Something Borrowed is based on a 2005 work of chick literature by Emily Giffin. It was directed with extraordinary impersonality by Luke Greenfield (Rob Schneider’s The Animal), and produced by Hilary Swank in collaboration, apparently, with the restaurant Shake Shack — one of the lifestyle brands prominently featured in this…
With post-Goodfellas crime-movie tropes dyed for St. Patrick’s Day, this Ballad of Danny Greene attempts to enshrine the Irish-American strongman, a real-life folk hero among Mob-lore nerds and Cleveland Teamsters for his Rasputin-like resilience through multiple assassination attempts. Kill the Irishman aims to come out bumping chests in upstart insouciance,…
Sam (Michael Angarano), a young kids’-book author, suckers his neglected childhood best friend, Marshall (Reece Thompson), into driving them out of Brooklyn. Romantic egotist Sam’s hidden ulterior motive behind their impromptu vacation is to ambush old flame Zoe (Uma Thurman) at her fiancé’s posh shore house — where he unexpectedly…
One of the few justifiable recent excursions into 3-D, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams documents a secret wonder of the world, the Chauvet cave — a subterranean gallery of 300 animal images discovered in 1994 in the South of France. Twice as old as the paintings at Lascaux yet…
Any stir caused by this stilted historical melodrama is more likely to be over its controversial real-life protagonist than its cinematic merits, such as they are. There Be Dragons compresses, embellishes, and probably whitewashes true events in its depiction of how Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá (Charlie Cox) founded Opus Dei…
A rare breed of mood movie, 3 Backyards crossfades through three stories, each begun in an unidentified Long Island suburb. The protagonists are an anxious housewife, Peggy (Edie Falco); a man burdened by vague marital and financial worry, John (Elias Koteas); and an in-her-own-world 9-year-old, Christina (Rachel Resheff). In the…
This one perfect moment.” “That soul-crushing mistress.” “Our forever night.” These and other understated definitions are obsessively applied to a certain dreaded/anticipated ritual throughout Prom, a timely pop product set in a suburban high school during the last weeks before summer break and destined for the immortality of Vitamin C’s…
One of the more depressing, desensitizing experiences I’ve had in a theater, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil feels as computer-generated as its creepy, talking-ceramic-toy style of animation. The sequel to the Weinstein Co.’s 2005 animation gambit, the movie is a fairy-tale pastiche that drops stale references to films like Goodfellas…
If The King’s Speech was a comfy middlebrow choice for Best Picture of 2010, how much more depressing was the academy’s squandering of Best Foreign Language Film on Susanne Bier’s In a Better World? Displaced tykes and bullies both macro and micro abound in this relentlessly pandering drama about a…
As agreeable as it is insidious, Morgan Spurlock’s latest exposé of corporate control via immersive humiliation is his best, most formally inventive project yet. The premise is initially fuzzy — Spurlock proposes to fund a documentary about product placement solely with product placements — and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold…
What happens when everything a filmmaker tells us about his characters is suddenly turned on its head? This is the dilemma that viewers of Abbas Kiarostami’s confounding Certified Copy will face late into this movie. It is at this point when the two main characters, William Schmiell’s pompous author and…
The fifth installment in The Fast and the Furious franchise picks up where the fourth left off: Lunkhead street racer/noble criminal antihero Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) is in a bus en route to prison; his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) and her paramour/sometimes FBI agent Brian (Paul Walker) are en route…
Cheerfully diffident, garrulous yet un-inflected, blithely self-absorbed, the mumblecore brand proliferates: Last year’s star vehicles Greenberg and Cyrus introduced the concept of mega mumble. Likewise, Cold Weather stakes a claim as the founding work of mumble noir. Exhibiting no particular rush to draw the viewer into its world, Cold Weather…
Anthropomorphizing its animal stars to a borderline-dubious degree, African Cats situates itself in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, where two four-legged mothers valiantly struggle to provide for and protect their young. On the northern side of the river that divides this gorgeous but pitiless land lives aging lioness Layla, whose…
Appearing in every frame of Applause, Thea Barfoed (Paprika Steen), an aging actress and recovering alcoholic trying to get her life back together, is a woman under the influence — of Gena Rowlands’ Myrtle Gordon, another aging, alcoholic actress, in John Cassavetes’ Opening Night. Danish director Martin Pieter Zandvliet, making…
No passion for fashion is required to enjoy this absorbing portrait of legendary New York Times “On the Street” photographer Bill Cunningham, but a sense of history and tragedy might help. Director Richard Press doggedly shadows the chipper octogenarian, foregrounding the modest lifestyle and quietly radical work ethic that have…
Tyler Perry returns to transferring his own stage work to the screen, donning once again the Lane Bryant floral prints that have made his millions. Like its predecessors, this Madea film features a saintly matriarch (Loretta Devine), a vilified bourgie princess, emasculated husbands, trifling heifers, a lengthy church scene, last-minute…
Set in the months after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, The Conspirator follows the consequences of the fatal shot at Ford’s Theater — specifically, the trial of Mary Surratt, owner of a D.C. boarding house. Surratt was presented before a military tribunal as the den mother in the…
When a local crime boss (Kevin Bacon) lures away his wife (Liv Tyler), lifelong pushover Frank (Rainn Wilson) — under the influence of a bizarre Christian kids’ TV show and a sci-fi-style encounter with something like God — starts to make himself over into a real-life superhero. On discovering that…
Parrot sex is the narrative impetus of Rio, and yet there’s still little spark to this animated tale of a domesticated Minnesota macaw named Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) who’s reluctantly taken to Brazil by his clingy owner, Linda (Leslie Mann), to mate with the last of his kind, tough…
Updated for a skeptical age, this new World War II movie comes impeccably groomed in period-attentive tans and grays, is written in nonheroic dialogue to suggest ambiguities in the good-evil dichotomies of war stories past, and is sufficiently hopped-up with thrills to warrant the interest of a U.S. distributor. Based…
Why won’t you die? There is a particular sort of stupid-acting-smart movie experience that can be achieved only through the reunion of David Arquette, Courteney Cox, and Neve Campbell. Updated for 2011 with ad nauseum cell-phone app and webcam references — none of which are integrated into the narrative with…
