Writer Andy Diggle dedicated his snappy DC comic books “The Losers” to ’80s screenwriting superstar Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon series. But in adapting “The Losers” for film, director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and…
Watching this lauded but fatally slight comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for four spunky old dames, it’s hard to believe writer, director, and star Gianni Di Gregorio also cowrote the bloody Mafia hit Gomorrah. Amiably self-deprecating to a fault, the semiautobiographical Mid-August Lunch features…
Like any normal former TV star with free time and a cause that’s caught his eye, James Van Der Beek could have done a voice-over for a documentary about Taiwan’s bloody struggle for independence — instead, he plays an FBI agent in this educational thriller set in early-1980s Taiwan. After…
An almost miraculously photographed showcase of some of the seven seas’ least seen and most incredible specimens, Disney’s Oceans (a follow-up to last year’s Earth) lets its subjects speak for themselves. Timed to coincide with Earth Day, the film’s preservationist agenda is mostly implicit in its wonder at these strangest…
Say what you will, but the lead actors in Argentine director Juan Jose Campanella’s latest film do have lovely (or at least handsomely shot) peepers. But the secrets you ultimately find therein are hilarious. Feeling like he has missed out on life, retired court investigator Esposito (Ricardo Darin) visits his…
I’m no obstetrician, but I’d wager that Jennifer Lopez’s own labor when birthing fraternal twins two years ago was much less interminable and painful than watching this romantic comedy, the star’s first movie since 2006’s El Cantante, about knocking yourself up. As single, financially comfortable, baby-craving Tribeca pet-store owner Zoe,…
Kick-Ass sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenaged mind. Tired of being mugged by high school thugs in a Manhattan that’s notably scummier than the real thing, our hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, a hot young thing given a perm-and-glasses nerdover) wonders, in a hilariously put-on and…
Seamstress Inge (Ursula Werner), professorial husband Karl (Horst Westphal), and silver fox Werner (Horst Rehberg) form a Berlin love triangle with more than 200 collective years of experience. She strikes up the affair after hand-delivering a pair of pants, and, within minutes, their living-room-floor intimacy goes beyond whether Werner dresses…
A fixture of New York City’s no-wave scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s — an era of prolific DIY filmmaking, when everybody seemed to be collaborating with everyone else — Bette Gordon continues her exploration of desire with Handsome Harry. A road-movie ensemble piece interrupted by Fireworks-like flashbacks,…
For a while, at least, a pitch-black (and therefore pitch-perfect) tale of our times: Four business partners masquerading as a happy family move into seven-figure suburbia and sell their friends and neighbors — which is to say, contacts and customers — on their early-adopter, newer-than-brand-new layaway lifestyle. David Duchovny, Demi…
It doesn’t take much to improve the first Death at a Funeral, the flat Frank Oz–directed Britcom of 2007; a few tossed-off references to Jet and sickle cell anemia will do it. Though the plot of Dean Craig’s original script remains almost entirely intact (he receives the sole writer’s credit),…
Somewhere in Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo’s awkward debut feature is a macabre and almost quaint gothic mystery begging to be left alone. After blowing up at her boyfriend (Justin Long) over dinner, Anna (Christina Ricci) drives off and suffers a disastrous crash — then gets chatty on the mortuary slab. The funeral…
“We are not these people! We are a boring couple from New Jersey!” complains Claire Foster (Tina Fey) to her husband, Phil (Steve Carell), in Date Night. Phil and Claire are middle-class, suburban parents whose plans for a night on the town are thwarted when they’re pulled into a web…
The social-networking site Gay.com presents a triple bill of same-sexer-themed movies. In descending order, from middling to empirically bad: Watercolors — the most professional job, and the only one that takes a stab at Eros — is a My First Time jock-on-nerd love affair done with chiaroscuro cinematography and awful…
Essentially a locked-room mystery with lashings of gore and sexual brutality, Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo disguised the simplicity of its narrative by embedding it within an almost Balzacian depiction of Swedish society, warts and all (but mainly warts). Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation relies more on…
According to Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere, Mussolini was nearly as much of a bully in the bedroom as he was in office. Il Duce would eventually get busy with the pope, but in the mid-1910s, he screwed — and screwed over — one Ida Dalser, who becomes this epic melodrama’s nobly…
There’s an obvious stunt element to the casting of The Runaways: a punked-up, barely legal Kristen Stewart and a still underage, barely dressed Dakota Fanning begging for street cred by playing dress-up as, respectively, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, front girls of the oversexed ’70s-era teen proto-punk sensation the Runaways…
A contemporary crime drama edged with Greek tragedy, Ajami is an untidy, despairing, oddly exhilarating joint venture by writer/directors Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Though its unwieldy cast and multiple story lines might better lend themselves to a television series, the movie teems with…
A decade too old to convincingly be called “boy,” Sam “Mr. Greenscreen” Worthington is poorly cast as reluctant-demigod Perseus — as was Harry Hamlin in the ’81 Clash of the Titans — but the appeal of sumptuous blockbuster Hellenism remains with the Gods (Liam Neeson as Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as…
Tyler Perry follows up his best film, 2007’s Why Did I Get Married?, with his worst. This time, the four couples in various states of marital discord vacation not in Colorado but in the Bahamas — mainly so that Michael Jai White’s Marcus can remain shirtless — before resuming their…
Lost boy John Hughes was inducted into the pantheon this month, when the Academy devoted a moving Oscar-night tribute to the departed writer/director. But do you actually remember being a teenage moviegoer in the 1980s? It wasn’t all some kind of wonderful. Hughes movies came out twice a year, if…
Sad, funny, and acutely self-conscious, Greenberg is the sort of mordant character study that people imagine were common in the ’70s. Greenberg is unafraid to project a downbeat worldview or feature an impossible protagonist. Loser Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is also painfully poignant. Noah Baumbach’s sixth feature is his first…
