Movie Reviews
Where the Wild Things Are
First of all, "Where the Wild Things Are" is not a kids movie. Its content is not inappropriate -- no more so than plenty of animated films -- but its style, tone, and structure would bewilder young children, if not bore them outright. It's a movie a...
Black Dynamite
Someone should abduct the idiots behind the "Date Movie"/"Epic Movie"/"Meet the Spartans" spoofs and force them to watch "Black Dynamite" so they can see how it's done. This is one of the cleverest, most consistently funny spoof movies since "Airplan...
An Education
Many protagonists in coming-of-age stories have their choices boiled down to two options: what their parents want them to do and some other thing. "An Education" gives us a heroine with far more influences than that pulling on her, none of them terri...
Law Abiding Citizen
In its wildest dreams, "Law Abiding Citizen" imagines it's a 21st-century hybrid of "Death Wish" and "Silence of the Lambs." In reality, it's a ludicrous combination of the two, a pointless exercise in phony social commentary that has no idea what it...
Couples Retreat
If one of the TV networks took the married couples from four of its sitcoms and crammed them into one big crossover stunt for sweeps week, it might resemble "Couples Retreat," although "Couples Retreat" does not have a laugh track, and only one of th...
Whip It
"Whip It" tells the tender, romantic tale of a 17-year-old girl falling in love for the first time. As is often the case with young love, the object of her affection is a rugged outsider. Its name is roller derby.
How refreshing to see a film abou...
A Serious Man
Joel and Ethan Coen, the fraternal existential pranksters of filmdom, are experts at making us laugh, making us think, and making us think about whether we're supposed to be laughing or thinking. Their latest, "A Serious Man," does all of that, and s...
The Invention of Lying
You probably already know that "The Invention of Lying" takes place in a world where deception doesn't exist. Mankind never developed the ability. Everyone is 100 percent truthful all the time -- not because they feel obligated to, but because the co...
Zombieland
It's been five years since we got "Shaun of the Dead," the last really terrific zombie comedy to reach a wide audience, and I'd say we're overdue for another one. And lookee here, stumbling up the path is "Zombieland," a deliriously funny and cheerfu...
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," being composed of 23 short stories in the form of monologues by unconnected men, has always been regarded as a fine book that could never be made into a movie, or at least not a good one. (I...
Paranormal Activity
From the dark underground of film festivals like Screamfest and Slamdance comes "Paranormal Activity," a low-budget horror flick that uses its do-it-yourself aesthetic to great advantage in scaring the pee out of viewers. Rather than building elabora...
Fame
The "Lord of the Rings" trilogy takes 10 hours of screen time to tell a story that occupies the space of four years*. "Fame," on the other hand, tries to cover four years in only 107 minutes. My point is not that I wish "Fame" had been 10 hours long,...
Surrogates
In "Surrogates," almost everyone in the world never leaves the house anymore. There's no need, thanks to the proliferation of "surrogates," robotic doubles that look like you (only smoother and prettier) that you can control from the comfort of home....
Capitalism: A Love Story (documentary)
When you make your living as a polemicist, it can't be a good sign when even people who agree with you don't like you anymore. That's what has happened with Michael Moore. As his work has gotten sloppier, more exasperating, and less focused in recent...
The Informant!
Everything about Steven Soderbergh's "The Informant!" suggests a level of playfulness that the director hasn't indulged in since "Ocean's Eleven." The exclamation point in the title; the kitschy musical score by Marvin Hamlisch (who hasn't composed f...
Jennifer’s Body
Good news, zeitgeist watchers! Diablo Cody has descended from the mountaintop to bestow new slang upon us! Henceforth, "jealous" shall be rendered "Jell-O," as in, "You're so Jell-O of me!" AND THUS IT IS.
The "Juno" scribe's sophomore effort, the...
Love Happens
Oh, "Love Happens," does it? Thanks, movie. Thanks for the evocative and powerful title. Way to show some effort in attracting an audience. Maybe you should have gone even more generic and called it "Two People Fall in Love." I would definitely pay t...
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
The book "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" has been delighting children for 31 years now with its tall tale of a town called Chewandswallow where it rains food. But readers have often wondered: How did the town come to be this way? What led to this...
I Can Do Bad All by Myself
"I Can Do Bad All by Myself" is Tyler Perry's eighth film in 4 1/2 years, adapted from another one of his many, many stage plays. Archeologists are constantly discovering new Tyler Perry stage plays waiting for their big-screen adaptations. Hollywood...
Whiteout
There are not a lot of murders committed in Antarctica, what with most of the population consisting of penguins, so it makes sense that when a researcher is found dead on the ice miles from his base, there's going to be a major investigation. What's ...
Amreeka (Arabic)
Movies about immigrant families coming to America are a dime a dozen, so nobody's saying "Amreeka" is anything groundbreaking. What it is, though, is warm-hearted and pleasant, a perfectly enjoyable comedy for the Palestinian refugee in all of us.
...
All About Steve
It was just this past June that I was praising Sandra Bullock for making "The Proposal" almost tolerable -- a great testament to her charisma and likability, given how exceedingly awful "The Proposal" ought to have been otherwise. And now, less than ...
Extract
Despite his success as the creator of the animated series "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "King of the Hill," Mike Judge has become something of a cautionary tale when it comes to directing live-action movies. His first one, "Office Space," was a box-offi...
The Final Destination
When the decision was made to produce a fourth "Final Destination" movie, there must have been conversations about whether the same formula would work without any reconfiguring. Audiences were pretty familiar with it by now: someone has a premonition...
Taking Woodstock
Just think how marvelous it will be when someone produces a definitive cinematic account of what happened behind the scenes at Woodstock in 1969. But you'll have to think hard, and use your imagination, because Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock" ain't it. ...
Inglourious Basterds
Though his imitators' films must number in the hundreds by now, Quentin Tarantino himself has made only seven features, and the latest, "Inglourious Basterds," demonstrates what should be an obvious truth: No one does Tarantino better than Tarantino....
Post Grad
Everyone knows times are tough for new college graduates entering the workforce, but if "Post Grad" is any indication it's not just the economy that's making it hard to find a job. Apparently we must also take into account that today's college gradua...
Shorts
Robert Rodriguez, best known in some circles for violent adult fare like "Sin City," is best known in other circles for whimsical children's movies like "Spy Kids." As he has alternated between these styles, the problem has been that most of his juve...
World’s Greatest Dad
If Bobcat Goldthwait's goal as a filmmaker is to avoid mainstream success at all costs, then "World's Greatest Dad" may be the pinnacle of his career. Calling it a dark comedy doesn't do justice to the word "dark," nor does it adequately convey how f...
Grace
Among the items on the prop list for "Grace" are: one (1) baby bottle filled with blood and one (1) dead baby. Now that you know that, a review might be superfluous -- you already know whether or not you want to see this movie.
If you are the sor...
District 9
The first sign that something is unusual about "District 9" is that when the aliens arrive, they don't land in New York or L.A. or any of the other metropolises that sci-fi movies usually have them land in, but Johannesburg, South Africa. You wonder:...
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Though "The Time Traveler's Wife" is more about the guy than his wife, the reference to Mrs. Time Traveler in the title is important. It's how you know it's not a science-fiction story but a romantic drama. Like many such tales, it is about a woman w...
Bandslam
Summit Entertainment is smart to put a trailer for "New Moon" (the "Twilight" sequel) in front of "Bandslam," knowing it will bring in fanatical teenagers who might have otherwise ignored this buzz-deficient movie. And if those young ladies stay past...
Ponyo
If you ever want people to think you're insane, simply describe, in as much detail as you can remember, the plot of "Ponyo." Like most of the films from Hayao Miyazaki, Japan's beloved animation master, it's beautiful to look at, bizarre to contempla...
A Perfect Getaway
"Young couple butchered in Honolulu!" says the headline, none-too-subtly, on the front page of a Hawaiian newspaper near the beginning of "A Perfect Getaway." That bit of outlandishness aside, this is a shrewd thriller that's both smarter and funnier...
Paper Heart
There are documentaries, and there are comedies made to look like documentaries, and "Paper Heart" is both. Conceived by comedian Charlyne Yi and filmmaker Nicholas Jasenovec, it combines elements of reality and fiction in an amusing, meta-referentia...
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
The best G.I. Joe adventures are in the imaginations of the 10-year-old boys who play with the action figures, and attempting to recreate that magic in movie form is a fool's errand. But since Hollywood has no shortage of fools in need of errands, we...
Julie & Julia
Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, already highly regarded by their peers and audiences alike, don't need a success like "Julie & Julia" to bolster their reputations. But Nora Ephron, the film's writer and director, does. It is she who has been on a los...
Aliens in the Attic
The people who made "Aliens in the Attic" probably will not be surprised to hear that their film is mediocre, given that they don't seem to have been shooting for anything better than that anyway. I picture the walls of the production office lined wi...
Funny People
We learned last year, with "You Don't Mess with the Zohan," that Adam Sandler's infantile brand of humor doesn't mix well with Judd Apatow's snarky-slacker style. (They co-wrote that film with Robert Smigel, who's more up Sandler's alley.) So here's ...
The Collector
"The Collector" is billed as coming from the writers of "Saw IV," "Saw V," and the upcoming "Saw VI" -- as if that's a selling point. "Hey, you know the guys who have driven an already-dubious franchise into the ground with dull stories and increasin...
Thirst (Korean)
"Thirst" is the story of a well-intentioned Catholic priest who volunteers as a subject for an experimental vaccine against a deadly virus, miraculously survives the procedure, but comes out of it a vampire. That kind of side effect is hard to predic...
Adam
If I told you that "Adam" was about a man with Asperger syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism, you would instantly lose all interest in seeing it, right? Yeah, that's what I thought. If Fox Searchlight's marketers are smart, they'll keep a lid ...
G-Force
We live in a marvelous age, one where technological advancements have made it relatively easy to produce a film in which computer-generated guinea pigs interact seamlessly with flesh-and-blood humans. What's extraordinary is that a film can have all ...
Orphan
Let's say you go into "Orphan" expecting a scary story about an evil girl who gets adopted into an unwitting family. In that scenario, you will be disappointed. There are no real scares in the film, only the "ha ha, made you jump!" kind, including a ...
The Ugly Truth
The disappointing thing about "The Ugly Truth" isn't that it's formulaic, stupid, and unfunny. It's that it's formulaic, stupid, and unfunny in all the usual ways. Is there no more ingenuity in Hollywood? Can no one think of new ways for movies to be...
In the Loop
Hollywood should be ashamed that "In the Loop," the sharpest, funniest political satire in years, had to be imported from England instead of being made here in the good ol' U.S. of A. But the filmmakers were gracious enough to make fun of the America...
500 Days of Summer
The first time I saw "500 Days of Summer" was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival. I loved it for its creativity and vibrant humor, for the clever way it rearranged familiar movie tropes to come up with something new. Five months passed before ...
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Even without knowing that "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is based on the next-to-last book in the series, you'd be able to tell that the story is hurtling toward a spectacular conclusion. The stakes are getting higher, the action is more dr...
Humpday
There isn't a false moment anywhere in "Humpday," not in the writing, the directing, the performances, or the dynamics of the characters' relationships. What's especially impressive about this is that the story presents a few unlikely scenarios that ...
Brüno
It would be difficult to recapture the magic of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," Sacha Baron Cohen's fearlessly offensive satire of American culture, not least because the character is now too fam...
I Love You, Beth Cooper
One of my first grown-up jobs in journalism was writing theater reviews for a small daily newspaper. Most of the productions were what's fondly known as "community theater," put together by unpaid hobbyists in their spare time for the benefit of thei...
Public Enemies
One of the very first films to last longer than a couple minutes and tell a complete story was "The Great Train Robbery," a hugely influential 12-minute adventure that dazzled audiences way back in 1903. Its technical and narrative innovations have s...
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
To answer the obvious question, the makers of "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" are well aware that the dinosaurs came and went long before the film takes place. What happened, though, is that some of the dinosaurs survived in a huge, cavernous world ...
My Sister’s Keeper
The premise of the two-hankie dying-daughter melodrama "My Sister's Keeper" is so preposterous that taking it seriously proves a difficult task. The gist: 11-year-old Anna Fitzgerald was conceived for the sole purpose of being a genetic match for her...
The Hurt Locker
It's not hard to suss out the message of "The Hurt Locker," as it begins with this quotation from New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Then, just to be sure, al...
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Michael Bay's philosophy goes something like this. "Did you like it when I playfully slugged you in the arm? Then you'll LOVE it when I PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE!" If you thought a 25-foot robot was cool, you'll think a 50-foot robot is TWICE AS COOL! (M...
Dead Snow (Norwegian)
The main thing "Dead Snow" wants you to know is that it's a splatter film about Nazi zombies. You like zombies, and Nazis add kitsch value, so you're sold. But once you get past the relative novelty of it (they're ZOMBIES, but they're also NAZIS!!), ...
The Proposal
She's a cold-hearted scary boss lady; he's her much-abused personal assistant. In order to avoid being deported to her native Canada, she tells the immigration office that he's her fiance -- which means now they have to meet his family and pretend to...
Year One
How does this happen? How does "Year One," a movie with so much raw talent behind it, turn out so lousy? Look at the cast: Jack Black and Michael Cera are the stars, with supporting roles by David Cross, Paul Rudd, Kyle Gass, Oliver Platt, McLovin fr...
Whatever Works
Of all the actors Woody Allen has recruited to play "the Woody Allen role" in his films, has there ever been a more inspired choice than Larry David? As a writer for "Seinfeld," and now in his own "Curb Your Enthusiasm," David's caustic, neurotic mis...
Moon
Intelligent science-fiction is something of a rarity these days, the genre having been overtaken by loud, silly things that focus on technology (weapons, usually) rather than on how humans are affected by it. So "Moon" should be enthusiastically gree...
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
People who have seen both the 1974 version of "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," a workmanlike thriller with Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, and the numeralized remake, "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," a generic thriller with Denzel Washington and Jo...
Tetro
It's unlikely that Francis Ford Coppola will ever make anything as momentous or influential as the first two "Godfather" films or "Apocalypse Now," which one of the downsides of doing brilliant work so early in your career. In "Tetro," however, he ha...
Easier with Practice
It's a rarity for a director's first film to be as confident and effective as "Easier with Practice" is. And for any film, let alone a debut, to address difficult subjects with this much insight, humor, and humanity is almost miraculous. There are fi...
Away We Go
Sam Mendes did caustic satire with "American Beauty" and "Jarhead," marital angst with "Revolutionary Road," and tender familial relations with "Road to Perdition." His fifth film, "Away We Go," combines all of that into a funny, good-hearted comedy ...
Downloading Nancy
Making a movie takes time, effort, energy, and money. While watching "Downloading Nancy," I kept thinking: Why would you go to all that trouble just to make something so ugly?
Not that all movies have to be happy and upbeat, of course. But good "...
The Hangover
Todd Phillips scored a hit in 2003 with the raucous R-rated comedy "Old School," then for some reason moved to tamer waters for "Starsky & Hutch" and "School for Scoundrels," neither of which amounted to anything. Duly chastened, he now returns h...
Land of the Lost
Oh, what a weird movie this is. "Land of the Lost" was a fairly strange TV show to begin with, and now the movie version has kept all of the built-in goofiness -- the slow-moving reptilian Sleestaks, the race of monkey people, the dinosaurs -- and ad...
Up
Here it is, the 10th feature film from Pixar Animation Studios, and the 10th one to redefine the rules of animated moviemaking, even compared to previous Pixar films. The studio's last offering, "WALL-E," worked hard to establish the realistic, nuts-...
Departures (Japanese)
One thing about the Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language category that separates it from the acting, screenplay, director, and best picture categories is that in order to vote, Academy members must prove that they have actually seen all five nominee...
Drag Me to Hell
It would be hard to improve on "Drag Me to Hell" as the title of a horror film, and even harder to improve on the film itself. Directed by Sam Raimi and written by him and his usual writing partner, his brother Ivan, it's outrageously dark and twiste...
Dance Flick
The recent glut of generically titled spoofs like "Epic Movie" and "Date Movie" began in 2000, with "Scary Movie," which was the brainchild of several members of the Wayans family. After the awful "Scary Movie 2," the Wayanses got out of the genre to...
Easy Virtue
As I write this, a Broadway revival of Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit," starring Angela Lansbury and Rupert Everett, is playing to packed houses and positive reviews. This coincides with another one of Coward's plays, "Easy Virtue," being re-introduced...
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Like its predecessor, "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" is a mix of genuinely funny performances and highly lazy storytelling. You know how it goes: the plot is inane, but a lot of the dialogue makes you laugh. It's hard to respect a m...
The Girlfriend Experience
Since 2000, Steven Soderbergh has directed a dozen films, plus all 10 episodes of the HBO series "K Street." He usually handles the cinematography and editing himself, too (pseudonymously), making him essentially a one-man movie factory -- except tha...
Terminator Salvation
The climax of "Terminator Salvation" takes place in a factory where Terminator robots are made, and I believe Henry Ford will be glad to know that his assembly-line process still exists in the future. He'll especially like that the human workers have...
The Brothers Bloom
Rian Johnson's first feature, the high-school film noir "Brick," earned one rave after another in 2005, which everyone in show business knows is a mixed blessing. A great first film means impossible expectations for your second film. So I think Johns...
Management
I suspect "Management" will make about five dollars at the box office and annoy half the people who watch it. It's being promoted as a comedy, but that's only because comedies are easier to promote than oddball romantic dramas with comedic elements, ...
Angels & Demons
Part of the problem with the movie version of "The Da Vinci Code" was that it took itself too seriously. You had these people dashing around Europe, investigating obscure clues and uncovering outrageous conspiracies, but the only person who seemed to...
Outrage (documentary)
Hypocrites beware: Kirby Dick will have none of your shenanigans. His Oscar-nominated "Twist of Faith" dealt with sex-abuse cover-ups within the Catholic Church, and "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" let the irrational and inconsistent MPAA ratings board ...
Star Trek
Most of my knowledge of the "Star Trek" mythos comes not from watching the original series (which I've never done) or the films with the original cast (ditto), but simply by osmosis, living in a society where "Star Trek" is a huge part of pop culture...
Adoration
The Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan often tells his stories with scenes out of order to reinforce his theme that absolute truth is impossible to find. In an Egoyan movie, things are rarely what they seem to be, which becomes evident when he circles b...
Next Day Air
"Next Day Air" isn't a movie. It's an idea for a movie. Actually, it's not even that: It's an idea for the first act of a Quentin Tarantino movie. When it ends, 80 minutes after it began, you're left thinking, "Is that it? Where's the rest of the sto...
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
At some point in the early 2000s, Matthew McConaughey stopped being a likable, laid-back everydude and started being an insufferable douchebag who I want to punch every time I see him. Surely I am not alone in this. McConaughey's self-effacing perfor...
Battle for Terra
Bless their hearts for trying, but the people who made "Battle for Terra" -- who aren't Pixar, DreamWorks, or any other major studio -- simply can't compete with the big boys when it comes to computer-animated feature films. The technical quality wou...
The Limits of Control
I'm going to write this review of Jim Jarmusch's "The Limits of Control," and then I'm going to read some of the film's positive reviews, to see what it is that other people have gotten out of it that I have missed. Sometimes I recognize what a film ...
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Despite appearing in three "X-Men" films so far, the character of Wolverine -- played with growly intensity by song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman -- remains something of an enigma. Viewers have wondered: How did Wolverine lose his memory before teaming ...
The Soloist
Originality and innovation are highly praised in filmmaking, and rightly so. But that doesn't mean a good film can't be made out of familiar, shopworn materials. The story and characters in "The Soloist" are nothing new, yet the film is quietly, resp...
Obsessed
Why is there an audience for a movie like "Obsessed"? Are people not aware of the Lifetime Movie Network, which shows films like this 24 hours a day for free?
Ah, but Lifetime movies don't star Beyonce Knowles. This deprives viewers of the opport...
Fighting
Its generic and lazy title notwithstanding, "Fighting" is almost a good movie. There's more to it than you'd expect -- you'd expect it to be a meathead drama about an underground fight club. And, OK, it is about that. But it also tries, albeit only s...
Il Divo (Italian)
I have enough trouble following the details of my own country's political intrigue, so the material in "Il Divo" -- about Italy's notorious seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti -- was almost entirely new to me. The film begins with a dizzying s...
The Informers
"American Psycho" was based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and so is "The Informers," but don't let that trick you into thinking "The Informers" is going to be good, like "American Psycho" was. In fact, the response to "The Informers" when it premiere...
Crank: High Voltage
"Crank: High Voltage," the ludicrous follow-up to 2006's ludicrous "Crank," is even less justified than most sequels, given that its main character died at the end of the first film. On the other hand, these movies -- can we call them a "franchise" y...
State of Play
By most accounts, the BBC miniseries "State of Play" was a riveting political thriller and well worth the six hours it would take me to watch it. (But why? I could watch almost a whole season of "30 Rock" in that time.) The two-hour American theatric...
17 Again
Zac Efron wants to break out of his "High School Musical" niche, but apparently not too far out of it. In "17 Again," he plays a popular, wholesome teenager who's also the star of the school basketball team. He even dances a little. No singing, thoug...
Sleep Dealer (Spanish)
In the future, our immigration problems will be solved by having Mexicans do their menial work with remote-controlled robots. We’ll get our cheap labor, and the Mexicans will stay on their side of the border.
That’s according to "Sleep Dealer," w...
Dragonball: Evolution
"Dragonball: Evolution" is based on a manga series (that's Japanese for "comic book") that was also turned into an anime series (that's Japanese for "cartoon") and is now a movie that was not screened for critics before it opened (that's Hollywood fo...
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Comb through the program guide at any independent film festival and you'll find 10 movies exactly like "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh." Why, it's about a directionless college graduate who spends a summer finding himself! And he has a disapproving fath...
Observe and Report
In another one of those weird coincidences that occur in Hollywood now and then, January's surprise hit "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" is being followed three months later by "Observe and Report," which is also about a mall security guard with delusions of g...
