Guy-jinks involving three middle-aged buddies and a nephew who, for R&R, repair to a rundown mountain resort, the playground of their salad days, where a malfunctioning hot tub transports them magically (as opposed to science-fictionally) back to 1986. They still look middle-aged to us and themselves, but everyone else sees …
Apparently, the hot tub time machine from the first movie was real, and John Cusack used it to go back in time and remove his contractual obligation for the sequel.
Directed by the consistently lightweight Harold Ramis, this incomprehensible embezzling caper, off-puttingly flippant in tone, nonetheless generates an atmospheric sense of weather and of environment: Christmas in Wichita, under a freezing rain, on skating-rink roads, around and about the seedy strip clubs and massage parlors, names like Tease-o-Rama, The Sweet …
Hokey thriller about a Ten Little Indians-type annihilation of the guests at a remote Nevada motel in a pelting rain. The hokeyness has a rationale, but the rationale is hokey, too. With John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Ray Liotta, Clea DuVall, Rebecca DeMornay, Alfred Molina, and Pruitt Taylor Vince; directed by …
Camped-up computer cartoon about a humpbacked lackey who bucks the class system in the land of Malaria and aspires to be an evil genius instead of just the lisping, switch-pulling assistant. The backdrops are sufficiently Gothic, but the figures are ghastly, and not in a good way. With the voices …
Father and daughter, who are all each other has, are separated in mid-Depression by fate and by no fault of their own. The daughter, played with impressive sobriety by Meredith Salenger, takes to the rails to rejoin her father in the Washington timberland, aided at various times on her trek …
If you're going to do a biopic of Brian Wilson, the musical mind behind an unconventional album like the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, you probably ought to break convention, even if it's just a little bit. Director Bill Pohlad serves up a healthy portion of the standard stuff: bad dad, …
How much mercenary sex, rampant pill-popping, craven inhumanity, horrific violence, and full-on incest does David Cronenberg have to put into his Hollywood satire before you get the point? Really? That much, huh? Okay, here goes. Julianne Moore caps off her recent triumph as Best Actress in Still Alice with the …
Sci-fi writer (and widower) adopts a problem child who believes he's from another planet. The means of expression are hackneyed and mawkish, and John Cusack's emotional reserves run only puddle-deep, but the warm, clean, well-lit photography of Robert Yeoman (on whose talents Wes Anderson holds no monopoly) will give the …
Director Clint Eastwood (not actor, too, this time) takes on John Berendt's "nonfiction novel" about a sensational homicide in Savannah, Ga., about the people of Savannah, about the history and the culture of Savannah, about Savannah in general. The early evidence of its reshaping for the screen is very encouraging: …
Fact-based story of an unemployed dockworker who finds two canvas bags stamped Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, freshly fallen off the armored truck and containing $1.2 million. Finding the money is no crime; keeping it is. But he never for an instant considers returning it. "Possession is nine-tenths of the …
Hen-party atmosphere for a romantic comedy wherein the sisters of an Irish-Catholic divorcée push her into Internet dating to find a replacement. Diane Lane seems too good for the shticky John Cusack ("You seem very practiced and smooth," she observes), who frankly doesn't act like a man whose favorite movie …
Two graduates of Generic High School spend the summer on Nantucket Island — meet girls, run afoul of the local capitalist pigs, challenge them in the big regatta, etc. The standard youth-comedy agenda, but a bit more detailed, more deviant, more mordant (e.g., the chain-smoking recluse who keeps a 24-hour …
Taken for what it is — and that includes a final third that comes with its own unique set of loopy, nonlinear terms — this followup from Precious writer-director Lee Daniels does just fine as a smutty sex-and-servitude potboiler that never bores. The 1969 murder of a small-town sheriff in …