Sebastian (Sebastian Maniscalco) is encouraged by his fiancée (Leslie Bibb) to bring his immigrant, hairdresser father, Salvo (De Niro), to a weekend get-together with her super-rich and exceedingly eccentric family (Kim Cattrall, Anders Holm, Brett Dier, David Rasche). The weekend develops into what can only be described as a culture …
I remember that wonderful summer when the teenage miracle reached full bloom -- it was 1958, in London, and for the first time in history, according to the original novel by Colin MacInnes, "kids" had become "teenagers." The vehicle for this slice of sociology is a triple-scoop youth musical, with …
For much of the distance, tolerably -- but true to the fashion of the times, overaggressively -- entertaining. Very fast out of the starting blocks (very fast at sinking a U.S. nuclear sub to the bottom of the Caribbean), and quite exhausting in the rate at which one problem follows …
A seven-time college reject (Justin Long) creates his own fictitious college -- South Harmon Institute of Technology, or SHIT for short -- to appease his parents and to accommodate fellow rejects. "A bad idea from the get-go," counsels a close friend -- a movie review within the movie. A couple …
Cast-heavy comedy about a girl with a nail embedded in her brain who sets out to fix the health care system.
Fresh-faced recent Harvard student Erwin (Rudy Pankow) flames out of his first professional acting job when he forgets to turn off his phone and triggers an explosive nightmare on set. His career and cell phone in tatters, he flees the New Orleans set, only to have his car break down …
An odd comic concept: a retriever of missing animals (and a virtual Saint Francis to an illicit menagerie in his Miami apartment). The man himself, Jim Carrey, is still odder: a spastic, rictus-afflicted, ducktailed rejectee from a Grease audition, whose mouth (and sometimes even voice) resembles Dan Aykroyd doing Dick …
Jim Carrey may well be the Jerry Lewis of the Nineties. Which would mean, in addition to masturbation jokes and such, that where Lewis had directors who were also stylists (himself, Tashlin), Carrey, here on the trail of the sacred white bat of mythical Nibia in Darkest Africa, has someone …
Two-and-a-quarter-hour promo for the Beatles without ever mentioning them by name. A generous, even overgenerous sampler of their songs (thirty-three of them, by the count in the press notes, leaving aside the numberless others that are quoted from or alluded to) has been re-recorded, or "covered" as they say in …
Asperger’s romance (and high time, too, after Tourette’s, Alzheimer’s, etc., have had a whirl at romance) about a socially handicapped astronomy buff and his pretty upstairs new neighbor, an aspiring children’s writer, in a New York apartment house. Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne, the afflicted and the normal respectively, play …
Animated holiday greeting card — Christmas and Hanukah both — addressed to Adam Sandler's flock: juvenile tastelessness sprinkled with sugar. Besides being the model for the bah-humbug protagonist, Sandler supplies four different voices, all of them irritating in different ways. And the brand names and corporate logos on parade — …
A power surge on an International Space Antenna nearly knocks career astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt, in his earnest, Robert Redford mode) out of commission. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that Ad Astra, Latin for “to the stars,” is Apocalypse Now in space — there’s a lot of Capt. Willard …
Black comedy for kids, specifically those too young to remember the mid-Sixties television sitcom of the same name. The pattern of inversions is simple to grasp -- the bouquet of rose stems with the blossoms snipped off, the children holding a TV antenna outdoors in a lightning storm -- and …
Monotony in nothing flat. The Addamses have a new addition (a mustachioed bundle of gloom named Pubert), and the two jealous older kids are packed off to summer camp, and the hired nanny is actually a black-widow serial killer who has set her cap for Uncle Fester. In the nanny …