Tom Cruise breaks out his best shit-eating grin (and accompanying bad-boyisms, mooning included) to play Great American Barry Seal for director Doug Liman. Good thing, too, since he winds up eating an awful lot of it: a lil’ cigar-smuggling while working as a commercial pilot leads to the CIA hooking …
Those who had been backing Doug Liman as a vital new maverick director (Swingers, Go) will have their work cut out for them on this one, a middle-of-the-road adaptation of the Robert Ludlum best-seller about an amnesiac spy, previously made as a two-part TV miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn …
The Bourne sequel. Admittedly, the basic premise of an amnesiac spy who remembers none of his assignments but all of his training is intrinsically ridiculous, internally illogical. (His unusual handicap -- groping along a fogbound Memory Lane -- never seems to slow him down, never lets his scheming adversaries get …
The Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson Affair, retold from their side, the covert CIA agent unmasked and defamed in retaliation for her husband’s op‑ed critique of the invasion of Iraq. Quite incoherent in its exposition, although because it’s a true and a well-reported story, we know where we’re headed; and quite …
Minor mishap from the maker of Swingers. Doug Liman's underfunded and overrated first film at least had a pretense of social observation within a restricted radius of reality, though even there he showed signs of excessive awareness of the audience and his effect on it. Observation tended to be outbalanced …
Flashy adolescent fantasy about a bullied nerd who spontaneously acquires the supercool superpower of teleportation: the face of Big Ben one minute, surfing in Fiji the next, the head of the Sphinx the next. Hardly has this power been established, and hardly has the awkward teen morphed into Hayden Christensen, …
A stargazer's delight, if, anyway -- and it's a big if -- you can take delight in gazing at Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (lips and more lips), worshipfully photographed by Bojan Bazelli, and pamperingly enshrined in an ambience of pristine showroom opulence. There is space in this firmament for …
Guy talk, among a group of Hollywood wannabes (their chief points of reference in life appear to be Reservoir Dogs and Goodfellas, openly aped by director and cameraman Doug Liman in slow-motion and Steadicam sequences, respectively) whose highest form of praise and self-praise is "money," as in "You're money!" and …
Doug Liman’s small-scale war movie pits two American soldiers (John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the latter looking like Jake Gyllenhaal and talking like Casey Affleck and acquitting himself admirably) against an Iraqi sniper in the pipelined, post-war wasteland. The sniper has the clear advantage: they don’t know where he is, …