What happens when “complicated” gives way to “convoluted.” It’s 10 years since super-amnesiac CIA super-agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) learned the awful truth that he volunteered to become a mindless government assassin, and now he is living off the grid, tortured by guilt and punching people for money. Only maybe …
Inbred Kevin Smith comedy arranges a kind of get-together of the casts of his four earlier comedies -- Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Shannen Doherty, Joey Lauren Adams, Brian O'Halloran, etc. -- but with the titular slackers (Jason Mewes, disturbingly credible, and Smith himself, disturbingly not) brought …
Another Robert Redford literary adaptation (what else?), complete with a voice-over narration almost as nagging as that of A River Runs through It. The narrator is an uncredited Jack Lemmon, suffering a prefatory heart attack on the golf course, lying flat on his back in the rough off the fairway, …
Anna Paquin, who gave a great kid’s performance in The Piano, offers a great adolescent performance as Lisa. Bright, snarky, spoiled, and neurotic about her broken family in New York, she drives her decent mom (J. Smith-Cameron) nearly crazy by becoming a drama diva. The cause is her role in …
Kids: stay in school, especially if you plan on becoming an astronaut. When a freak accident (wind-loosed antenna piercing bio-monitor) leads to his being stranded on the red planet, astro-botanist Matt Damon decides he ain't got time to muse on fate, the fragility of existence, or man's place in the …
A final scoop of franchise gravy ten years after the last one with good critters and effects, the gee-golly style again directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Will Smith as agent J is getting too mature for his bouncy boyishness, and Tommy Lee Jones as sullen, snarky K is looking pickled by …
In the latter days of World War II, a band of charming, aging misfits (Bill Murray! George Clooney! Bob Balaban! John Goodman! Matt Damon! Plus that French guy and that English dude!) is tasked with designating, preserving, and ultimately, recovering the art looted by the Nazis during their European conquest …
The gang of scammers and heisters reassembles on a weak premise (revenge for the backstabbed and cardiac-arrested Elliott Gould), weaker even than the deeper premise of making a huge pile of money for Warner Brothers. Despite the "emotional" motivation, there is no loss of smugness (only a loss of Julia …
Hayao Miyazaki further postpones his announced retirement three feature films earlier, and appears to reverse the slippage of his hand-drawn purism into corner-cutting computer animation, reverting to a simpler, less congested style than in Spirited Away and even more Howl’s Moving Castle. His famous sensitivity to nature is immediately on …
Hayao Miyazaki further postpones his announced retirement three feature films earlier, and appears to reverse the slippage of his hand-drawn purism into corner-cutting computer animation, reverting to a simpler, less congested style than in Spirited Away and even more Howl’s Moving Castle. His famous sensitivity to nature is immediately on …
A natural gas salesman (Matt Damon, not director Gus Van Sant) uses the economy as a bully stick to convince a small town into accepting his company's offer for drilling rights to their properties. He is opposed by a charismatic stranger (John Krasinski) who takes advantage of an open-mic night …
Another in the line of adaptations of John Grisham's dragon-slaying fairy tales for the morally complacent and self-congratulatory. In this one there are actually two dragons. Number one is a scamming insurance company that preys on the poor and dispatches a battalion of nattily attired attorneys against the idealistic young …
Steven Spielberg's blood-and-guts war movie is at its best when it is most conventional and at its worst when trying for more (Spielberg in a nutshell), and it is very often very conventional. Whether or not the filmmaker has achieved his flag-waving, trumpet-blowing goal of honoring the survivors and the …
Steven Spielberg's blood-and-guts war movie is at its best when it is most conventional and at its worst when trying for more (Spielberg in a nutshell), and it is very often very conventional. Whether or not the filmmaker has achieved his flag-waving, trumpet-blowing goal of honoring the survivors and the …