own-skull story about bad cops, black sheep, good sons, and…
There’s a whole lotta fucking going on in Choke, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s first-person novel about a sex addict named Victor Mancini with severe Mommy issues — fucking in a cramped airplane bathroom, on a barnyard’s itchy haystack, in a grimy toilet stall, in a hospital chapel even…
In its final 10 minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise, and nonsense, and those are 10 perfectly enjoyable minutes. It’s hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the 80 or so…
Early buzz out of Hollywood pegged Tropic Thunder, directed and cowritten by star Ben Stiller, as the end-all and be-all of movie-biz parodies — a savage beast with a rough touch featuring Tom Cruise in a career-resurrecting role as bald-headed, big-gutted, foul-mouthed studio boss Les Grossman, who does the fuck-you…
On the surface, Pineapple Express offers precisely what it advertises: a roll-’em-up, smoke-’em-up, blow-’em-up bromantic comedy from the freaks and geeks who have made Judd Apatow’s brand of stunted-man yuks a global franchise. Once more, Seth Rogen’s red-rimmed, half-shut eyes peek out from beneath his tousled Jewfro, which sits atop…
At the top, let’s be clear about one thing: Journey to the Center of the Earth is more a demo reel than a narrative feature. It’s a decent if overly familiar and yawningly obvious compendium of look-at-me moments intended to show off the latest and greatest in stereo 3-D filmmaking,…
The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis as a dead man, was writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough, but its follow-up, Unbreakable, starring Bruce Willis as the walking dead reborn as a superhero, was the filmmaker’s masterpiece. It remains the most quietly influential of all recent superhero movies, the unacknowledged template for…
