Nat Faxon and Jim Rash didn’t set out to make a comedy about divorce. Eight years ago, when the improv-comedians-turned-actors-turned-Oscar-winning-screenwriters started writing a coming-of-age script based on a particularly upsetting moment from Rash’s childhood, they just wanted a happy ending. Yet almost all of the characters in The Way, Way…
If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3-D blockbusters, Guillermo del Toro may as well make one. His Pacific Rim is summer entertainment with a pulse. The effects are so overscaled and lavish as…
Michael Cera is growing up. It may be hard to picture, as at one point it seemed as if baby-faced Cera could forever play the awkward teenage boy next door. But in the last few months, other than a recent return to his Arrested Development roots, Cera has left behind…
Opening Friday at the Classic Gateway Theatre, 1820 E. Sunrise Blvd., Fort Lauderdale; 954-763-7994; thegatewaytheatre.com. Also at Movies of Delray, 7421 W. Atlantic Ave., Delray Beach; 561-638-0020; moviesofdelray.com. And at Movies of Lake Worth, 7380 Lake Worth Road, Lake Worth; 561-968-4545; moviesofdelray.com.You use big words to say simple things,” says…
It’s not news that the American “war on terror” has helped create growing anti-American sentiment (in Iraq and Afghanistan, for starters) rooted not in people’s envy of our culture or hatred of our values but in the senseless bloodshed suffered by their families and countrymen. A sobering illustration of how…
Courtside trash-talk is a whole ‘nother game in The Hot Flashes. “I am going to rip those worn-out nipples right off of you,” snarls Camryn Manheim to the woman who broke up her marriage and is also her teammate. Later, Virginia Madsen winks, “Why buy the pig when all you…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group-dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy—weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the pushy, wheedling neediness of…
Not lazy in the sense that he has no ambition, or doesn’t want to work hard to maintain his status as America’s big-screen comedy king. But in the sense that Sandler has built an empire by doing the same things with the same people, over and over again. That sameness,…
One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie’s brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight’s Children concerns a lovelorn doctor, his beautiful patient, and that timeless exemplar of old-world prudishness: a sheet with a hole in it. The patient, Naseem, not yet of marriageable…
Until 2005 or so, no one thought much about modern piracy of the high-seas variety. But then Somali pirates began attacking merchant ships with increasing frequency, seizing vessels and holding their crews hostage for outlandish sums. Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the…
The two married couples in this woefully schematic play turned film emote madly, revealing all manner of sexual secrets and hidden jealousies, not one of which will come as a surprise. Screenwriter Joe Hortua, adapting his 2004 play with cowriter/director Dan Mirvish, gracefully time-shifts between two ill-fated parties, both of…
Admit it: Redemption is boring. We think we want characters to “grow” and “change,” but really, it’s the people around us in real life — people who, say, loudly pick their teeth in restaurants, or walk too slowly in public thoroughfares — who need revamping. (We ourselves, of course, need…
You’ve probably seen most of the elements that make up The Lesser Blessed before: the icy, desolate rural town, teens who get high and have sex because there’s nothing else to do, two friends who want the same girl, a family that can’t communicate. But The Lesser Blessed can be…
Title: White House Down How Many Times Have We Seen The White House Destroyed On Film? If you mean, the royal “we,” then seven: WHD, Superman 2, Mars Attacks!, Earth vs the Flying Saucers, 2012, Independence Day, and Olympus Has Fallen. Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: Two-and-a…
Surprising proof that Hollywood still can craft a memorable studio comedy, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down stands as a singular achievement in parody, its auteur’s intentions be damned. It’s not only a pitch-perfect attack on every risible plot point afflicting today’s all-exposition-and-explosions filmmaking but also a mad liberal’s vision of…
Constructed with the same patient sorcery and elliptical menace as director Sergei Loznitsa’s previous art-ordeal, My Joy, the WWII saga In the Fog opens with a tracking shot through the 1942 equivalent of a Bosch painting. For almost four minutes, Loznitsa’s camera prowls after three Nazi-arrested locals as they’re led…
Since it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv and since its mystery plot involves a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that isn’t its subject. The film is about love, trauma, and trust, both…
The story Alex Gibney tells here, that of WikiLeaks’ founder, raconteur, and alleged sexual offender Julian Assange, is outlandishly complicated, peopled not with clear-cut good and bad guys but mostly imperfect individuals who hover in between. There’s emotionally fragile Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who passed sensitive military and…
Before he was one of cinema’s finest dramatists (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, Broken Embraces), writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was a provocateur and a satirist. The 63-year-old filmmaker harks back to that past with his first comedy in nearly 25 years, I’m So Excited!, a lighthearted, ensemble-driven bit…
The Heat Would Be More Likable if It Stopped Yelling Everything
In Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, Iron Man gets off a good burn on Thor during their intramural fight in the woods: “Shakespeare in the park?” he says. “Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?” Like any good Shakespearean pastiche, The Avengers began in media res, with a glowy cube thing…
Terrorizing children in their bedrooms remains the existential concern of the toothy blobs, hams, and pop-pom-furred Wild Things that populate Monsters movies. Their very lives depend upon coaxing night-screams from human kids, a premise rich enough for Seuss or Borges. Is it too much to ask, then, that a film…
