Long ago, Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo pitched itself with the tagline, "Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression." Guess again, chump! When he turns 21, Domhnall Gleeson discovers he can time travel. So he sets about shamelessly manipulating Rachel McAdams into falling in love …
How can a story laden with this much betrayal and corruption feel this cheerful? Welcome to Hawaii. Bradley Cooper smiles his way through the shenanigans as the wounded hero (physically, morally, spiritually, professionally) who has to choose which parts are worth healing and which can be cut away. Happily, he …
11-year-old Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) is uprooted from her life in New York City for the suburbs of New Jersey, going through the messy and tumultuous throes of puberty with new friends in a new school. She relies on her mother, Barbara (Rachel McAdams), who is also struggling to adjust …
11-year-old Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) is uprooted from her life in New York City for the suburbs of New Jersey, going through the messy and tumultuous throes of puberty with new friends in a new school. She relies on her mother, Barbara (Rachel McAdams), who is also struggling to adjust …
Director and co-writer Sebastián Leilo’s story of a black sheep’s return to the pen (though not the fold) hits three notes of a religious chord: faith rejected, faith endured, and faith tested. The first sounds clean and clear, embodied with captivating grace and power by Rachel Weisz as a rabbi’s …
Not only does this mark Sam Raimi’s return to the screen since The Great and Powerful Oz failed to live up to its title, it’s his first comic book movie in 15 years. It’s as good a cast as any Marvel’s assembled (Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Elizabeth Olsen, Rachel McAdams, …
Or: Lars (Will Ferrell) and the real actress (Rachel McAdams). We open in 1974 with an Icelandic nod to The Jazz Singer: only over Erick Erickssong’s (Pierce Brosnan) dead body will his son Lars be allowed to appear on the world’s largest televised singing competition. From that seed grows a …
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 …
Christmas comedy about the gathering of a clan, and allies, in snowy New England at the holiday. The core family, name of Stone, numbers seven, so a lot is afoot: terminal cancer, a pregnancy, a gay-couple adoption (minorities within the minority: the couple is interracial and one-half hearing impaired), an …
From John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the team that crapped out the saddening remake of Vacation, comes something a bit more tolerable. As the competitive couple whose weekly game-playing ritual turns deadly after an even more cutthroat participant brings a corpse to the party, Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman …
Contrived road movie wherein three wounded vets from the Iraq War, strangers to one another stranded at a shut-down airport, drive westbound in a rental car: a latter-generation The Best Years of Our Lives, better thought of as The Forgettable Year of Our Lives. (Sample contrivance: the soldier wounded in …
Tepid adaptation of a classic John Bingham thriller, Five Roundabouts to Heaven, moved to America, but kept in the post-WWII period, and instilled with a modern condescension to the past, along with a modern irony, drollery, jadedness. The casting and playing of Pierce Brosnan and Chris Cooper tip off the …
A home-schooled teenager, raised in the wilds of Africa, is let loose as an innocent in the American public school system, and the worn-out subject of adolescent cattiness and bitchery receives an infusion of fresh blood, or at any rate a megadose of caffeine. The snap-crackle-pop script (from a book …
One of Woody Allen’s mostly smoothly enjoyable entertainments. Like Stanley Donen’s Funny Face and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, it is a devotional candle of the American love of La Belle Paris. The blond wick who lights up for joy is Owen Wilson as Gil, a “Hollywood hack,” aspiring novelist, and …
A Chechen Muslim enters Hamburg in the guise of a homeless man seeking asylum and captures the attention of intelligence operative Philip Seymour Hoffman’s antiterror unit. Based on a John le Carré novel, this is the sharpest, most reasonable tale of espionage and intrigue since John Boorman’s Tailor of Panama. …