True story of a U.S. military suicide mission embarked upon by a group of young elite commandos, led by Captain Drummond. The soldiers are tasked with collecting highly classified information that can change the fate of the war, a mission that requires sneaking through miles of enemy, Vietcong infested tunnels. …

This shameless action machine is a video game wrapped in a Marine Corps recruitment poster. Space aliens invade L.A., mostly trashing Santa Monica. Only our jarheads can rise to the occasion, mostly with a platoon led by veteran sergeant Aaron Eckhart. They make their escape from hell in a bright …

James Ellroy's theory of the case -- the unsolved murder, disembowelment, and bisection of Hollywood wannabe Elizabeth Short in 1947 -- as expounded in 325 dense pages of fiction, fitted on screen into the film noir boilerplate: the laconic first-person narration of a two-fisted cop (Josh Hartnett), the moody solo …

It’s Rocky joins the Head Injury Club for Men in this half sports/half disease-of-the-week biopic of world “champeen” pugilist Vinny Pazienza. After a head-on collision finds “Paz’s” sawbones fitting him for a Halo vest, his spirit and determination… Must I go on? The trailer offered a Viewer’s Digest condensed version, …

Jon Amiel's doomsday thriller in the tradition of The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962) and Crack in the World (1965) stays serious long enough for a couple of catchy introductory scenes: thirty-two civilians simultaneously dropping dead within a few-block radius in Boston (the common thread appears to be their …

Fashionably “dark” comic-book movie, the first one to think of putting the darkness right up in the title — a synonym, that, for “the bat man,” as he is frequently and unfamiliarly referred to, or simply Batman to you and me. Aside from the title, the second installment in Christopher …

Ostensibly this has to do with a factual water-contamination case not unlike that of A Civil Action. But more centrally and essentially, it has to do with Julia Roberts's hitherto unnoticed boobs, which are pushed up, pressed together, and popped out -- where did these come from? -- in an …

Cold, abstract, almost hypothetical proposition concerning a couple of mid-level corporate pricks -- a stiff one and a limp one -- who, on an out-of-town assignment, form a pact to avenge themselves on the opposite sex (i.e., "restore a little dignity to our lives"; i.e., "payback"). To that end, the …

In 1885 New Mexico, a frontier medicine woman forms an uneasy alliance with her estranged father when her daughter is kidnapped by an Apache brujo. Directed by Ron Howard, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Aaron Eckhart, Val Kilmer, and Evan Rachel Wood.

Women's Western, concerned with a frontier healer (Cate Blanchett) and her relationship issues, her maternal instincts, her sexual urges. One day her estranged and very strange father (Tommy Lee Jones, as "Mr. Jones") turns up on her New Mexico homestead, having long ago gone native and converted himself into a …

Nowadays, a sports film such as this has but two paths to follow: faith-based proselytizing (Facing the Giants, Woodlawn) or a regulation biopic like all the rest. First time director (and author of Hoosiers and Rudy) Angelo Pizzo dutifully delivers the latter in his latest schoolboy tome, a tribute to …

American remake of Mostly Martha, blunted to the point of total pointlessness, eliminating the national differences between the German and the Italian, leaving only the passably cool Catherine Zeta-Jones and the insufficiently warm Aaron Eckhart as the executive chef and sous-chef at a swank Manhattan eatery. Abigail Breslin, of Little …

Neil LaBute wades into the mainstream, above the ankles, over the knees. He, as we learned from In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, is a filmmaker uncommonly tough of mind and of hide. That toughness, along with that almost reptilian coldness, is patently of less use …

“Why can’t you simply put your critical faculties on hold long enough to sit back and enjoy the damn movie?” The question comes up — particularly in the summer months — more times than I care to remember. Olympus Has Fallen is the answer to discerning action fan’s prayers: an …

Not exactly a time-travel thriller, more correctly a "time-viewing" thriller (i.e., a science-fictional crystal ball), but it has all the same illogicalities. And not exactly an amnesia thriller, either, but rather a "memory-erasure" thriller. Sleek and fast and forgettable. And slightly less stupid than most John Woo films, notwithstanding the …