2 Guns Is Every Movie You’ve Seen

All you need for a movie are two guys and two guns. Unless that movie is 2 Guns, in which case you probably need a good deal more. The problem with so many current action movies, this one included, is that once you’ve seen one, you can’t help feeling you’ve…

The Smurfs 2: Insufferably Frantic and Goofy

Grouchy Smurf may change his tune and transform himself into “Positive Smurf” in The Smurfs 2, but Raja Gosnell’s insufferably frantic and goofy sequel isn’t apt to motivate similar conversions from those who detested his original 2011 live-action/CG hybrid. Gosnell’s follow-up is something of a nature-vs.-nurture tale focused on the…

Mainstream Movie Porn Sucks: How Real Sex in Real Movies Is a Real Distraction

Porn re-inserts itself into the arthouse with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star–two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex into their…

The To Do List Has Fun With a Woman Losing Her Virginity

Like first sex, writer/director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but will no doubt be…

Fruitvale Station Makes a Man of a Martyr

In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, on a platform of Oakland’s Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a young man named Oscar Grant III was shot in the back by a BART transit officer. The officer later claimed he meant to reach for his Taser and not…

R.I.P.D. Is Bland

In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer multitude of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…

The Hunt an Allegory About a Man Falsely Accused of Pedophilia

Opens Friday at Cinema Paradiso, 503 SE Sixth St., Fort Lauderdale; 954-525-3456; fliff.com. Also at Living Room Theaters, FAU Main Campus, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton; 561-549-2600; fau.livingroomtheaters.com.A Danish allegory about a man falsely accused of pedophilia (the dashing, quietly charismatic Mads Mikkelsen) and the town that turns against him,…

Still Mine a Pitch-Perfect, Deeply Affecting Film

Opens Friday at the Classic Gateway Theatre, 1820 E. Sunrise Blvd., Fort Lauderdale; 954-763-7994; thegatewaytheatre.com. Also at Living Room Theaters, FAU Main Campus, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton; 561-549-2600; fau.livingroomtheaters.com. Also at Movies of Delray, 7421 W. Atlantic Ave., Delray Beach; 561-638-0020; moviesofdelray.com. And at Movies of Lake Worth, 7380…

Men in Bland: R.I.P.D. is a Movie That Exists

In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer bulk of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…

Too Bad The Wolverine Isn’t as Interesting as Hugh Jackman

As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine—bony, loping, a little shaggy—and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men characters…

The Conjuring Offers the Same Old Spirits

Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…

Museum Hours Makes Art of Waiting

It’s tempting, after watching the exceptional new film Museum Hours, to describe director Jem Cohen’s visual style as chiefly “observational.” The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their…

Turbo: Big Dreams in Small, Slimy Packages

Big dreams come in small, slimy packages in Turbo, the story of a garden snail (Ryan Reynolds) who realizes his need for speed after a freak accident involving a hot rod’s nitrous oxide tank turns him hyperfast. Chastised for his racecar dreams by curmudgeonly brother Chet (Paul Giamatti), Turbo nabs…

Compulsion: Thriller or Satire?

In this very talky, action-free thriller — a remake of a 1995 South Korean film — Amy (Heather Graham), a wannabe master chef, uses food to insinuate herself into the life of her neighbor, Saffron (Carrie-Anne Moss), a deeply depressed former child star. Amy is living in a fantasy world…

In The Way, Way Back, Adolescence Is a Fantasy

The Way, Way Back is a crowd-pleasing summer treat, predictable in its sweetness but satisfying all the same. It’s like the multinationally branded ice-cream sandwich you get on any pier in the Western Hemisphere — market-tested to appeal to as many people as possible (but you don’t mind gobbling up)…

Girl Most Likely, a Jersey-vs.-Manhattan Comedy

Less funny than her worst SNL sketch, Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-vs.-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan. Fired from her job and dumped by her boyfriend, once-promising playwright Imogene…

Red 2 Isn’t Great, but Helen Mirren? Fabulous.

The world is full of lackluster movies. But the world is not full of Helen Mirren in a Marlene Dietrich fedora, or Helen Mirren in full-tilt eveningwear disposing of a bothersome corpse in a marble bathroom, or Helen Mirren firing a massive rifle-type thingie while sprawled on a picnic blanket…