Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill makes mean-spirited tragedies that studios market as inane comedies because otherwise no one would pay a cent to see them. That’s more or less what happened to Hill’s The Foot Fist Way in 2008, two years after its Sundance twirl first caught the attention…
Lovely to look at but too slow and deliberate to get lost in, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is a tribute to still photography filtered through a portrait of working-class life wracked by war and want in early 20th-century Sweden. Written by Niklas Rådström from a story shaped by Troell and…
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for the leg warmers and knee socks clinging to lower extremities than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather, like the apes at the start of 2001,…
Bart Got a Room South Florida native Brian Hecker’s uncomfortably strained directorial debut — a semi-autobiographical comedy about a high school senior who can’t find a prom date — foolishly believes that Windsor fonts, swing-era songs, and Jews are enough to invoke Woody Allen’s wit. It’s a quirky indie, you…
It’s 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning, and we’re sitting in a former Methodist church. So it’s no wonder the man gesticulating forcefully at the front of our congregation could be mistaken for a preacher. His voice changes pace, lilt, and volume at intervals, similar to man possessed by “the…
With the molded-rubber face of Savalas, the basso profundo of Stallone, and the name of an underdog gas alternative, Vin Diesel’s already-dubious ripped-tough-guy star has dimmed enough to warrant a return to the car-chase series that made him — and money. In the latest, notably slack Fast & Furious (number…
At the end of 2008, DreamWorks Animation bossman Jeffrey Katzenberg embarked on a cross-country tour, toting 20 minutes’ worth of Monsters vs. Aliens. The reason for his trek? To persuade critics that 3-D movies are no longer the snake-oil salesman’s hustle but the future of filmmaking — if not the…
The Haunting in Connecticut There’s no rest for the dead — or the living — in this laughably hokey haunted-house hand-wringer based on yet another Amityville-style “true story” peddled by an enterprising family eager to turn a bum real estate deal into a pop-culture gold mine. The trouble begins when…
Haven’t we been here before? The inbred mutant offspring of Crash and Babel, writer/director Wayne Kramer’s Crossing Over treats the subject of illegal immigrants coming to (and from) Los Angeles with the same vulgarity that Kramer brought to his 2006 children-in-peril thriller Running Scared, this time (barely) concealed under a…
Just as we thought the “bromantic comedy” had overstayed its welcome, the genre reaches its high point with I Love You, Man. The subtext is finally the text—it’s right there in the title. The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms: the…
Duplicity It’s little surprise that, for his second film as director, Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy leans heavily on his favored tropes of international espionage and cutthroat capitalism. The surprise is that Duplicity is a comedy — about two people who love each other more than they could ever trust…
“That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator. Such blanching is the reaction Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will be typical. Permissibility has…
The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year (if not the century), Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse’s adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address…
There are many similarities between Laurent Cantet’s terrific The Class and any of the following schoolroom chestnuts — Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds, and To Sir, With Love. There are the structural similarities: misbehaving students, an educator who wants them to succeed, and big thoughts about the classroom as urban…
Champagne the prostitute got her name from a piece of paper pulled out of a hat. It began back in 2007, when local filmmakers Jon Vinazza and Dawn Dubriel of Underlab Studios entered Fort Lauderdale’s Quick and Dirty Short Film Festival. The rules called for filmmakers to finish their work…
Tom Tykwer’s The International is one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings, and inconspicuous public spaces (museum galleries are a particular favorite), travel under assumed names, and always glance nervously over their shoulders, fearful of being spied on through a sniper’s lens. Some…
If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, were 12 years old, the movie might make a touching, if not noticeably fresh, romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t nurse unhealthy crushes and regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation, which may be…
If Alice in Wonderland were retold by the Mad Hatter, it might look something like Henry Selick’s 3-D, stop-motion Coraline, in which the bored, blue-haired 11-year-old of the title (voiced by Dakota Fanning) travels through the looking glass and ends up in a world that strangely resembles her own —…
The smirky, overbearing, and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You — which sold a regrettable 2 million copies when it was published in 2004 — seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times,…
Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex daycare as “Mo” Folchart: an antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts they’re reciting from. Mo has abstained…
Will there be a special Academy Award for Best Aryan Costume Design this year? Everywhere you turn lately in the movies, it’s swastika flags and SS uniforms. Although the Holocaust movie has been on hiatus for a while, lately it seems as if everyone is trying to squeeze in his…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
