James Franco’s impish appeal as outdoorsman Aron Ralston is caught between a hard place and two rocks: the stone that pins down his right arm in a Utah canyon and the clobbering boulder of director Danny Boyle’s “art.” Complicating the simple story are flashbacks, visions, jokes, music, and the hero’s …
James Franco plays a writer who needs a chemical bump to help him focus and produce. Pamela Romanowsky directs.
By-the-numbers military training exercise: a sensitive riveter, not content just to build ships, joins the Naval Academy on a promise to his late mother. There's a withholding father, a hard-ass drill instructor, a roly-poly lagging roommate, a foxy female officer, and a boxing tournament for proving manhood. James Franco might …
A displaced Afghan journalist comes to rest in a Northern California town where a job at a small town newspaper leads to danger. Dominic Rains, Melissa Leo, and James Franco star.
True-crime drama, about a New York cop with a father and son on the opposite side of the law, wears its heart on its sleeve and squeezes it like a sponge. Scottish-born director Michael Caton-Jones (best films: Rob Roy, Memphis Belle, old-fashioned stuff) doesn't let things get too messy. Excellent …
Backstage dance musical centered around a Chicago ballet troupe, not necessarily the Joffrey Ballet that does the actual dancing. A labor of love for Neve Campbell, who trained in her native Canada as a ballerina and who co-wrote and co-produced in addition to starring, and just a labor for Robert …
A hedged bet, marital comedy cum action thriller, with a “boring” New Jersey couple enlivening their stale marriage by getting themselves mistaken for high-stakes blackmailers. Tina Fey will never in her lifetime use up the eternal gratitude she earned for her role in the 2008 presidential campaign (the faux Palin), …
Writer and director Karen Moncrieff, of Blue Car, goes at the title figure -- not just dead, but brutally murdered -- by way of five separate storylines, one after another, some more tangential than others, all populated by horridly stunted humans. Structurally intriguing, but grindingly grim and condescending. With Toni …
Director and star James Franco’s ode to artistic ambition and invention — two things which, it should go without saying, have no necessary connection to artistic excellence or triumph. Indeed, if you really want to examine them in their purest form, you’re probably better off focusing on a failure — …
Self-affirming, boastful, best-selling piece of nonfiction Chick Lit transformed into a two-and-a-quarter-hour blandishment for a major star. While there is a lot of sightseeing on the heroine’s Search for Self (“I want to go someplace where I can just marvel”), Italy for food, India for meditation, Indonesia for romance — …
Wim Wenders’s latest takes us through 12 years in the life of a writer who accidentally ran over a child and the emotional cauterization of feelings the tragedy visits upon all parties involved. Wenders can photograph nothing and make it interesting, which is kind of what he does with screenwriter …
Fulsome tribute to the boys, the men, of the Lafayette Escadrille, the corps of American volunteers who flew for France in the First World War. A throwback, to some extent, to the aviation films of, for the prime example, William Wellman, except that Wellman had himself been a pilot in …
True story of a U.S. Ranger assault on a POW camp in the Philippines toward the end of the Second World War, though the first-person narrator, the leader of the assault, starts back a bit further: "In 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor...." John Dahl, the director, had had trouble …
Writer and director Nancy Meyers arranges an Internet home exchange, for two weeks at Christmastime, between two wounded women desperate to get away: a London newspaper columnist (Kate Winslet) with a cozy cottage in Surrey, and a Hollywood trailer-cutter (Cameron Diaz) with a modernist mansion in Beverly Hills. The agreed-upon …
In the middle of a holiday moviegoing season fraught with yarns of slavery, childhood mortality, cancer, senility, and an AIDS panacea as a cash cow, it’s amazing how refreshing a cheesy exploitation film can sound. Taking sole screenwriting credit, Sylvester Stallone lumps together shreds of his past glories to form …