Fargo: the Next Generation? Perhaps, if by that you mean “brisk, violent, and largely unsentimental about the depths of human folly.” It’s also the least preening of Summer 2011’s many raunch comedies, content to spend its time among the genuinely raunchy. A would-be white-trash criminal mastermind (Danny McBride) straps a …

Unlike most sequels, 35 Up is really more for people who failed to see its immediate predecessor, 28 Up. For the people who did not fail to see the predecessor, this is apt to seem a too-soon reunion (not unlike your latest high-school reunion) of the diverse group of Britishers …

Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) uses Max Ophüls’s dazzling La Ronde as a blueprint for this cluttered globe-hopping melodrama featuring an all-star international cast in various stages of grief and infidelity. The set-up is exquisite: the use of architecture and highly reflective surfaces function as serviceable tributes …

No one'll ever write a book titled The McG Touch, particularly one based on the time he killed directing this movie. Here’s another Luc Besson production that appears to have been sitting on a shelf in the Cannon Film vault since 1977. Who better than McG (Charlie’s Angels, Terminator Salvation) …

Television veteran Chadwick Boseman gives a fine, canny performance as Jackie Robinson, the man who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Well, except for when he talks to his wife and infant son: then, writer-director Brian Helgeland’s script drives him into speechmaking about the …

Michael Apted's sequel to 35 Up, 28 Up, and on down, at seven-year jumps, to 7 Up. American audiences did not get in on this fascinating project -- following the lives of a motley group of English schoolchildren -- until the fourth installment, 28 Up. That may have been the …

Stick two hot siblings (Mandy Moore, Claire Holt) vacationing in Mexico in an iron cage, dunk them in the shark-infested deep, and hope the Dolby Atmos and visual effects work will do most of the heavy lifting. One anticipates the random acts of dopiness often associated with this “if it …

Chronicle of the relationship of a young couple brought together at the office, a greeting-card company, through their shared taste for the music of the Smiths, among other things: “She likes Magritte and Hopper!” It is a maddeningly mixed experience, beginning (and continuing) with the two leads. A dimply Joseph …

Writer-director Trent Haaga takes on Bryan Smith’s novel about a beta dude (Matthew Gray Gubler, looking like a cross between Jim Carrey, Steve Buscemi, and Joel McHale) who finds himself in thrall to a series of alpha chicks — several of whom are cheerfully, plainly psychopathic — and who must …

An English soldier (Jack O'Connell, doe-eyed and square-jawed) finds himself shipped to a foreign country that isn't quite foreign: Northern Ireland, there to keep the peace in Belfast, a city rife with division. You've got your Catholics and Protestants, of course, but then you've got your factions within each, not …

A dramatization of the twenty-year correspondence between New York litterata Helene Hanff and a London book dealer she never met. This basic material, with its excessive necessity for voice-over recitations, will hardly commend itself beforehand as very intrinsically cinematic; and the deep-rooted reverence for books at the core of it …

It starts out in the precinct of Joseph Wambaugh's Police Story — L.A. cop shoots and kills petty drug dealer, goes on an extended bender, loses his family, emerges months later at A.A. meetings — but it soon veers off toward more routine TV cop shows. Director Hal Ashby has …

A little fib snowballs into an avalanche of lies over the course of a three-day family getaway. For the first 30 minutes, writer-director Asghar Farhadi acts the role of magician, using sleight-of-hand to sufficiently divert audience attention away from the cataclysmic events about to take place. It’s when Elly (Taraneh …

Based on the David Mamet play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, adapted by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, and directed by first-timer Edward Zwick. The movie, wherever it gets it from, and however deeply buried beneath slickness, cuteness, soupiness, pop songs, montages, and assorted froufrou, has something a little special about …

The early ‘90s TV series about the Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), and the triumph of PR over reality gets a worthy capstone, full of gleeful amorality and two characters whose self-absorption reaches a sort of mystical apotheosis. Even in the narcissistic world of fashion, Eddie and …