Moving in just six years from critic-approved discovery (Head-On) to state-of-the-union meller (Edge of Heaven), with a fruitful detour into the music doc (Crossing the Bridge), Turkish-German director Fatih Akin now takes a break with a peppy Eurocomedy. Wild-haired young Greek-German Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos) runs a lumpen-loved schnitzel joint…
Programmatic by design, Burlesque flattens singer Christina Aguilera’s inherent thorny appeal — the persona that’s at once obnoxiously “provocative” and sympathetic — by laughably casting her as the 21st-century, torch-signing equivalent of Ruby Keeler in a hodge-podge of Busby Berkeley plots, with none of the Depression-era style or social critique…
From a jaunty Spin Doctors-scored opening to a teary, Regina Spektor-cued finale, Love and Other Drugs will switch to any style, station, or frequency to keep you entertained. Or at least not bored. (Maybe awake?) The most egregious four-quadrant pander-party of the year, Ed Zwick’s latest middlebrow atrocity has been…
“Great,” sighs the wicked witch in Tangled, a CG-animated spin on the Rapunzel story, “now I’m the bad guy.” Mother Gothel, the frizzy-haired, sharp-featured enchantress with the inimitable voice of Donna Murphy, is Disney’s first villainess whose chief crime is being an underminer, and the heroine of Disney’s 50th animated…
Faster is a glossy B made from three twining badmen stories: There’s pneumatically-muscled ex-con “Driver” (Dwayne Johnson), sharp-dressed hitman “Killer” (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and self-explanatory “Cop” (Billy Bob Thornton). Driver stomps out of prison with a list of the people who put him there and a sworn mission to cross them…
Other people besides James Franco appear in 127 Hours, but as they’re unimportant, they will not be mentioned in this review. Danny Boyle’s film — based on the story of Aron Ralston, who in 2003 cut off his own arm after being stuck for five days under a rock in…
A teenaged witch stands trembling behind her unsuspecting mother and father, wand raised. Obliviate, she whispers, and her parents’ eyes go glassy, their memories erased. On the mantel, the girl’s image disappears from the family’s photos. Blinking back tears, she walks into the street, the link between herself and her…
“What if we choose to exist solely in a reality of our own making?” asks Pittsburgh community-college lit professor John Brennan (Russell Crowe) rhetorically to his class in The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis’ fourth effort as director. Like his lumpy protagonist, Haggis, who also scripted this remake of the…
The science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjorn Lomborg. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the movie’s eponymous source book, the Danish adjunct professor of statistics became, over the past decade, a thorn…
Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s prize-winning documentary is an intimate portrait of an unfathomable immensity, focusing on a single family caught up in the world’s largest mass migration. Opening overhead shots show a huge mob waiting in the rain to push their way into China’s Guangzhou railroad station for the annual…
In the climax of Morning Glory, Rachel McAdams is dressed in the kind of cocktail dress a screen heroine wears when a slow-building love plot is coming to a head; it is the perfect costume for, say, leaving one suitor to run across Manhattan to another. Which McAdams’ Becky ultimately…
In Unstoppable, an unmanned runaway freight train, laden with toxic waste, is careening across Pennsylvania! There’s another train with innocent schoolchildren on the same tracks! Who will save them? Denzel Washington and Star Trek’s Chris Pine — that’s who — under the direction of hectic-action auteur Tony Scott. We expect…
In Due Date, a skinny, scowly, and dryly self-referential Robert Downey Jr. meets a chubby, beardy, quasi-autistic Zach Galifianakis boarding a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Downey Jr. plays Peter, a Bluetoothed architect with a very pregnant wife (Michelle Monaghan) waiting at home for him; Galifianakis’ Ethan is a…
Adapted from Valerie Plame and Joseph C. Wilson’s memoirs, the unsurprisingly validating Fair Game begins as a timeline-hopping international thriller of the countdown months to the second Iraq War. Covert CIA operative Plame (Naomi Watts) and ex-ambassador husband Wilson (Sean Penn) are proverbial ships passing in the night, shuttling from…
It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, where Ntozake Shange first presented her combustible choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf in December 1974 to Atlanta’s Tyler Perry Studios, where the impresario filmed much of this calamitous adaptation. Though striving…
On matters animated and three-dimensional, I take my cue from the 7-year-old sitting at my right, who got megafidgety about ten minutes into Megamind, a 3-D superhero story about the villain who — shockingly — turns into the good guy. (“Same story as Despicable Me,” said the wee one.) To…
As a young boy growing up in the Swiss Alps, Ruedi Beglinger watched in awe as his father returned home from climbing expeditions and mountain rescue missions. Stephen Grynberg’s documentary, A Life Ascending, captured how the 51-year-old Swiss-Canadian mountaineer not only followed his father’s footsteps but took it further by…
Does it matter that a young Israeli filmmaker’s imaginative reconstruction of an abandoned Nazi propaganda film about the Warsaw Ghetto is not, strictly speaking, a documentary? Not if it sets a crucial historical record straight. Discovered by East German archivists after World War II and accepted for decades as one…
Tarik Saleh’s Metropia paints a dismal and dejected picture of Western civilization 14 years from now — a society in crisis, nearly depleted of resources, leaving its citizens with shrinking motivations and aspirations. The animated movie accentuates scenes of dark and polluted skies, dilapidated buildings, and message boards with propaganda…
Beyond fans of Mélanie Laurent—who furiously fingers a fiddle and wears flashback wigs—The Concert may appeal to those who delight in stereotypes (Jews like money!). Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) pushes a broom at the Bolshoi, where he lost his status as star conductor 30 years ago under Brezhnev for refusing…
When we first see bi computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, she is being transported to a hospital in Gothenburg, bloodied almost beyond recognition, the result of a bullet put in her brain by…
Road, Movie is an expression of director Dev Benegal’s adulation for film. The inspiration was a personal experience he had watching people travel across vacant landscape to watch a movie. In Road, Movie the lead character, Vishnu (Abhay Deol), is a discontented salesman who jumps at an opportunity to escape…
