Martin Scorsese's career-changing turn to the overblown epic, a turn marked by Casino, would seem to be a course difficult to reverse. Kundun ... Gangs of New York ... The Aviator.... And now even a trashy light diversion, adapted from an average-length Hong Kong action film, will get dragged out …
Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson aren’t real world men of God, but they play them in the movies. Wahlberg stars as Stuart Long, a hard-living pugilist whose doctor cautions that it’s time to hang up the gloves. Next stop: showbiz, where homophobic Stu counters a casting agent’s advances with one …
The world's most unlikely priest is back in theaters in time for the holidays. When an injury ends his amateur boxing career, Stuart Long moves to Los Angeles to find money and fame. While scraping by as a supermarket clerk, he meets Carmen, a Sunday school teacher who seems immune …
Elemental protecting-the-nest melodrama about an innocent chick who brings home a bad egg. The family tensions are believably drawn and ably acted (William Petersen, Amy Brenneman, Reese Witherspoon), and Mark Wahlberg frowns fiercely and sweet-talks dulcetly as the two-faced psychotic. The finale aspires to something on the scale of Straw …
Not so much a movie about boxing as a movie about fighting, about the act of conflict. Mark Wahlberg plays Micky Ward, the real-life road worker from Lowell, Massachusetts, who recharged his sputtering boxing career to win the WBU Light Welterweight Championship in 2000. Amy Adams stars as his supportive …
The titular quartet, all adopted, all acknowledged "fuck-ups," are of two races, evenly divided, black and white, and reunited for the Turkey Day funeral of their sainted mother, murdered in the course of a liquor-store holdup. "I didn't come back here for the funeral," explains the Mark Wahlberg one, making …
Mark Wahlberg stars in a remake of the 1974 film starring James Caan.
Ill-named chiller by M. Night Shyamalan, not to be confused with the Swinging Sixties caper by Elliot Silverstein (title tune by the Supremes), unleashes a wave of inexplicable self-inflicted violence: a lunch-hour idler puncturing her carotid with a hair stick, a traffic cop turning his gun on himself, a steady …
A self-declared Existential Comedy revolving around the personal crisis of an environmental activist (Jason Schwartzman), currently getting squeezed out of the Open Spaces Coalition by his duplicitous but much better-looking and more charismatic colleague (Jude Law), who is literally sleeping with the enemy, the cheerleader-perky spokesmodel (Naomi Watts) of the …
From the busy Disney sports department, an implausible but true story made more implausible and less true (and not made "better" in the process), the football equivalent of baseball's The Rookie, wherein a thirtyish laid-off schoolteacher, part-time bartender, and abandoned husband in South Philly, name of Vince Papale, earns a …
High-tech tale of betrayal and revenge, lighthearted to the point of self-contradictory and callous (Charlize Theron does, at least, haul off and sock the man who murdered her father: that sure felt good), mechanically directed by F. Gary Gray. As remakes go, it has the advantage of coming from an …
The Passion of the SEAL. Peter Berg, having humiliated the American military by involving it in the ludicrous nonsense of Battleship, attempts to make up for it by telling the (based-on-a-true) story of a four-man mission gone very bad in Afghanistan. The desired response to the action onscreen seems to …
Fourteen-year-old rape and murder victim, marooned in “the in-between," a/k/a "the blue horizon" dividing life and afterlife, continues to watch over her family, friends, and unapprehended killer, a quintessential creep who looks to be guiltily, self-incriminatingly, in disguise: Stanley Tucci with a blond comb-over hairpiece, paste-on matching mustache, aviator glasses, …