A mainstreamy, sitcommy version of Happiness, awash in splashy, trashy plot turns. Any movie whose opening line features a sulky teenage girl (in a grainy video image, but never mind that) saying directly into a camcorder, "I need a father who's a role model, not some horny geek-boy who's gonna …
Director Sam Mendes travels the sunnier side of Revolutionary Road, travels it, together with a playful, lovey-dovey, loosey-goosey couple expecting their first child and looking for a spot to put down roots, to Phoenix, to Tucson, to Madison, to Montreal, to Miami, evoking little sense of place anywhere outside of …
Watching writer-director Sam Mendes’ latest, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that he fell in love with the setting — an achingly beautiful old movie house/general nightspot in an English seaside town — and set out to make a movie around it. Because while the place looks fantastic — Roger …
Director Sam Mendes returns to the suburban stamping ground of his filmmaking debut, American Beauty, but at the very opening of that territory in the 1950s, at the inception, that is to say, of all the clichés of cookie-cutter conformity, Little Boxes, the Lonely Crowd, lives of quiet desperation, and …
Inflated, arty, but satisfactory reworking of an old gangster-film formula. The sense of raising the bar (in the fashionable phrase) seems quite ostentatious at the outset, with its unmistakable evocation of The Godfather. These are Irish gangsters instead of Italian, and they are gathered for a wake instead of a …
In his fourth outing, Daniel Craig's iteration of superspy James Bond takes his undersized suits, hangdog expression, and psychological damage on an epic, eye-popping, worldwide hunt for...closure? (The personal and political are pretty much identical here, and a spectre is, of course, a ghost — the sort of things that …