In the future, rebel districts are punished by the Reaping: every year they have to send a couple of teenagers to the Capitol. There, the kiddies fight to the death in a regulated, televised competition. Sloppily directed by Gary Ross, it’s more games than hunger and more a comment on …
Katniss Everdeen won her murder tournament in The Hunger Games. Now she has to deal with the aftermath. Once again, the best reason for seeing a Hunger Games movie is star Jennifer Lawrence, whose protean, Old Hollywood visage brings to mind the line about how They Had Faces Then. And …
The edifying and entertaining spectacle (not in the ways intended) of Hollywood high rollers wrestling with a Moral Question. Here's the question: What if a perfect stranger were to offer a happily married couple a million dollars for one night with the wife? Or to put it another way: Does …
No-holds-barred lowbrow comedy, with unusual levels of nerve and endurance, especially on the fun-poking possibilities of a prosthetic appendage and bald-spot comb-overs. It goes soft at the end, although later than you might expect. And the bowling ambience, in which a one-handed has-been is preparing an Amish bumpkin for a …
Instead of presenting a sweeping biographical portrait, Rob Reiner confines his narrative to the chapter in Lyndon Johnson’s life dealing with the Civil Rights Act, thus reducing the landmark decision to a plodding parable for our times. For suspense, Reiner intercuts the first half of the movie with Kennedy’s ill-fated …
Woody Harrelson stars in and directs a feature film shot in real time.
Roundabout romantic comedy starting with a travelling saleslady at a mom-and-pop-and-son motel in arid Arizona, where she catches the eye and the fancy of the socially inept son. The operational details of the Kingman Motor Inn are ingratiating, but the relationship details are grating. Steve Zahn’s “growth” from a stunted …
Three months from the finish of his tour of duty, a wounded Iraq War vet gets assigned on the home front to the Casualty Notification Team, a recipe for overacting. A muted Samantha Morton almost alone avoids the pitfall. With Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Jena Malone, and Steve Buscemi; directed …
What happens when producers do double duty as screenwriters? Midway through Midway, it hit me. First-timer Wes Tooke, guilty on both counts, makes it so the special effects are more interesting than the characters and events they were meant to update for contemporary audiences. The cast, on the other hand, …
Difficult-to-stomach documentary on the Japanese invasion of the then Chinese capital in 1937 and subsequent atrocities, recounted through archive footage, still photos, present-day interviews with survivors, and excerpts from letters and diaries read on camera by actors in costume (Woody Harrelson, John Getz, Mariel Hemingway, Stephen Dorff, Jurgen Prochnow, et …
Oliver Stone's ballad of the alliterative Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis), who crisscross the American Southwest on a Charles Starkweather-ish murder spree, but multiplied many times for purposes of "satire." Also part of the picture, also part of the "satire," is a tabloid TV show called American Maniacs, …
The Coen brothers' first literary adaptation, from a Cormac McCarthy original, an overflowingly bloody pulp thriller, plumped up with folksy first-person social commentary in italics, about a Texas good ole boy who stumbles upon the internecine scene of a drug deal gone bad, makes off with a satchel of cash, …
A sexual-harassment horror story, single-minded if not simple-minded, set in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, Not Quite That Many Hideous Open-Pit Craters, Two Dead Stags Strapped to a Flatbed, and Untold Chauvinist Pigs. (The soundtrack, a tad predictably, makes use of several songs by that …
The big reveal at the end of a magic trick is supposed to leave you shaking your head in wonder and asking, “How on earth?” But the big reveal that Morgan Freeman’s skeptical antagonist lays on Mark Ruffalo’s wounded trickster at the end of this sequel to 2013’s surprise hit …
Director Scott Cooper's long-awaited followup to Crazy Heart may make you wish the wait had been a little longer. He got his all-star cast, but forgot to come up with a logical screenplay (he shares writing credit with Brad Ingelsby). And apparently, he also got his camera stuck on Close …