Continuing both his bad filmmaking and obsession with lethal orifices, Mitchell Lichtenstein follows up Teeth, his clumsy debut about a dismembering vagina, with a voluminous explosion of poop. The brown-out is produced by Joe (Rip Torn), a dementia-addled horndog whose two daughters, environmentalist Laura (Demi Moore) and married-into-money Jayne (Parker…
Opening with balalaikas, scurrying agrarians in collarless shirts, and helpful intertitles announcing that Tolstoy was “the most celebrated writer in the world,” The Last Station threatens at first to be Tolstoy for Dummies as interpreted by Monty Python. Soon, though, this workmanlike adaptation of Jay Parini’s novel about Tolstoy’s last…
Assault by relentless accordion-playing, Paris 36 proves that sometimes, imitation is the highest form of flatulence. Christophe Barratier follows up his equally pandering The Chorus (2004) with an aggressively nostalgic, tinny homage to French musicals of the ’30s and ’40s. To distract viewers from the film’s shallowness and the fact…
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby’s parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory…
The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and, addressing what used to be called “the German problem” while dodging the filmmaker’s own likability issues, it’s his best ever. A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt…
In Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall’s personal cinematic high score, the opening credits close (and the closing credits open) with the voice of a street freak, barely noticeable in wide shot, chanting an absurd mantra — “Welcome to Hollywood, land of dreams!” Twenty years later, Marshall dips into the same…
The Wolfman has it all – mist drifting over moonlit moors; Geraldine Chaplin as a gypsy fortune-teller; a dark, gloomy castle full of cobwebs and family secrets; effective fake-out scares complete with crisply jarring sound; a bombastic score and a soundtrack overstuffed with creepy whispers. Benicio Del Toro stars in…
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…
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…
“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…
Endgame, about the covert negotiations in the ’80s that helped bring down apartheid, follows Michael Young (Jonny Lee Miller), a public affairs director for a British gold-mining firm. Miller secretly assembles talks between African National Congress representatives led by Thabo Mbeki (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and powerful Afrikaners like philosophy prof Will…
For better or worse, there isn’t a human experience that French director André Téchiné can resist lathering into a tone poem. Tackling a 2004 incident whose sociopolitical ramifications can hardly be ignored — a young Gentile woman set off a media storm by falsely claiming to be the victim of…
The bar for romantic comedies has been set so low that when one — especially one whose press materials boast “from the studio that brought you The Proposal” — doesn’t leave you with the feeling that you’ve witnessed onscreen gynocide, consider it a small victory. When in Rome is confused…
Rebecca Miller’s fourth feature may be the only film you’ll ever see with both Cornel West and Monica Bellucci in minor roles. But it is also immediately recognizable as the millionth iteration of a sheltered, middle-aged suburban housewife who has a slight crackup and decides she better get her ya-yas…
It’s hard to know what Dwayne Johnson has less faith in: his talent or his audience. Though hardly a comedic dynamo, Johnson has generated laughs with his easygoing charm in forgettable studio products like Get Smart and Planet 51, appealingly undercutting his beefcake physique by letting his characters’ arrogance blow…
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…
Coming in the wake of Avatar’s cultural tsunami and its controversial take on — among other things — earth and ancestor-based spirituality, Legion is decidedly old-fashioned in its monotheistic Bible-thumping and fear-mongering. While director Scott Stewart (who penned the script with Peter Schink) obviously can’t compete with James Cameron’s mega-budget…
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…
I’m Not There screenwriter Oren Moverman makes his directorial debut with The Messenger, a moving and nuanced drama about the home-front readjustment period for decorated Iraq War hero Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) who, after surviving a roadside blast, has been reassigned as a Casualty Notification Officer. He is partnered with…
Cults collide as Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson tackles Alice Sebold’s bestselling New Age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath, narrated by its 14-year-old victim from heaven. The movie, starring Saoirse Ronan as the teenaged Susie, is horrific yet cloying, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous. Published…
Like director Brian Levant’s last two outings — 2002’s Snow Dogs, 2005’s Are We There Yet? — The Spy Next Door is immediately forgettable family entertainment, suitable for release only in the dung-heap month of January. Jackie Chan, game as ever, stars as Bob Ho, an undercover CIA agent from…
For years, Hollywood has wrestled with adapting C.D. Payne’s 1993 novel Youth in Revolt — which, actually, was three novels collected under one title, and so the possibilities were endless given 500 pages of material to mine. In 1996, Fox filmed a pilot starring Chris Masterson as Nick Twisp, the…
