Earth Abig-screen, family-friendly (well… friendlier) version of the enthralling BBC/Discovery series Planet Earth, Earth follows three animal families — polar bears scavenging for food in the High Arctic, elephants trekking across the Kalahari Desert in search of water, a humpback whale and her young calf on their annual 4,000-mile migration…
The Golden Boys You can feel yourself growing older in the 90 minutes it takes to watch this horrid piece of filmed dinner theater starring Rip Torn, Bruce Dern, and David Carradine as a trio of crusty former sea captains living under the same roof in 1905 Cape Cod. Based…
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for the leg warmers and knee socks clinging to lower extremities than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather, like the apes at the start of 2001,…
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…
Haven’t we been here before? The inbred mutant offspring of Crash and Babel, writer/director Wayne Kramer’s Crossing Over treats the subject of illegal immigrants coming to (and from) Los Angeles with the same vulgarity that Kramer brought to his 2006 children-in-peril thriller Running Scared, this time (barely) concealed under a…
Tom Tykwer’s The International is one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings, and inconspicuous public spaces (museum galleries are a particular favorite), travel under assumed names, and always glance nervously over their shoulders, fearful of being spied on through a sniper’s lens. Some…
If Alice in Wonderland were retold by the Mad Hatter, it might look something like Henry Selick’s 3-D, stop-motion Coraline, in which the bored, blue-haired 11-year-old of the title (voiced by Dakota Fanning) travels through the looking glass and ends up in a world that strangely resembles her own —…
You’ve made the first movie of the Obama generation!” an audience member exclaimed as he rushed up to Clint Eastwood after a recent screening of Gran Torino. “Well,” the 78-year-old actor/director replied without missing a beat, “I was actually born under Hoover.” It was an ironic juxtaposition, given that Eastwood’s…
I hated the ’90s. The ’90s fuckin’ sucked,” professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson says early on in The Wrestler — and he should know. Over the hill and past his prime — his steroidal body a palimpsest of battle scars, his graying hair dyed a Nordic blond — Robinson…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious — a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man born in the twilight of life and gradually regressing toward dawn that has been adapted into a two-ton, Oscar-season white elephant. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth,…
Walt Kowalski growls a lot — a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest that he sell his house on a gang-infested corner…
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies. It starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Watching Smith and Muccino’s latest…
If you traveled the length of John Malkovich’s medulla oblongata, hung a sharp left at the desk where Beckett’s Krapp recorded his last tape, and walked through the adjoining door of the interstellar hotel room at the end of 2001, you might end up somewhere in the vicinity of Charlie…
A new kind of war movie for a new kind of war, Body of Lies is about the War on Terror as it is being waged on the ground, in the air, but most of all in cyberspace. Directed with terrific verve by Ridley Scott (coming after the listless American…
On some level, you’ve got to hand it to Spike Lee. There are probably less than a handful of directors working in Hollywood today who could put together the financing for a three-hour war movie lacking any marquee names and performed largely in Italian and German with English subtitles. Spielberg…
Earlier this year, when I found myself assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if we had any…
And so, another summer movie season comes to an end not with a bang but with a whimper — what else to call four new releases (Babylon A.D., Bangkok Dangerous, College, and Disaster Movie) in the past ten days that weren’t prescreened for critics by their respective distributors? These are…
Perhaps this review should begin with a disclaimer: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s 39th film as writer/director, will do little to endear itself to the happily-ever-after crowd or those who consider acts of infidelity punishable by impeachment. Leave it to Allen to make a romantic comedy in which all the…
Swing Vote is an election-themed comedy that’s about twice as smart as you expect it to be and still only half as smart as you wish it were. The clever premise, which would have seemed like pure science fiction no more than eight years ago, concerns a U.S. presidential election…
I haven’t seen much at the movies in the past two years that has given me as much unbridled comic pleasure as the sight of Will Ferrell as the win-at-any-cost NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, calling on Jesus, Tom Cruise, and Oprah Winfrey to put out the psychosomatic flames engulfing his…
What a brooding pleasure it is to return to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City — if “pleasure” is the right word for a movie that gazes so deeply and sometimes despairingly into the souls of restless men. In The Dark Knight, the continuation of Nolan’s superb 2005 reboot of the Batman…
Screenwriter Steven Conrad writes movies about success and self-fulfillment in America — how we define it, the price we pay for it, and what it looks like depending on where you’re standing. In Conrad’s The Weather Man, the central figure was a vain TV news personality who had everything that…
