Heartfelt and personal but maudlin and awkward account of the maladjustment of a six-year-old Hungarian émigré in Eisenhower-era America. It gets off on a bad foot with some remedial first-person narration, corroborative newsreel footage, and a black-and-white flashback that arbitrarily turns to color after a quarter of an hour. It …
A labor of love on the part of über-geek director Joss Whedon, if not necessarily a labor of art. The genius here shows not in the story (magic geegaw!), nor in the performances (Mark Ruffalo’s embittered Bruce Banner/Hulk excepted), but in Whedon’s ability to juggle six disparate comic-book heroes while …
A hot mess of a philosophical cyber-thriller. The hot is provided by Scarlett Johansson as a government agent (but corporate creation) built from a human brain and a synthetic body, the latter often on quasi-display in a shimmering sort of shell casing that she only occasionally uses as digital camouflage. …
James Ellroy's theory of the case -- the unsolved murder, disembowelment, and bisection of Hollywood wannabe Elizabeth Short in 1947 -- as expounded in 325 dense pages of fiction, fitted on screen into the film noir boilerplate: the laconic first-person narration of a two-fisted cop (Josh Hartnett), the moody solo …
In many ways, this is the best James Bond picture since Daniel Craig assumed the role. Imagine two sibling 007s for the price of one: Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and her little sister (a feisty, pug-nosed Florence Pugh). The act of leaving home to find a home among superhero freaks …
Most guys pass out after a spirited round of lovemaking. Not this guy. Incapable of replacing fantasy with reality, porn addict Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) can’t wait to knock off a one-night stand and scurry to his computer for some quality alone time. It’s very hard to make a smart …
Wised-up, camped-up creature feature about overgrown arachnids overrunning Prosperity, Arizona. Incestuous horror-film allusions abound: a parrot who squawks, "I see dead people!"; a clip from Them! in a TV Monster Movie Marathon; a shopping-mall fortress similar to the one in Dawn of the Dead; and on and on. Although it …
A hot mess of a philosophical cyber-thriller. The hot is provided by Scarlett Johansson as a government agent (but corporate creation) built from a human brain and a synthetic body, the latter often on quasi-display in a shimmering sort of shell casing that she only occasionally uses as digital camouflage. …
The heroine, out of a comic book by Daniel Clowes, is someone a critic could love. Not only a critic, rest assured. Fresh out of high school — or rather, jaded out of high school — she can produce an equal sneer for the wheelchair-bound valedictorian ("High school is like …
Envisioning a chain of events that might have led to the Vermeer painting of the same name: the coming to the Master's household of a chaste young maid, daughter of a blinded Delft tile painter, and her inch-by-inch entrée to the artist's atelier by virtue of her demonstrated interest in …
Remember movies? The Coen brothers do. Westerns, romances, musicals, dance extravaganzas — the works. (All of which are on gorgeous, indulgent display here.) Millions of people used to look to them for — in the words of Capitol Pictures’ Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) — “information, uplift, and yes, entertainment.” Kind …
Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are) continues his intrepid exploration of your inner man-child, this time with a barely futuristic story about Theodore, a lonely guy (played by an opaque but vulnerable Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his smart new operating system. "If you love your tech …
As an explanation of romantic incompatibility, the catchphrase title is stunningly unilluminating, no matter which of its six words is stressed. (On screen, the third one stands out in green from the white of the rest, but that seems an arbitrary reading.) Satisfied with the what and incurious about the …
Instead of following author Stephen Rebello’s fine Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by turning out a procedural on the art of making a masterpiece, Sacha Gervasi (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) gives us a watered-down romcom directed in the style of an episode of Hitchcock Presents. (It’s ostensibly …