A comedy of male menopause. The hero, a Hollywood songwriter with personalized license plates that read "ASCAP," is explicitly a product of an earlier, more romantic era, and is quite nakedly a stand-in for writer-director Blake Edwards. Edwards's conscientious efforts to adopt liberal, open-minded, up-to-date attitudes lead him onto some …
Proof that the intellectually challenged are fun to watch even with subtitles. Commence with a dead cat, an overly-latexed actor buried beneath more wrinkles than a kennel filled with shar-peis, and a neck-breaking 20x1 zoom. It only gets clumsier. At his current age, our titular centenarian (Robert Gustafsson) flees a …
A lot of time is spent, and a lot of blood spilt, to set up a situation so simple-minded that we will approve of Charles Bronson throwing out the legal code: "I remember when legal meant lawful," he philosophizes. "Now it means some kind of loophole." Unlike the high-strung sex …
James Franco’s impish appeal as outdoorsman Aron Ralston is caught between a hard place and two rocks: the stone that pins down his right arm in a Utah canyon and the clobbering boulder of director Danny Boyle’s “art.” Complicating the simple story are flashbacks, visions, jokes, music, and the hero’s …
Time-travel brain-twister credited as "inspired [but not very] by the film La Jetée -- the 1962 experimental short composed exclusively of still shots, save one. There are some provocative or at least irksome notions in the script by David and Janet Peoples (Mr. and Mrs.), chief among them the implicit …
Hollywood continues to pay reparations for Gone With the Wind with this elegiac adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s autobiographical saga of a free black man forced into bondage for a dozen years. They might just as well have named it The Passion of the Slave. Chiwetel Ejiofor suffers well under the …
Think The Seven Samurai with a revisionist twist. Yes, there’s a villain with murderous henchmen terrorizing the countryside. Yes, a master samurai must gather a team to confront the bad guys. But this time, the villain is royalty, the kind of guy the samurai usually live to serve. And this …
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 …
Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall launched a thousand YouTube Hitler memes. Any number of them are more insightful and engaging than this fact-based saga of a German worker who in November of 1939 miscalculated by that much an otherwise foolproof scheme to blow up the Fuhrer. Johann Georg Elser’s (Christian Friedel) botched …
An Arabian Nights tale detoured into a Norse saga. (A little off the beaten path, too, for the author of the original novel, Michael Crichton.) Lots of gore, but lots more hair. John McTiernan's careening Steadicam slips and slides over every possible point of interest. The release was delayed so …
Socially conscious monstrosity on the stitched-together topics of violence in America, tabloid television, and the cult of celebrity. A couple of new-generation American Dreamers ("You think I came to America to work?"), a Russian and a Czech whose feverish sweat and shifting glances unaccountably fail to set off any alarms …
It’s being touted as his 100th starring role, but Jackie Chan’s heroics take a backseat to Winston Chao’s endless speech-making in this commemorative retelling of the birth of the Republic of China. Unless you have more than a working knowledge of the subject, this could conceivably be the longest two …