The sixth installment in the Rocky series (despite the absence of a Roman numeral to remind us) comes thirty years after the first one and sixteen after the fifth. It will stand as a serviceable definition of "retarded." Written and directed by its sixty-year-old star, Sylvester Stallone, it wants nothing …
Splashy feature debut for the man behind the cable-television series Nip/Tuck, writer-director Ryan Murphy, a hey-look-at-me cannonball, adapted from the "memoir" of Augusten Burroughs. Set in the Seventies, it spans his prepubescence ("I guess it doesn't matter where I begin," the narrator comments in voice-over, "because nobody's going to believe …
Hackneyed vacation comedy (it could almost have a National Lampoon's in front of its title) about a horse's-ass dad who rents an eyesore motor home, christened by his children the Rolling Turd, in an effort to fulfill family obligations and keep an important business engagement at the same time. Well …
Druggie paranoia in the near future, when the drug du jour is Substance D (for Death) and the only cure is the torturous New-Path rehab center. Richard Linklater's adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel avails itself of the rotoscope animation technique of his Waking Life, live-action photography covered over …
Michel Gondry, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and less memorably Human Nature, sets out to demonstrate he can be just as wacky and braintwisty without Charlie Kaufman as his scriptwriter, with, instead, only himself as scriptwriter. The blur of dream and reality demonstrates that, all right, …
A companion piece to Woody Allen's Match Point only insofar as it prolongs his revitalizing sojourn in England. The half-year interval between their releases is nothing out of the ordinary for the chop-chop Woodman. Nor is the repeat appearance of Scarlett Johansson in the female lead any more remarkable than …
Someone in the Secret Service, so says a scumbag informer, aims to assassinate the President. Framed for it is the very agent who blows the whistle, a wily old veteran (Michael Douglas) who once took a bullet for Reagan and is now assigned to the First Lady and having a …
Tim Allen seems to have his opportunities -- wolfman transformations into an itch-scratching, stick-fetching, cat-chasing canine -- but the circumstances are strained to a point of discomfort: an abducted Tibetan holy dog, animal experimentation, mixed-species mutations. With Kristin Davis, Robert Downey, Jr., and Danny Glover; directed by Brian Robbins.
One-track-minded sex film, with exhibitionistic hardcore action and a no-name cast, a something-for-everyone smorgasbord (more for gays, however) anchored at an underground New York club for libertines. Intrepid but inept. And groundbreaking only if you've been hankering to see a limber young man get into an inverted yoga posture and …
Video-game gamut of ghoulies and ghosties, creepies and crawlies, in an abandoned coal-mining town in West Virginia. Very little development; plenty of the feeling of a bad dream, and plenty, too, of a bad movie, albeit a smoothly tooled one. With Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, …
Archive footage and present-day interviews revive the memory of G.I. protests of the Vietnam War. The physical changes in the protesters, between then and now, add visual interest to an interesting but not very visual subject. The best-known protester to take part is Jane Fonda, who brought the troops an …
Oafish sci-fi comedy scrupulously follows the alien-invasion conventions (grade-Z budget) but smarts off all the while. Elizabeth Banks, as the distressed damsel with a mutating hubby, would clearly have been up to the challenge of playing it straight. With Nathan Fillion and Michael Rooker; written and directed by James Gunn.
All pitch and no movie. The thing would more fully be labelled Computer-Generated Snakes on a Tangible Set of a Plane, such that the snakes seldom look to be actually aboard the plane but rather cut-and-pasted on top of it. In any case there are too many of them (whether …
Cheerily nostalgic college comedy, set in mid-Eighties England, built around an exceptionally endearing hero (James McAvoy), a Bristol University quiz kid thirsty for knowledge, torn in his affections between a Victoria's Secret-pretty blond Drama major and a J. Crew-pretty Jewish political activist. Choices, choices. Alice Eve, Rebecca Hall, Dominic Cooper, …
A former girl gymnast ("one of the greatest natural talents the sport's ever seen"), and a current scofflaw, is given the choice between reform school and the bitch-eat-bitch Vickerman Gymnastics Academy ("It's not called gym-nice-tics"), where she trains and competes to hip-hop thumps and shrieking electric guitars. Jeff Bridges, as …