How can a story laden with this much betrayal and corruption feel this cheerful? Welcome to Hawaii. Bradley Cooper smiles his way through the shenanigans as the wounded hero (physically, morally, spiritually, professionally) who has to choose which parts are worth healing and which can be cut away. Happily, he …

Jim Jarmusch's mainstreamiest film to date has a lot of laughs in it, despite the pretentiousness of the cinéma d'ennui pacing and deliberately dissatisfying ending. Laughs are laughs, nonetheless, and once they've fought through the pretentiousness, they cannot be wiped off the scoreboard. (Another impediment to be fought through, another …

Comedy out of the better-slob-than-snob school. But then, it hasn't much to be snobbish about. Its main boasting point is in finally giving Rodney Dangerfield a film role large enough to move around in: a nouveau-riche vulgarian who invades the inner sanctum of an exclusive country club. Bill Murray has …

The overhaul of the late-Seventies TV series is, in essence, M:I-2 plus T&A.; The Mission: Impossible element comes clear in the opening sequence when, by and by, the Steadicam gives up roving the aisles of an airborne jetliner and settles down in front of an African-garbed LL Cool J, who, …

What would probably like to be thought of as a big goof, or alternatively a big boner, must instead be regarded as a big botch. The bigger-headedness that results from the big hit of 2000 is not an attractive feature, and in truth none of the three Angels -- Drew …

Post-apocalyptic children’s film, sufficiently dark for any full-bloom pessimist, about the remnants of humanity in a run-down underground city, and the two teenagers in search of an exit. Impressive physical production (Terry Gilliam at his greediest could not have asked for more), though the escape route gets a bit theme-parky. …

A collection of eleven comic sketches filmed over a period of almost two decades by Jim Jarmusch, all of them involving, if not actually revolving around, coffee and cigarettes (or in one case, tea and cigarettes) and the various restaurant tables on which these are arrayed. Each takes place in …

An escapee from the loony bin, passing himself off as resident psychiatrist thereof, gets to sit in for a radio psychologist on leave of absence: an "idea" comedy with nothing much to back the idea up -- nothing beyond putting Dan Aykroyd in the starring role (where Chevy Chase or …

Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing …

One thing to be said for a Wes Anderson film, and it's no small thing, is that it bears an individual stamp. A stamp as flat as a postage stamp, as emphatic as a rubber stamp. (Whap, whap.) A well-known commodity after Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life …

The scary (and gory) things on screen may be zombies, but the real monster here is the troll in the director’s chair. Jim Jarmusch and friends (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, et alia) have a laugh at the audience’s expense with a film that starts off sounding good, looking …

Conventional Hollywood "biopic" on an unconventional subject of study: the ignored, ridiculed, and campily canonized director of Plan 9 from Outer Space. The disrepute, or nonrepute, of the central figure liberates the film to engage in the kind of myth-making in which the "biopic" once engaged with impunity, but which …

Wes Anderson’s wised-up children’s film, a labor-intensive stop-motion animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl animal tale (reportedly he never visited the London set, but directed from Paris by E-mail) about a vulpine sophisticate who moves up in the world — out of a hole and into a tree — but …

The feature debut of director Aaron Schneider starts like a house afire, meaning it starts literally with a house on fire, and proceeds from there to shave off a thin slice of folksy baloney purportedly based on fact, something to do with a misanthropic old Tennessee hermit who throws himself …

Three parapsychologists, having had their academic grant rescinded and their research equipment confiscated, go into private practice as exterminators of any and all supernatural pests. Just in time, too. It seems that an Art Deco skyscraper on Central Park West has been designed as an antenna to pull in assorted …