A new, updated, relocated Alfie — an Alfie for America, for the Bedhead generation, for the erectile-dysfunction era. He's still a Brit, and still talks straight to the camera, but now our lady-killer must be a chiselled Adonis (Jude Law) instead of a legitimate heir to Michael Caine (a Rhys …
More disappointing than most Adam Sandler comedies because the subject was more promising: temper control. You would hardly know that that's the subject from the way the humor runs to sex, private parts, bodily functions, in short the toilet. The strong supporting cast is a sign of either Sandler's growing …
Interesting attempt by the eighty-three-year-old Sidney Lumet to keep up with the Tarantinos, piloting a caper film of back-and-forth time jumps and alternating points of view. The caper itself, a jewelry store stickup, is strictly small-time. "We don't want Tiffany's," the mastermind, a drug-dependent real estate accountant (Philip Seymour Hoffman), …
What fun: a romantic comedy based on genuine human folly instead of some high-concept absurdity. Julianne Moore is a middle-aged woman adrift, so much so that she slips out of her marriage (to Steve Carell) and into another man's bed. Pathos ensues, with many of the laughs arising from moments …
“Edgy” indie comedy by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass (“mumblecore” movers and shakers, makers of Baghead among others), the premise of which would be just as easy to imagine as a mainstream Will Ferrell vehicle: an oafish divorced lonelyheart (“I’m like Shrek”) thinks he may have found a new …
A bottle of Alan Rudolph's watered-down and chilled romanticism: a noir-ish fairy tale about a pair of twins separated at birth (cringing nerd, swaggering hood) and now living, unaware of each other, in an imaginary city of quasi-science-fictional decay and chaos. The performances (excepting chiefly the swaggering half of Matthew …
A respectable addition to Bukowskiana, if respectability can be a criterion for the life and work of the pickled writer, Charles Bukowski. A mangily bearded Matt Dillon, in the part of the author's semi-autobiographical stand-in, Henry Chinaski, gives a full-bodied performance, and a literally full-body one, his head tilted backwards …
After the series opener, I vowed to Purge no more. Funny how air conditioning on a 105 degree day has a way of changing one's mind. White devils brainwash blacks into spending a governmentally sanctioned extended grace period killing other blacks. Describing three dudes on a stoop as, "Moe, Larry, …
Dance instructor from India (a specialist in the macarena) chases the American Dream in New York, where he falls by accident into the role of high-society swami, under the philosophical tutelage of an unsullied porn actress. A roundabout path to a trite and tacky romantic comedy, completely indifferent to the …
Fey relationship comedy revolving around an unlucky-in-love New Yorker (Marisa Tomei) whose new suitor (Vincent D'Onofrio) claims to be a "back traveller" from the year 2470, where, it develops, he had fallen in love with a photograph of her (how romantic!) and whence he has come to rescue her from …
Facile but enjoyable. George Clooney directed and stars as a presidential candidate, a glib liberal dream — apart from his Clintonian attraction to a naïve intern (Evan Rachel Wood), who seems to be running on the Live Bait ticket. As a silky machine of ambition, he excites other tough guys: …
A dealing-with-tragedy movie (a summer romantic idyll turned violent) with dangerous tendencies toward a Lifetime Channel original. But first-time director Todd Field proves himself to be a true director, cunning in his omissions, his obliqueness, his attention to off moments, his focus on marginal details: the family photos in the …
A change-partners sexual square dance in a ghastly pallid digital-video image. The image, or part of the image, is scribbled on, now and again, with crude animation; the time sequence is scrambled; and an alternative destiny is thrown in at the end. Affectation is everywhere. With Patrick Breen (who also …
As a smart, dressy, but not upscale lawyer whose main office seems to be his Lincoln (a very L.A. touch), Matthew McConaughey has a career high. He defends a pretty-boy heir (Ryan Phillippe, having his own peak) who is into sordid kinks with prostitutes. That torques into an old murder …