Glamorizing biopic of baby-faced thrill-killer Carlos Robledo Puch (Lorenzo Ferro) whom, after spending more than forty-six years in jail, is the longest-serving prisoner in the history of Argentina. His life in crime began as a “house cat,” a burglar without a gun. You’re heard of a meet cute? Director Luis …
Sanctimonious slush surrounding a dedicated doctor and an uncommitted wife (somebody else's) who make a deep connection while fighting famine in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya. The high ideals amount to no more than emotional blackmail. With Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo, Noah Emmerich; directed by Martin Campbell.
Detective thriller in which the mental prowess of the master sleuth is glaringly spotlighted by reducing him to a quadriplegic: an almost literally disembodied brain. The arrangement vaguely suggests a high-tech variation on the modus operandi of the venerable Nero Wolfe, a voluntary shut-in (you will recall) who left the …
The latest from Cartoon Saloon points up one of the major differences between animation and cartoons. Hit Wile E. Coyote in the face, and by the next scene, all traces of a black eye have disappeared. But those regenerative powers don’t always apply to animated features, as when your lead …
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Pitt star as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Kidding. Mostly. Anyway, there's a troubled marriage on the French Coast. Written and directed by Ms. Jolie Pitt.
Clint Eastwood was due for a dud, and this stacks up as his flattest film, his stumpiest film, since Blood Work, bookending his hot streak of Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and the Second World War diptych, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Time once again to …
Colombiana is an Angelina Jolie action-blockbuster without the Jolie. Enter Zoe Saldana, an actress Hollywood can’t quite pigeonhole, as Cataleya, a stock exotic-female vigilante poised to take on a slew of interchangeable male aggressors. The opening sequence — a chase that allows nine-year-old Cataleya (Amandla Stenberg) to show off her …
Stranger in town: the long-legged, short-haired, fat-lipped Angelina Jolie, introduced on screen, to the whistling and stomping of rain and thunder, in anatomical stages, working upwards from the toes of the boots. "Just passing through," as she laconically puts it, after getting thrown out of school "for thinking for myself," …
The title is taken from the prefatory narration of a one-time mental patient diagnosed with an ill-defined Borderline Personality Disorder: "Maybe I was crazy, or maybe it was the Sixties, or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted." Kinship with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has been intimated, but …
Hollywood imperialism in action: take a profitable little independent film (a car-chase thing from the speed-happy days of Vanishing Point, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Sugarland Express, etc., etc.), take it over, make it into a much bigger and even more profitable studio film. Thinking big passes as imagination nowadays. The …
Espionage epic, reasonably described by one blurbist as "The Godfather of CIA movies," but only if you are satisfied to retain all the pretentiousness of The Godfather, right down to the oppressive underillumination, and do without any of the enlivening pyrotechnics. (Despite those subtractions, the movie still comes to within …
Computer-nerd wet dream of averting global disaster and foiling the corporate bad guys (most particularly the hackers' adult counterpart, the villainously bearded Fisher Stevens) during Senior Year in high school. And, for a lucky two, finding a soul mate in the bargain, namely (or nicknamely) Crash Override, formerly Zero Cool, …
Steven Soderbergh’s latest attempt to subvert popular genre expectations results in an adequate 007 action/adventure picture. Mixed martial arts champion Gina Carano has the tough, tight look and smoldering dispassion the genre demands, but not even Meryl Streep could add depth to this. It’s easier to swallow than the average …
Plump computer cartoon about a tubby panda (voice of Jack Black, tubby typecasting), an envious aficionado of the martial arts, dissatisfied with his lowborn “place” in the family noodle business. Wanting nothing more than to witness the anointment of the new Dragon Warrior, inheritor of the Secret of Limitless Power, …