Maestro of movie mayhem Michael Bay (Transformers) turns his camera on the real-life violence of Benghazi 2012 and despairs, giving us the story of a badass American (John Krasinski, sad-eyed and bushy-bearded) who nevertheless finds himself worried, in between firefights and rightly so, that his kids will remember him as …
The latest overinflated stretch of chase scenes stitched together to fabricate a feature from Michael Bay runs almost an hour longer than the 80 minute Danish thriller of the same name upon which it was based. Unable to get satisfaction from the VA, war hero Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) …
Just two months after Earth was threatened by giant comet in Deep Impact, it gets threatened again by giant meteoroid. Too near in time; too distant in tone. The total focus of our attention here, to say nothing of our hopes and our prayers and our desire to identify with …
Another big idea -- or "high concept," as it's known in the trade -- from the producers, most pertinently, of Beverly Hills Cop (Simpson and Bruckheimer). In fact, an even bigger idea. Exactly twice the size. Two black comedians (Will Smith, Martin Lawrence), not just one, in the roles of …
Bad movie too. Two and a half hours of bang-screech-crunch-boom. With Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Gabrielle Union, Jordi Mollà, and Peter Stormare; directed by Michael Bay.
Not Michael Bay’s latest Transformers installment, but Swedish documentarian Fredrik Gertten’s heartfelt plea for drivers to share the road with cyclists — or, better yet, do away with oil-burning autos altogether. From São Paulo and Toronto to Los Angeles and the ultimate bicycle-friendly city, Copenhagen, Gertten takes us to the …
Other than a prologue flashback to a Transformerzilla-ish creature attacking South Korea, there’s nothing irregular about the setup for this story of an irresponsible drunk (Anne Hathaway) who gets kicked to the curb by her boyfriend and moves back into her parents’ abandoned home. Whether she wants it or not, …
Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg rejoin forces, nineteen years later, for a fourth archaeological adventure. Ford, with his big-cat purr of a voice, remains an amiable fellow; and if he’s a bit jowlier beneath that crumpled face (like a wadded-up piece of paper retrieved from the wastebasket and mostly smoothed …
The beginning takes place in the vicinity of an Orwellian dystopia, where a closely monitored populace ("Sodium Excess Detected," reads out a urinal at a morning pee) must live in regimented drudgery and sterile isolation, under stricter rules against intergender "proximity" than at a Catholic-school dance, and with the desperate …
Oy, Bay! Michael Bay, the Butcher of Burbank, returns, this time with one pound of script in a 20 lb. casing and a refrigerated display case fit to bust with shoulder cut of Mark Wahlberg, prime rib of Anthony Mackie, and filet of Rock. In order to help underwrite their …
WWII history according to Michael Bay (Armageddon, The Rock), a three-hour lesson. To some extent the seriousness of the subject -- as contrasted to the director's previous subjects of the end of the world and the mere annihilation of San Francisco -- seems to have inspired Bay to sit up …
The first voice you hear is that of Werner Herzog. The pre-credit dismembering of March of the Penguins is enough to make one believe that Dreamworks may have finally produced a product to rival Pixar. (Either that, or Herzog wrote his own dialogue.) But it’s all downhill once the credits …
This film is dedicated in loving memory to Don Simpson -- the last in his line of collaborations with co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide, Bad Boys, et al.) before his drug-related demise. A fitting monument, it goes about as far as a narrative film can …
No extraneous pan down to an establishing exterior shot; we begin simply on action. After evicting an avaricious lawyer from his taxi, a near-mute cabbie (Parviz Parastui, Iran’s answer to Ben Gazzara) picks up a pregnant and battered fare (Soheila Golestani) en route to the hospital and once there convinces …