Movie Reviews
Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star
"Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star" is about a man who succeeds in the porn industry despite having none of the talents or assets required for the job. The movie was made by people who have succeeded in the comedy industry despite not being funny. Writ...
Contagion
Many horror films use scary sounds to unnerve us, and "Contagion" -- a horror film disguised as a medical thriller -- is no exception. As the film begins, before we even see anything, we hear a cough. An ordinary-sounding cough, maybe. But it's rathe...
Apollo 18
"Apollo 18" imagines two hypothetical scenarios. One, what if there'd been a secret mission to the Moon after the Apollo space program was officially discontinued? And two, what if the "found footage" genre of horror filmmaking were still fresh and o...
A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
R-rated comedies have grossed a combined $760 million this summer, outranking even the superhero movies in the contest for American moviegoers' affections. So it's fitting to end the summer with one last raunch-com, especially one whose plot revolves...
The Debt
"Truth is a luxury," says Tom Wilkinson in "The Debt." "Some people have to put other things first -- their country, their family." As far as justifications for lying go, that's a pretty good one, and Wilkinson delivers it with his usual conviction. ...
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
As a general rule, I'm not fond of seeing children terrorized in movies (or in real life, for that matter), but I make an exception for something like "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," where the intense scares are balanced by a feeling of fairy-tale enc...
Colombiana
The title character in "Colombiana" is a girl from Bogota whose parents got killed by a drug kingpin, evidently because they were involved in the drug trade themselves and, well, that's what happens. Not a lot of old, happily retired people in the Co...
Higher Ground
Not to get all "Hollywood is full of godless heathens" on you, but it's rare to see religious faith addressed with sincerity in a studio production. Main characters in movies usually aren't religious at all unless it's central to the plot, while reli...
One Day
"One Day" is a generically sweet melodrama about the relationship between two people over the course of two decades, told with a gimmick: every scene takes place on July 15 of a different year. Sometimes July 15 is eventful, fraught with drama that a...
Conan the Barbarian
The first thing that happens in "Conan the Barbarian" is that a pregnant woman gets stabbed in the gut on a medieval battlefield, sending her into labor and requiring her husband (who luckily is fighting nearby) to cut her some more to get the baby o...
Fright Night
For a film with such a campy title -- and for a film about a suburban vampire -- "Fright Night" is awfully cool. Self-aware without being ironic and funny without being a joke, this remake of the 1985 second-tier cult classic has a few jolts of funho...
30 Minutes or Less
In the dark and often very funny "30 Minutes or Less," two dirtbags strap a bomb to a pizza-delivery guy's chest and tell him to rob a bank on their behalf or they'll blow him up. The lead dirtbag is Dwayne, played by Danny McBride, moviedom's reigni...
Final Destination 5
While "Saw" and its sequels were becoming the highest-grossing horror franchise in movie history (not adjusting for inflation) and inspiring much media hand-wringing about "torture porn" and whatnot, the "Final Destination" series was quietly doing i...
The Help
"The Help" is about a young white woman in segregated Mississippi who seeks to give a voice to the black maids and nannies by gathering and publishing their personal stories. You cringe just thinking about it, don't you? Movies like this are usually ...
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
We need to accept first of all that any movie about apes becoming intelligent and overrunning the human race is, by its very nature, ridiculous. Monkeys -- I know there's a difference between monkeys and apes, but I don't care -- are funny. Seeing mo...
Bellflower
"Bellflower" has earned a significant number of detractors since its premiere, and believe me, I get where they're coming from. This is one odd, potentially off-putting movie. But if you see it, whether you love it or hate it, you won't soon forget i...
The Change-Up
Hollywood's body-swap comedies have explored the wacky shenanigans involved in having to live someone else's life, but they have largely ignored a major part of it: the sex part. If you're inhabiting someone else's body, even going to the bathroom or...
The Future
Miranda July is an artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work gives off a vibe of hippie New Age whimsicality. Everything I read about her suggests she is not for me. Yet both of her feature films -- "Me and You and Everyone We Know" and now "The Futur...
The Guard
Martin McDonagh, the caustically funny Irish playwright responsible for stage hits on both sides of the Atlantic (including "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and "The Lonesome West"), successfully translated his perverse talents to the big screen a few y...
Cowboys & Aliens
"Cowboys & Aliens" is a great title. It suggests a scenario wherein Wild West frontiersmen encounter extra-terrestrials, which is a great premise. For all I know, the 2006 graphic novel is indeed great. But the movie -- which is attributed to no ...
Crazy Stupid Love
Almost everyone in "Crazy Stupid Love" has strong romantic feelings for someone they shouldn't. That's one of the reasons love is crazy and stupid, you see. Another reason is that love has this habit of looking pathetic until you fall into it, and th...
Attack the Block
The hairy, luminescent-fanged extra-terrestrials that wreak havoc in "Attack the Block" are exotic and frightening, to be sure. But then, so are the hoodlums defending a South London tenement building against them. People are already afraid to go out...
Point Blank (French)
Last fall, Paul Haggis made "The Next Three Days," starring Russell Crowe as an ordinary man trying to get his falsely accused wife out of prison. It was a remake of a French film called "Anything for Her" ("Pour elle"), written and directed by one F...
The Interrupters (documentary)
You might feel compelled to see "The Interrupters" for one of two reasons. One is that it was directed by Steve James, the socially conscious filmmaker whose documentaries include "Hoop Dreams," "Stevie," and "At the Death House Door." The other pote...
Captain America: The First Avenger
"Captain America: The First Avenger" is a high-spirited, gee-whiz adventure in the tradition of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the matinee serials that inspired it. It was directed by Joe Johnston, whose career has been an alternate-universe version o...
Friends With Benefits
Sex plays an important role in "Friends with Benefits" -- but not as important as you'd expect, given the film's title and its easy-to-advertise premise of two attractive young people having no-strings-attached hanky-panky. At its core, it's just a r...
Another Earth
When you hear that "Another Earth" deals with the discovery of a previously unknown planet orbiting not far from our own, you may then be surprised to hear that 1) the movie isn't really sci-fi, and 2) the story is not a terribly original one.
Th...
Tabloid (documentary)
Errol Morris must have felt like it was time to lighten up. After his last few documentaries addressed the death penalty, Holocaust deniers, the Vietnam War, and Abu Ghraib, his new one tells an astonishing-but-true story about an insane-but-function...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
The final book in J.K. Rowling's moderately successful series of Harry Potter novels was split into two movies, but the split was not equal. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1," released last fall, covered about 500 of the book's 750 pages,...
Winnie the Pooh
As beloved as A.A. Milne's "Winnie-the-Pooh" books are, there's little question that most of the people currently living were first exposed to the characters through Walt Disney's adaptations of them. If a new Pooh flick is to succeed with viewers, i...
Zookeeper
I have a hard time buying the central premise of "Zookeeper." Hot women being interested in Kevin James? Come on. You'd have an easier time convincing me that animals can talk!
That's the secondary premise of "Zookeeper," that animals can talk. Th...
Horrible Bosses
We shouldn't be asking why we have yet another movie about people who hate their bosses. This is one of the most universal themes in all of humanity. Everyone who's ever had a job has disliked an employer at some point. The real question is why there...
Terri
I'm sick of all the "Napoleon Dynamite" copycats, and I actually liked "Napoleon Dynamite." I can only imagine how the people who hated it must feel about its imitators. It must be like rubbing salt in the wound.
Those wounds will feel especially ...
Monte Carlo
The star of "Monte Carlo" is a person named Selena Gomez, who is also the star of something called "Wizards of Waverly Place," a Disney Channel sitcom now in its fourth season. Her arrival in "Monte Carlo" is in accordance with the prophecy that all ...
Larry Crowne
Few actors are as universally beloved as Tom Hanks, and a turkey like "Larry Crowne" isn't going to change that, even though Hanks is responsible for writing and directing it, too. Like Hanks, the movie is easy-going and good-natured; unlike Hanks, i...
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
"We were once a peaceful race of intelligent mechanical beings." So says Optimus Prime, the alien robot that is also sometimes a semi-trailer truck, at the beginning of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon." Now there is no more peace, most of the race is...
Bad Teacher
Cameron Diaz has been in some funny movies, but she's never been the funniest character in one of them. She's never needed to be; in the comedies, she's always been a supporting character or a co-lead. That pattern of being at most mildly funny conti...
Cars 2
What a fine thing it is to be Pixar, to have produced 11 computer-animated feature films, all of them beloved by audiences and critics alike. What a marvelous situation it is when the "worst" of your output, "Cars," still merits a B- rating. We shoul...
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (documentary)
In the court of public opinion, Conan O'Brien clearly emerged victorious in NBC's mishandling of him, Jay Leno, and "The Tonight Show." (I suppose there are people who took Leno's side in the debacle, but they comprise a small minority, and I prefer ...
The Art of Getting By
"The Art of Getting By" would be a good film to watch if you were cramming for your Indie Films of the 2000s final and didn't have time to see everything on the syllabus. It's like a Cliffs Notes version of every teen-centered Sundance comedy of the ...
Green Lantern
Ryan Reynolds might be the reigning champion at playing glib, cavalier hotshots. His condescending snark, often delivered in a soft voice to mask the brutality, almost always makes me laugh, even in movies that aren't necessarily very good. Because o...
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
You know those syrupy family movies about a guy whose successful but hollow life gets turned upside-down by a new arrival who winds up teaching him valuable lessons? Sure you do. Disney makes a lot of them. The man has to take care of a child he neve...
Super 8
Even if Steven Spielberg weren't credited as the producer of "Super 8," his name would pop up in conversations about it. The movie, written and directed by J.J. Abrams, combines science fiction, the wonder of childhood, fear of the government, and da...
The Trip
From the very British BBC comes "The Trip," a very British comedy starring the very British actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Viewers who are not familiar with Coogan, Brydon, and British pop culture in general probably won't find much to enjoy in ...
X-Men: First Class
The damage inflicted on the X-Men franchise by the poorly received "X-Men: The Last Stand" and "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" wasn't quite as extensive as the harm done to Batman by the infamous "Batman & Robin," but the brand was definitely in need ...
The Tree of Life
The reason I didn't review Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" when it was released in May was that I didn't know what to say about it. This was partly because I didn't know what it was saying to me. I knew that I'd been mesmerized by its gloriously...
Kung Fu Panda 2
Viewers of "Kung Fu Panda" couldn't help but notice that the main character was a panda, yet his father was a goose. This can be a touchy subject, and one doesn't like to make assumptions, but it seemed likely that the panda was probably adopted. The...
The Hangover Part II
Ah, the curse of the comedy sequel. You almost can't win. Fans of the first film want to see their favorite elements revisited, but they get mad if it's TOO similar, because then you're just being lazy. But if you veer too far from the path establish...
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Bleh. Stop it. Just stop it. Don't do this anymore. You're done. You did your movie, and then you absurdly stretched it into a trilogy, and it got all meta-referential when you brought in the guy that Johnny Depp was impersonating to play Jack Sparro...
Midnight in Paris
Woody Allen is like a thousand years old, and he's written and directed like a hundred movies. It shouldn't be possible for him to make something as light-footed and witty as "Midnight in Paris." But he did make it! I've seen it! His name's right the...
Priest
This week's post-apocalyptic movie about the battle between humans and vampires is called "Priest." It stars Paul Bettany as a priest who defies his religious superiors to prevent the slaughter of innocents. It is directed by Scott Stewart, whose las...
Bridesmaids
"Bridesmaids" is so funny, and has so many It's about time! qualities to it, that you can easily overlook the fact that it's too long and has too many dangling, underdeveloped threads. It's miraculous that the movie exists at all, never mind whether ...
Everything Must Go
Though he has dabbled in light drama, Will Ferrell has yet to try the sort of intensely serious role that many of his comic peers have taken on. "Everything Must Go" still isn't his grab for an Oscar (and I'm in no hurry to see him make one), but it ...
Hesher
We have a sad, damaged family that is barely functional, with parental supervision at a minimum. A peculiar stranger with distinct musical tastes sweeps into the house, takes control, behaves in an unorthodox manner, and helps the family heal before ...
Hobo with a Shotgun
"Hobo with a Shotgun" is everything you'd want a film called "Hobo with a Shotgun" to be, except that ideally you'd be watching it on a crusty VHS tape that you found in the back of an independent video store run by a weird guy with a ponytail.
In...
Thor
I know very little about Norse mythology and even less about Thor as he's depicted in Marvel comics, but that doesn't seem to have hindered my enjoyment of the movie that bears his name. This is fun, straightforward stuff, closer in spirit to the ear...
The Beaver
Mel Gibson's latest troubles began just as "The Beaver" was finishing production, but if you didn't know that you'd think the film was devised as a rehabilitation project. It turns out to be the perfect reintroduction for an audience that may be wary...
Something Borrowed
The rule in romantic comedies is that if someone is eventually going to dump one romantic partner for another, it needs to be clear that the first partner wasn't right for him or her anyway. If either partner would be a suitable mate and the choice b...
Fast Five
"Fast Five" is a movie about two guys who steal expensive cars for a living and are forced to do this in Brazil because of America's draconian anti-stealing policies. It is like when people moved to Canada to avoid the draft. These two guys are consc...
13 Assassins (Japanese)
Though he's also made children's movies and period pieces, Takashi Miike is best known for bloody, twisted tales like "Ichi the Killer" and "Audition," which are among the few of the Japanese director's 70-plus movies to play in Western theaters. His...
Madea’s Big Happy Family
Tyler Perry's Madea character has been growing on me lately, to the point where I no longer dread the sassy old broad's antics but actually kind of look forward to them. Part of the reason is that the character exists in her own sphere of reality, li...
Rio
Like the city it's named for, "Rio" is a brightly colored confection full of samba music, crime, and monkeys. An animated film intended primarily for kids, it also passes the grown-up test, with enough good-natured comedy and general intelligence to...
Scream 4
There could be any number of reasons for the 11-year hiatus between "Scream 3" and "Scream 4," but I hope one of them isn't that they were trying to find just the right story. Because if they worked all that time and THIS is what they came up with, w...
The Conspirator
Happy 146th anniversary, Abraham Lincoln's assassination! In your honor we have prepared a didactic but not entirely unenjoyable historical drama called "The Conspirator"!
Everyone knows Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a disgruntled Confede...
American: The Bill Hicks Story (documentary)
Even Bill Hicks' adoring mother wasn't sure what to make of him. "Bill was -- I don't know -- he was interesting," she says, in "American: The Bill Hicks Story," the documentary about her comedian son, who died of cancer in 1994 at the age of 32. Thi...
Arthur
If it is mandatory that Hollywood make nothing but remakes and sequels -- and this appears to be the case -- you could do worse than choosing 1981's "Arthur" for an upgrade. Well-remembered for Dudley Moore and John Gielgud's droll performances, it's...
Hanna
There are almost as many different parenting styles as there are parents, and it's difficult to say that one method is inherently better than another. The title character in "Hanna" is a teenage girl who's been trained by her father to be a deadly as...
Your Highness
Wow, what a load this is. I'm not even entirely sure what it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be funny, I know that much. And it isn't. Here's Danny McBride, James Franco, Zooey Deschanel, Natalie Portman, and Justin Theroux -- in a stoner come...
Hop
While the world's desperate cries for more sequels to "The Santa Clause" go unanswered, Universal Pictures brings us the next best thing: the same basic concept, changed to the Easter Bunny, mixed with "Alvin and the Chipmunks," and executed without ...
Insidious
Oh, sure, "Insidious" gets a little hokey. It leans on the jump scares more often than it should. Dialogue is not its strong suit. Some of the details, rather than contributing to a cohesive whole, are simply random. I will grant you all of this.
...
Source Code
And for his next act, Duncan Jones -- writer/director of the art-house sci-fi hit "Moon" -- presents "Source Code," another confidently entertaining tale of identity-based angst. "Source Code" is less introspective and ambitious than Jones' first fil...
Super
How strange to think we live in a world where "ordinary person without super powers becomes a superhero" is so common as a plot device that it now has a "formula." But that's what "Super" is -- formulaic. Though it does shake things up with a couple ...
Rubber
You may have heard that "Rubber" is a movie about a sentient automobile tire that goes around killing people. If so, you have heard correctly! "Rubber" is indeed that.
It is also, however, a dementedly clever deconstruction of horror movies, not ...
Sucker Punch
This is the dark side of disposable pop culture. "Sucker Punch," a female-driven action drama set in a dreamworld, feels like it was based on a graphic novel based on a video game based on a wet dream based on "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" -- a d...
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
I don't want to talk about "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules," which is inane and exasperating and hard to watch, so let's discuss the behind-the-scenes scandal instead!
The scandal -- which might be a product of my imagination -- is as follows...
The Music Never Stopped
Imagine going to sleep in 1969 and waking up in 1986, unaware of how much time has passed. Plenty of former hippies walked around in the mid-'80s acting like that's what had happened, but "The Music Never Stopped" tells the remarkable true story of s...
Paul
The question we're left with after watching "Paul" is this: How could Simon Pegg, one of the guys behind the astute satires "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," be responsible for something this lazy? With so much comedy potential in the premise of sc...
Win Win
Here's what you should do. You should watch "The Station Agent," "The Visitor," and the new "Win Win" -- three very good movies, unconnected save for being written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, that depict strangers being kind to one another and i...
Red Riding Hood
"Little Red Riding Hood," like many fairy tales, is a dark and gruesome story that ought to traumatize children more than it does. If some savvy filmmaker wanted to emphasize that side of it, really bring out the horror, maybe even make the wolf into...
Redland
"Redland" is an art film in the most literal and complimentary sense. Every frame of it looks like an Impressionist painting or an exquisite photograph, and the dialogue is overheard in snippets, the way you half-hear conversations when you're drifti...
Monogamy
As film festival titles go, "Monogamy" doesn't exactly grab you. A movie about two people in a committed relationship who don't sleep with anyone else? Ooh, I'm on the edge of my seat. But when you hear "Monogamy" is the narrative feature debut from ...
Battle Los Angeles
Let us say, hypothetically, that you took all the well-worn cliches of the war genre -- especially movies from World War II -- and Frankensteined them into one standard War Movie. Then let us say that "Independence Day" had physical relations with th...
Mars Needs Moms
Let's see... Science-fiction themes... A flat, joyless story... Motion-capture animation that results in everyone having creepy robot faces... What are the chances "Mars Needs Moms" has Robert Zemeckis' name on it?
Sure enough, the man behind "The...
The Adjustment Bureau
In "The Adjustment Bureau," clothes make the man. The gentlemen who work for the title organization wear matching uniforms of tailored suits and fedoras, suggesting seriousness and professionalism. David Norris (played by Matt Damon), the rakish New ...
Beastly
"Beastly" is a modernized version of "Beauty and the Beast" that has no idea how to tell a modernized version of "Beauty and the Beast." You have to admire the bravery of the filmmakers, who went ahead and made a movie despite not understanding the s...
Rango
With "Rango," the only thing more astonishing than its subversive sense of humor and general anarchy is the fact that a studio is putting it in wide release. It's a cartoon about talking animals, but I don't know if kids will like it. I'm not even su...
Take Me Home Tonight
Except for getting that Eddie Money song stuck in your head, "Take Me Home Tonight" doesn't commit any egregious offenses.
Set, for no discernible reason, in 1988, it's a simple, all-in-one-night youth comedy much like the ones they made in the a...
Drive Angry
Are you in the market for some insane trash? Then allow me to recommend "Drive Angry," which is insane trash of the highest order. More importantly, it's insane trash that knows how ludicrous and disposable it is -- pulpy, gleeful madness that tells ...
Hall Pass
Sports usually play a part in their films, so let's put it this way: "Hall Pass" is another swing-and-a-miss for Bobby and Peter Farrelly. The effusive raunch-comedy brothers have never been able to recapture the success of their first hits, "Dumb an...
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
For many years, scientists believed that the sight of an ordinary man dressed as a fat woman was literally the funniest thing in the world. Countless films were produced based on this premise, each more side-splitting than the last, each delighting v...
I Am Number Four
So much of the potential in "I Am Number Four" goes untapped that I hope the sequel that's shamelessly set up at the end of it actually happens. There's good material for an exciting franchise here, if only someone could figure out how to guide it in...
Unknown
Well, yes, eventually "Unknown" becomes the kind of movie where an amnesiac tough guy tells an enemy, "I didn't forget everything. I remember how to kill you, a**hole." Which is too bad, because for a while it's not that kind of movie at all.
The...
Cedar Rapids
If there is justice in the world, Ed Helms will soon be a comedy star whose name above the title sells a movie all by itself. A veteran of "The Daily Show," "The Office," and "The Hangover" (plus its impending sequel), Helms is a master of lovable, s...
The Eagle
"The Eagle" is a lot easier to swallow when you know that the book it's based on -- Rosemary Sutcliff's "The Eagle of the Ninth," from 1954 -- was intended for young adult readers. That doesn't give a story license to be dumb, but it does promote a c...
Just Go with It
What an interesting failure "Just Go with It" is! Plenty of comedies are doomed from the start by bad premises or bad screenplays, but this one actually could have been good -- even with this script, and even with this cast. The material is simply mi...
The Roommate
If you think it's repetitive for film critics to keep bemoaning the awful state of teen-oriented PG-13 horror movies, imagine what it's like to actually watch them.
The latest is "The Roommate," a "Single White Female" rip-off set among colle...
Sanctum
Though his name is all over the advertising as the film's executive producer, it's not clear how much creative input James Cameron actually had on "Sanctum" beyond lending out his "Avatar" 3D technology. Sure, it's the sort of story he'd go for, what...
The Dilemma
At 118 minutes, "The Dilemma" is easily 30 minutes too long. It's also one of the shortest films Ron Howard has ever directed, and his first comedy in over a decade. The man who grew up on sitcoms and then made agreeable diversions like "Splash" and ...
The Green Hornet
In films like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "The Science of Sleep," beloved French crazy person Michel Gondry has demonstrated a directorial vision full of imagination. In "The Green Hornet" (Gondry's first truly mainstream effort), you...
Season of the Witch
After being kicked around for a while, "Season of the Witch" -- originally scheduled as one of 2010's dumbest cheesefests -- will now be one of 2011's. You expect that a movie starring Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman as medieval knights seeking to destr...
