Delicate, gangly Louis Ives (Paul Dano) yearns to be both a Gatsby-era gentleman and a pretty young lady. Caught fondling a lacy brassiere, he’s dismissed from his teaching post at a Princeton prep school and heads to New York with writerly aspirations, sharing an East 91st Street apartment with Henry…
Midway through Lottery Ticket, a teen-comedy-cum-wish-fulfillment fantasy, the movie’s hero, Kevin Carson, goes on a spending spree. The holder of a $370 million lottery ticket that he can’t cash in until after the July 4 holiday, Kevin, played by rapper Bow Wow, accepts a $100,000 loan from a local gangster…
Strictly speaking, the two scrappy Irish kids in Lance Daly’s Kisses aren’t homeless, but in every sense that matters, they have only each other for shelter. Kylie and Dylan, played with forlorn defiance by Kelly O’Neill and Shane Curry, live next door to each other in a dreary housing project…
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…
An earthquake has opened an undersea chasm, unleashing a gazillion piranha fish near an Arizona resort town that just happens to be jammed with spring-break partiers anxious to frolic in the pretty blue lake. Horny horror-movie revelers tend to deserve what’s coming to them, a sentiment French-born director Alexandre Aja…
A loose adaptation of a Jeffrey Eugenides story called “Baster,” The Switch stars Jennifer Aniston as Kassie, who, having failed to find a husband by age 40, informs her sad-sack best friend, Wally (Jason Bateman), that she’s on the hunt for a sperm donor. Though wholly devoted to Kassie, Wally…
“No Damn Trespassing, Beware of Mule!” warns the hand-carved sign posted near the high-country cabin of Tennessee recluse Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), whose abrupt decision to reengage with the larger world propels Get Low, an imperfect but rewarding film. It is 1938, and Felix, who’s been in a self-imposed exile…
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…
In Sally Potter’s 1993 Marxist-punk-tinged Virginia Woolf adaptation, Tilda Swinton plays the titular British lord blessed with eternal youth who, after failing in the world of men and balking at his preordained role in imperialist war, suddenly shape-shifts into a woman. With Orlando now being reissued in theaters, Swinton’s current…
For all of Scott Pilgrim’s adherence to the graphic novels upon which it’s based — the pop art pows and thwacks, the videogame imagery, the rock ‘n’ roll references, the merging of chop-socky action and puppy-dog-sweet sentiment — it goes even deeper, conveying the ache pulsating between the lines in…
Lusciously shot by Oscar winner Robert Richardson (The Aviator, JFK), Eat Pray Love delivers a sensory overload as intense as Inception’s. But it’s heavily calibrated to stir the hearts, loins, and tear ducts of women for whom love handles and spiritual bankruptcy are of equally pressing concern. Julia Roberts’ Liz…
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…
The dance battles that structure the Step Up films are all about “the move” — the one unexpected, mind-blowing, totally impossible move that ends a competition and raises the game. The franchise itself has attempted such a maneuver with its third installment, Step Up 3D. Meant to take the scrappy…
“Never ask for what ought to be offered,” 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tells her little brother in Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik’s dark and flinty Ozark fairy tale. Those are words to live by for Ree and her people, scattered across the hardscrabble crooks and hollers of the southern Missouri…
In a go-nowhere Pacific Northwest town, dreamy high school sailor Charlie (played mostly by Zac Efron’s abs and piercing gaze) puts his Stanford scholarship plans on indefinite hold after he momentarily flatlines in a car accident, which also takes his little brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan). Half a decade later, Charlie…
In Steve Carell’s first few episodes of the American version of The Office, the series hewed closely to the template created by the series’ British mastermind, Ricky Gervais. But in the United States, audiences didn’t take to so bleak a comic vision, and soon, the tone of the series evolved…
Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass has plenty of fans — it copped an award at Cannes in 2009 — but I don’t see what they see. The 87-year-old filmmaker’s latest is an insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault. Georges (Resnais regular André Dussollier) finds a…
About as unremarkable as a film about talking animals organized into competing intelligence agencies can be, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore overcompensates for its preschool premise (I don’t know if you’ve heard, but these house pets — they don’t like each other) with a steroidal story line…
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…
Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming of age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist, in part by creating a romantic triangle among a longstanding, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple, Nic and Jules…
So one-sided that it nearly validates what the right says about Hollywood’s liberal crusaders, Oliver Stone’s essay/lecture/travelogue South of the Border is propaganda in the form of a home movie, documenting Stone’s summer vacation spent in the collegial company of the figureheads of various South American states. About ten minutes…
Despite the presence of Mouse House starlet Selena Gomez, Ramona and Beezus is less Disney than Hallmark Channel, a loose adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s first novel in her beloved kid-lit series that’s wholesome to the point of dull. Without much in the way of a governing narrative structure, Elizabeth Allen’s…
