Bring Me the Head of Han Solo

Harrison Ford has been a good soldier in the Star Wars. He did whatever was asked of him by his commanding officer, George Lucas, even when his commanding officer was wrong. Now that Ford is back in Star Wars, and J.J. Abrams is running the show, Abrams’s first order of…

X-Men: Days of Future Past Needs More Fun, Less Exposition

America’s sweetheart Jennifer Lawrence truly can do anything. In the course of three months, she’s graciously lost an Oscar (her third nomination in four years), swanned above the mansplaining condescension of a male pundit who tsk-tsked her for getting drunk in public, and burst into the summer blockbuster X-Men: Days…

Locke Locks You and Tom Hardy in a Car

How much can you take away and still have a movie? Steven Knight’s Locke is an experiment in reducing contemporary scree storytelling to its irreducible essentials, which isn’t quite the same thing as being an “experimental” film, despite the ravishing early reviews from England. It shows us just one actor,…

Sandler and Barrymore Hurt Us in Blended

A romance ripped from the pages of Deuteronomy, Frank Coraci’s Blended posits that the best reason for a woman with sons and a man with daughters to get married is that they can take care of each other’s kids. Quel pragmatisme! In the world of this sitcom love story, men…

Godzilla a Generic, Omnipresent Blockbuster

Godzilla is the movie monster with the mostest. King Kong may be just one gorilla-chest-hair behind, but not even the greatest of apes can quite match the half-dragon, half-dinosaur who first stomped and chomped his way through Tokyo in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Toho Co. Ltd. extravaganza Godzilla. In that picture…

With Chef, Jon Favreau Whips Up Indie Comfort Food

Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture as his own Swingers is to ’90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist, and divorced father with a chef’s knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and “El Jefe”…

John Favreau Talks Chef and Writing Again After Swingers

The lights were dim. Gray-haired musicians in linen guayaberas filled the small stage, and the hips of every man and woman, young and old, moved to the rhythm. It was an exhilarating moment in one of Miami’s oldest hangouts, Little Havana’s Hoy Como Ayer. And there, right in the middle…

Cannes Report: Grace of Monaco at Least Has Clothes

Greetings from Cannes! It’s an unwritten rule – maybe it should even be a written one – that no one who is lucky enough to come to Cannes for the film festival, now in its 67th year, should, in any way, shape, or form, complain about being here. But may…

Frat-Versus-Family Comedy Neighbors Won’t Haze You

Nicholas Stoller’s hilarious Neighbors splashes into summer with the satisfying swish-plop-hooray of a winning beer pong serve, making the director, who also wrote March’s Muppets Most Wanted, the first filmmaker in history to simultaneously have in theaters both a kiddie flick and an R-rated comedy where two men sword-fight with…

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Finds Spidey Doing the Usual Stuff

Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, the other Spider-Man, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source science has dubbed “Parker…

Tom Hiddleston Wants to Wear Jeans for Once

Tom Hiddleston can pull off extreme looks. In The Avengers, he strutted around in Loki’s two-foot horned helmet. For Midnight in Paris, he finessed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prim finger waves. And in his latest, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston lounges bare-chested in velvet-cuffed robes. The only…