In a wintry woodland in an unspecified time long, long ago, teen beauty Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is arranged to marry brooding, hunky, rich dude Henry (Max Irons), but is plotting to run away with brooding, hunky peasant Peter (Shiloh Fernandez). Then — bummer! — Valerie’s sister is eaten by the…
The shaky-cam is coming, the shaky-cam is coming! Jonathan Liebesman directs his alien-invasion saga Battle: Los Angeles as if he were having a violent seizure, wedding whiplash faux-war-documentary aesthetics to a Michael Bay cocktail of ooh-rah military romanticism, quick-stroke melodrama, and seesawing CG mayhem. Called into duty after news reports…
Like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol before it, the characters in Mars Needs Moms boast the waxy complexions, unreal movements, and dead eyes of mannequins come to surreal, energetic life. With an unsettling Joan Cusack facial reproduction lending the proceedings a predictably creepy Madame Tussauds vibe, Mars…
Robert Loggia gives a charming performance as Siv Monopoli, patriarch of a squabbling Italian family somewhere in New England. It’s unfortunate that Harvest, written and directed by Marc Meyers, concerns Siv’s decline and death, so that scenes of the old man happily riding his bike through town and amazing everyone…
Fifty years after Kim Ki-young’s postwar hothouse original, Im Sang-soo attempts a sleek, breathless update to the tale of a household riven by a sexy domestic. This time around, instead of a family-man music teacher getting ensnared, a bored, feckless maid (Jeon Do-yeon) is seduced by a rich scion and…
More accurately titled Vidal Sassoon: The Slavering Advertorial, Craig Teper’s obsequious documentary on the stylist who popularized geometric haircuts in the ’60s is in desperate need of shaping and trimming itself. Organized, sort of, around executive producer and Bumble and Bumble founder Michael Gordon’s assembly of a coffee-table book on…
Mikey, Manny, and Angel Jr. are three private-school buddies. Three months before graduation, they are living the fast life of sex, drugs, and hip-hop in Miami. The story is narrated by Mikey, who is a top baseball prospect torn between living clean and joining his friends in the fast lane…
In 1772, we find the young German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe flunking out of law school and getting drunk with his friends. He’s a free spirit trapped in a stringent world where class is everything. All Goethe wants to do is write poems and get them published. But his stern…
In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race apparently on the strength of his charisma and the idealism of his young supporters: “Come November, I want [the naysayers] to know it was young people like you who…
Ink still wet on his MIT degree, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in hometown Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHSes of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt reencounters…
A rollicking, surreal, and existential kids’ Western that worships at the altars of Sergio Leone, Hunter S. Thompson, and Chinatown, Rango drowns under the weight of discordant objectives and influences. With his crooked neck, bug eyes, and Hawaiian shirt, reptilian Rango (boisterously voiced by Johnny Depp) is a Ralph Steadman…
A modernized riff on Beauty and the Beast that’s as subtle as its protagonist’s freaky facial blemishes, Beastly offers up an Apple-store-shiny high school crammed with catty cretins, blossoming love in a luxuriant rooftop greenhouse, and a wise, racism-enduring Jamaican maid (Lisa Gay Hamilton) as its de facto Mrs. Potts…
Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are two domesticated husbands whose long marriages (to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, respectively) have achieved somnolent routine in suburban Providence, Rhode Island. Yet the wives worry. Rick is a girl watcher; Fred masturbates in the privacy of their parked Honda Odyssey…
Ned (Liev Schreiber), the beleaguered patriarch in writer/director Richard Levine’s middling first feature, slogs through slowly simmering domestic and work stresses. Wife Jeannie (Helen Hunt) has begrudgingly allowed her sour, incapacitated father (Brian Dennehy) to move into their Queens home; recently out teenage son Jonah (Ezra Miller) has set off…
Genre-unto-himself Nicolas Cage’s latest displays much the same tattoo-parlor hellfire imagery as Ghost Rider, but this is the hard-R version, with Johnny Blaze’s jellybeans from a goblet in the earlier film now replaced by a cold after-work beer drunk from a human skull. Cage plays a black-denim God’s Lonely Man,…
In past years, the theatrical release of the Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts has provided a fun peek into intriguing, bite-sized cinema from across the globe. But for the 2011 edition, the series is at last making room for the five nominated documentary shorts as well. Unfortunately, this year’s nonfiction…
Despite the biodoc implication of its title, Bhutto is not just a portrait of the late Benazir Bhutto but also a chronological recap of Pakistan’s anarchic history. Duane Baughman’s nonfiction film pays reverential tribute to Bhutto, who, after the 1979 execution of her prime minister father, became the first woman…
In her tale of a brusque, prickly young Dutch woman who inexplicably cuts herself off from the world, except for a heavily circumscribed relationship with a man whose isolation is less voluntary, writer/director Urszula Antoniak hits a lot of expected notes. But she does so with a gracefulness that makes…
Conceived by author James Frey as the beginning of a potential blockbuster franchise, I Am Number Four is nothing but a million little pieces from prior superhero series and the Twilight saga. D.J. Caruso’s generic adventure, co-written by Frey under a pseudonym, concerns John Smith (Alex Pettyfer), a hunky blond…
Lovingly animating an unproduced script by the great Jacques Tati, The Illusionist is, at least in part, a chaste father-daughter romance. Animator Sylvain Chomet was even given the source material by French filmmaker Tati’s daughter. Chomet sets The Illusionist on the cusp of the ’60s. The animator presents his title…
The Bieber movie, a concert experience and origin-myth documentary, is not good — not that it needs to be. It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off, and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing “At Last” while Bieber’s glossy…
Adolescent hormones wash across the sky in magenta waves and kaleidoscopic prisms in the second installment (of four) of this Japanese anime, derived from the ’90s Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series. The fireworks above a futuristic, ruined Tokyo come as four high-schoolers pilot giant, Transformers-style battle-bots against marauding “angels” that…
