Hanna tells a tech-savvy fairy tale, replete with a wicked witch, uncertain parentage, and chop-socky mixed martial arts. Yet despite its 21st-century trappings and proto-feminist protagonist, Hanna strangely reverts to reactionary politics as usual. When we first meet 16-year-old Hanna (Saoirse Ronan, a Tilda Swinton in training who trafficks in…
Heartbeats, the second feature from 21-year-old wünderkind Xavier Dolan, is an Instagram of the way we fuck now — or, more precisely, the way gorgeously costumed and coifed French-Canadian early-20-somethings fuck and/or fail to fuck while tripping over their own misguided attempts to land in love. The film bounces between…
Adapted from the memoirized 2003 tragedy to triumph of Hawaiian teen surfer Bethany Hamilton — who famously returned to her board a few weeks after a tiger shark snapped off her left arm — Soul Surfer offers a ghastlier sight than your wildest 127 Hours -meets-Jaws nightmare: barefaced Christian pandering…
In this rethink of the 1981 screwball throwback, the titular drunken heir, originally played by lovable lump Dudley Moore, has been rebuilt to suit slinky British sleaze-comedian Russell Brand, whose constant nattering rarely transcends throat-clearing improv. Still supposedly a debauchee, Brand’s Arthur cruises Manhattan in too-tight schoolboy suits and fawns…
Paul Giamatti continues contemporary cinema’s longest pre-midlife crisis in Win Win as Mike, yet another schlubby 40-something flummoxed by mundane personal problems. Mike is the coach of the county’s worst high school wrestling team, and his failing small-town law practice has accrued a mountain of debt, which he’s too chicken-shit…
Gigantic form, diminutive content: Born to Be Wild 3D, presented in expansive IMAX and narrated by Morgan Freeman, offers a visually arresting, kid-friendly but cursory portrait of the altruistic efforts of two women to not only rescue orphaned baby animals but to then raise and ultimately release them back into…
Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic, streaked with carelessly contemporary-sounding blue humor, blunt profanity replacing the naughty-naughty, tankard-sloshing, heaving-bosom ribaldry that goes with the period setting. The scene: a generic medieval realm from an EverQuest or Forgotten Realms module…
Source Code is a pseudocerebral, modestly budgeted sci-fi thriller, a propulsive ride worth your popcorn dollar. That’s not for its preposterous genre tinkering but for its refreshingly humanist take on a high-concept gimmick. A totally game Jake Gyllenhaal is the movie’s glue as Capt. Colter Stevens, a decorated pilot and…
The romanticized commitmentphobia that keeps Judd Apatow in gilt-fixtured man caves is brought down to Earth (or Park Slope, anyway) in this inventive indie thriller. Monogamy follows 30-something Brooklynite Theo (Chris Messina) as he simultaneously slogs through his day job as a wedding photographer, preps for his own impending nuptials…
There is a great deal of prowling motion in Insidious: a recurring sideways dolly outside a haunted house, a trench-coat-clad cacodemon pacing outside a second-story window. It’s the restless motion of a movie stalking its prey — you, dear viewer. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are moving their family into…
As Suzanne, Catherine Deneuve plays the title role in Potiche, a 1970s period piece that translates as “trophy wife.” She is married to the smarmy, unfaithful Robert (Fabrice Luchini), whose primary attraction to Suzanne appears to have been motivated by the umbrella factory she inherited from her father, which Robert…
Talk-show host Bill Maher believes that the way we live in the West is not just different from life in the Muslim world — it’s better. This sounds pretty reasonable, rational, and true, particularly when focusing on the restrictions on Muslim women. But good P.C. liberal Tavis Smiley argued on…
Director Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre) fragments Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, introducing us to Jane (Mia Wasikowska) as a young woman run ragged, fleeing an unspecified threat. Setting up Jane’s tale as a mystery — what was she running from, and why? — Fukunaga skips back and forth across years to…
With stick figures and crisply funny journal entries, Jeff Kinney’s cartoon series breathed fresh life into preteen lit’s most exhausted trope — the twisted tribal etiquette of middle school. Screenwriters Jackie and Jeff Filgo’s respect for Kinney’s sharply observant dialogue is the chief virtue of this fairly capable screen version…
Tender irony and dark humor abound in Israeli director Eran Riklis’ latest account of bureaucracy colliding with burgeoning compassion. This follow-up to 2008’s Lemon Tree, based on the novel A Woman in Jerusalem by A.B. Yehoshua, hits the road when the restless personnel director (Mark Ivanir) of a large Jerusalem…
As spacey as its title suggests, Gregg Araki’s latest youth film is an occult mystery set in the ultimate SoCal college playpen. Kaboom is Scooby Doo with sex, drugs, and tattooed hotties; following on the heels of Araki’s relatively commercial stoner farce Smiley Face (2007), the movie makes you wonder…
The eight gentle Trappist monks depicted in Of Gods and Men uphold the faith that brought them from France to Algeria only to be abducted and massacred, presumably by fanatics of a rival religious persuasion. The movie, based on a 1996 event that continues to resonate in France, opens on…
As in his equally exceptional last film, Secret Sunshine (2007), Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry is a perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence. In her 60s, Mija (the marvelous Korean screen vet Yun Jung-hee)…
Paul, it should be noted up-front, is not the third installment in the so-called “Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy” featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, though there are indeed servings of both. Note the one key missing element: Edgar Wright, who directed and cowrote with Pegg both the 2004 zom-com…
A gleeful celebration of nonstop doping, Limitless offers up a dim Better Living Through Chemistry fantasy that refuses to rain on its own pill-popping parade. With long, disheveled locks and matching facial scruff, novelist Eddie (Bradley Cooper) struggles with writer’s block until he runs into his ex-brother-in-law, Vernon (Johnny Whitworth)…
As devoid of spontaneity as a D.A.’s defense strategy, this adaptation of fiction machine Michael Connelly’s 2005 legal thriller is convoluted and completely predictable, which fans at least should appreciate. The title refers to Mick Haller (Matthew McConaughey), an L.A. ambulance chaser who conducts business from the back of a…
Andrzej Krakowski pegs his water-treading labor-of-love indie to the always-cool but here too-blithe Ben Gazzara, playing a reclusive screen legend dodging a pushy agent. (Guatemalan location-shooting is the only other attraction.) Suited and ear-pieced on the colorful streets of Antigua, Josh Ross (David Moscow, kinda still “the kid from Big”)…
