Unless you watch Nancy Meyers’ romantic-comedy oeuvre strictly for the interior design and décor, there’s little to note about Sophie Lellouche’s shallow, witless, but pretty-enough French ode to Woody Allen, couched in a loose revision of 1972’s Play It Again, Sam. A model-thin blond beauty with perfect cheekbones, Alice Taglioni…
To the Wonder, Terrence Malick’s second movie in two years, is ridiculous, pretentious as hell, and in places laugh-out-loud funny. “Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt. Into the eternal night…” With dialogue like that, in voiceover and in French, who needs satire? But for all the absurdity, there’s also…
Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) believes life has cheated him. Doesn’t America promise riches and luxury to people who deserve it? He’s worked hard to build his body into a hulking knot of muscles; success should follow. But he’s stuck as an underpaid personal trainer at Miami Lakes’ Sun Gym, where…
Has anyone ever been so perfectly cast as Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused? Sculpted entirely of charisma and cheekbones yet still seedier than a stash of gym-locker pot, McConaughey’s radiant stoner exemplified high school promise gone bad. he looked like the little man of top of trophies, just horny,…
Part The Diary of Anne Frank, part The Swiss Family Robinson, and part The Shawshank Redemption, No Place on Earth, about a Ukrainian Jewish family in WWII who hides from the Nazis by living in caves, has all the elements of a great story: an epic quest (survival), formidable obstacles…
When a film mashes up two seemingly unlike genres, we’re too quick to praise the hybridization as a “fresh twist” or subversion of formula, even if those disparate elements aren’t engaging each other thematically or aesthetically. (For instance, has anyone married zombie horror with comedy as flavorfully as Shaun of…
Michael Bay reclines in a white lounge chair on a 14th-floor balcony at Brickell Key’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel. To the east, a sheet of piercing rain swallows Key Biscayne, thunder cracks overhead, and a lightning bolt shoots above the choppy waves. The sudden monsoon provides the perfect backdrop for the…
Hey, who cares if you don’t have the money for a ride if a Hollywood movie studio is sending a limousine your way? This past April 11, Lennie the limo guy stacked my mixed assortment of family and friends into his large, gleaming black Cadillac at the old-school Eden Roc…
Though he’s long been among the most recognizable celebrities in the world, Tom Cruise has always seemed vaguely irritating, like the popular kid at school everybody secretly dislikes. His is an odd sort of fame: globally recognized but rarely acclaimed, he remains more reliably bankable than nearly any other actor…
In The Client List, Lifetime’s pseudo-steamy take on the world of sensual massage, Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a struggling housewife who takes a rub-down side job in order to support her kids after her husband disappears. The show, which jumps from scenes of Hewitt pleasuring executives to her dancing with…
Tom Cruise’s Oblivion Is Grand Until It’s Not
Beyond the Hills: A Powerful and Necessary Act of Reclamation
Leonie Squanders an Ambitious Lead Performance by the Stellar Emily Mortimer
After working a packed auditorium into a frenzy at last September’s premiere of Lords of Salem at the Toronto International Film Festival, Rob Zombie anxiously took his seat and watched his audience watch his film, his first independently financed feature. It’s also the first film he’s made following a messy…
After two Halloween remakes, rock star turned filmmaker Rob Zombie has penned a somber, surprisingly tame tale of witchcraft and possession that may trigger unintended giggles among even his most devoted admirers. Sheri Moon Zombie, the director’s wife, stars as Heidi Hawthorne, a Salem, Massachusetts radio DJ who begins hearing…
Picking up seven years after the previous installment, Scary Movie V features no original cast members, no Wayans brothers producing (they bailed after No. 3), and a new director (first-timer Malcolm D. Lee). It’s still terrible. For an alleged comedy, it’s remarkably laugh-free; as insta-parody, it already feels dated (Inception…
Half a year later, now on Blu-ray and DVD, Django Unchained is still kicking up shit, this time via cross-media trickle-down. TV’s LL Cool J, not long before declaring Confederate flag apparel A-OK with him, dared to express in “Accidental Racist” one hard-edged complaint about the life of a black…
At any prior point in TV history, Rectify, a six-part drama on the Sundance channel, would be a shake-up-the-medium astonishment: A sober, even stately investigation into a curious kind of afterlife, that of a death-row inmate given freedom twenty years after his conviction. For all the finely crafted mysteries of…
The Place Beyond the Pines opens with a close-up of Ryan Gosling’s chiseled abdomen — surely one of the more salable quantities in movies today — and heavy breathing on the soundtrack (or was that just the person next to me in the screening room?). Then, in a single, five-minute…
A likable hagiography as nuanced as a plaque at the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, Brian Helgeland’s Jackie Robinson bio 42 finds a politic solution to the challenge Quentin Tarantino faced last year with Django Unchained: How to craft a crowd-pleasing multiplex period piece whose villain is, essentially, “all white people”?…
This fact-based, girl-group empowerment story never quite soars but has its easy pleasures, and it’s likely to become one of those movies everyone sees, maybe more than once. The wonderful Irish actor Chris O’Dowd stars as Dave Lovelace, a musician living out of his car who stumbles upon a gifted…
The latest from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is a silent, black-and-white film so witty, riveting, and drop-dead gorgeous that moviegoers might forget they can’t hear the dialogue. Berger has astutely chosen to wrap his experiment around a tale everyone knows: the perils of that sweet beauty, Snow White. Here, she…
