What’s missing from first-time director Lorene Scafaria’s Steve Carell–vehicle misfire is the one element any apocalypse narrative suffocates without — urgency. Scafaria, screenwriter of the chipper, inexplicably lauded Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, has created an end-times comedy that’s by turns bizarrely affectless and prattlingly manic, much like its dual…
I’d rather die than be like you,” the barely adolescent heroine of Pixar’s 13th feature roars to her mother, perhaps the most radical line ever uttered in a Disney production—and one that highlights just how different Brave’s heroine’s predicament is from those of her recent screen sistren. Where fellow bow-and-arrow…
Egg, meet sperm. Sperm, my mother.” And so it is that 10-year-old Henry James Herman (Jason Spevack) introduces his mother, Patricia (Toni Collette), to Slavkin (Michael Sheen), the college professor whose sperm-bank donation helped create Henry. With the second-highest IQ score in recorded history, Henry is a certified genius whose…
Three generations of fine actresses are squandered in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, an incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results. This head-hammering, clash-of-values, family-healing dramedy makes sure to literalize all of its uplifting messages; gentle admonitions about “letting go” are immediately followed by a…
Rock of Ages, a new star-clogged pop-musical diversion partly filmed in South Florida, is a cinematic event. It’s not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions — guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater — so thoroughly, mutually degraded. This mess originated…
Yet another indie examination of humanity’s escalating technophilia, Small, Beautifully Moving Parts addresses its oh-so-contemporary concerns through the story of Sarah (Anna Margaret Hollyman), a Manhattanite obsessed with gadgets who finds herself unprepared for the news that she’s pregnant. Hollyman imbues her shaken protagonist with understated sensitivity, even when writers/directors…
It’s a warm spring evening on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood, and the crowd jostling for hors d’oeuvres in the lobby of the Paramount Theater exudes the anticipatory hum of a gala studio premiere. Only tonight’s feature presentation isn’t a new summer blockbuster or year-end prestige release. Rather, it’s…
Arriving in theaters on the back of a portentous ad campaign, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus assumes the air of something more than a summer movie, a blockbuster with brains that links the genesis and the ultimate fate of mankind beyond the stars. It is, incidentally, the story of an ambitious mission…
After New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is through regulating sugar intake via soft drinks, he might want to consider the dubious, overstimulating effects of a film like Madagascar 3. Like a big-screen Big Gulp, this third installment of the billion-dollar animated franchise contains as much unnecessary cinematic confection as an…
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena is a tale of two apartments: a spacious chrome, glass, and marble luxury flat that might be anywhere in prosperous Western Europe, and a cramped unit in some exhausted-looking, distinctly Soviet-vintage apartment block with a view of a nuclear plant. Central to the movie is the distance,…
If ever there were a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it is Snow White and the Huntsman. Had it trusted to the native charm of its cast and the sensory seduction of its often-astonishing images to humbly, naively retell its story, this Snow…
Its opening shots replete with heavily fetishized close-ups of kids taking hits off joints and its dialogue peppered with lines like “Getting high… it’s like freedom,” this dismal stoner comedy does little to inject any sense of joy or laughter into its depiction of teenaged pot antics. When soon-to-be valedictorian…
The nonfiction formula pioneered by Spellbound leads to frustrating superficiality in First Position, a glossy documentary about a multicultural collection of young ballet dancers striving for awards, scholarships, and job contracts at the prestigious annual Youth America Grand Prix. Director Bess Kargman adheres to a now-familiar template in which glib…
Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? Chances are, if you saw both MIB movies upon their original release you have little memory of the experience, as if our minds have been wiped with…
This riff on Margaret Atwood’s 2008 book-length essay, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, avoids the traps of recent social-problem documentaries. But if there’s value in Payback’s all-encompassing point of view, it’s a weakness as well. Screenwriter-director Jennifer Baichwal pegs Atwood’s thesis that debt is as philosophical of…
Spoiler alert:Chernobyl Diaries is toxic waste. Based on a premise by Paranormal Activity director Peli, Chernobyl Diaries tags along with a group of American backpackers visiting Kiev — the usual boring actors giving boring readings of boring dialogue, which constitutes our contemporary conception of realism. Signing up for a guided…
In The Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb leader of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet, Aladeen himself is so attracted to Western culture that he has commanded a…
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Battleship, which I swear to God is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few years, the…
In an old news clip that is played in the documentary Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story, a newscaster says, “You can tell a lot about a people by the rumors they share.” You can also tell a lot about a people by the ways they talk about their heroes…
Heidi Murkoff’s mega-best-selling manual, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, actually makes perfect sense as a vehicle for Hollywood, an industry banked on bathroom humor. But while the book’s journey ends with the beginning of a new life, the movie leaves you hoping for a swift end to your own…
A significant portion of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland— and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed daily daytime soap, Dark…
Eileen (Kathleen Turner) is consumed by the Catholic Church and its doctrine — so much so that her nonstop charitable work for the church leads to her priest (Richard Chamberlain) nominating her for Catholic Woman of the Year, pitting her against childhood rival Agnes (Sharon Lawrence). What the good father…
