Effective kidnap thriller, even if some of its effect is achieved by cheating. And even if, too, some of the effect is subjected to insufficient elucidation. And even if, in any case, the total effect is cheap and empty. For all that, once we get over the rocky start (the …
An alternative-universe Hollywood where a married pair of superstars -- it will not be helpful to think of Cruise and Kidman, Burton and Taylor, Bogart and Bacall -- have appeared together in nine consecutive boffo blockbusters (the samples we see of their work are on a par with the standard …
Preachy computer cartoon, holding up the communal spirit of an ant colony against the every-man-for-himself ethos of humankind. As in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (but by another method: the potion-in-the-ear method of Hamlet), a human being gets to see the world from an ant's-eye view. Notwithstanding some clever touches, …
This year’s entry in the dysfunctional family holiday sweepstakes is a heaping plate of fried green magnolias. The Weston clan and company gather in Tulsa to mourn the suicide of the family patriarch and wind up wishing that their beastly, cancer-riddled mother (Meryl Streep) could trade places with him. John …
An Almodóvar paella of priestly pederasty, transvestitism, female impersonation, film, stage, assorted spices and savories. (Gael García Bernal in the persona of cabaret artiste Zahara looks strikingly like a blond Julia Roberts.) The presentation is polished and colorful as always; the onion-y layers of reality -- of fiction within fiction …
It’s a case of “different message, same actor” as Lucas Hedges trades in one important theme for another and goes from a boy erased to a beautiful boy addict. Mom (Julia Roberts) returns from church on Christmas Eve to find Ben (Hedges), her semi-rehabbed son, anxiously vaping on the front …
Didactic poli-sci lesson on How the System Works, entertainingly illustrated by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols. The titular war is the one between the Soviets and the Afghans in the Reagan era, and Charlie Wilson is a nonfictional Texas congressman (played with supreme complacency by Tom Hanks) who, …
E.B. White's barnyard children's story, a friendship fable about the promise of a spider to save a spring pig from the smokehouse. Sweet sentiment soured by the cacophonous Cultural Diversity of the animal voices (British sheep, Southern cows, African-American geese, New York City rat, Julia Roberts spider, and so on) …
Reekingly urbane Mike Nichols chamber piece, prone to be seen as a long-distance companion to his Carnal Knowledge in its dirty talk and its romantic disillusion. The quartet of players -- two American females, a stripper (but of course) and a portrait photographer, and two British males, an obituarist and …
An adaptation of the "unauthorized autobiography" of Chuck Barris, TV game-show producer -- The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, et al. -- and moonlighting CIA hit man. Says him. We meet the protagonist (played with maximum smarm and supreme sleaze by Sam Rockwell) holed up, Manson-haired, naked, close to catatonic, …
Paranoia thriller without a milliwatt of power to compel belief. Mel Gibson, reunited with his Lethal Weapon director, Richard Donner, is an addlepated Manhattan cabbie, loonier than Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, who puts out a newsletter of exposés on the order of "The Oliver Stone-George Bush Connection." (Number of subscribers: …
Entertaining enough game of industrial espionage, kicked off, behind the credits, with a slapstick soundless slo-mo fight on the tarmac between the ungainly Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson. The repeated doubling-back in time proves to be more exasperating than clever, but writer-director Tony Gilroy, going light after Michael Clayton, hasn’t …
And dying pretty -- first in a posh palace on Nob Hill, then in a two-story treasure of Victoriana on a Mendocino cliff, and in the company of a private nurse with a ton of hair, miles of legs, and an acre of lip (Julia Roberts). And dying, if need …
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 — …
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 …