Vera Farmiga is not a name readily associated with drollery — her bounded approach to comedic delivery generally results in talking faster — and her performance here is not about to change any minds. Writer/director Shana Feste’s (Country Strong, Endless Love) feel-good, “love-me-daddy” road picture proffers a pair of males …
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! For the price of one thin ticket, witness an intimate documentary account of the tragic rise and fall of Violet and Daisy Hilton, the world’s most celebrated conjoined twins. Long before reality television beamed anomalies and curiosities of medicine into living rooms on a …
Ethnic epic covering much the same ground, a year later, covered by American Me, only less of it and at greater length: three hours of heavily accented and sometimes English-subtitled snarls and sneers, directed by Taylor Hackford with his customary disdain for subtlety. (Floyd Mutrux receives a screenwriting credit on …
David Carradine works small miracles with his loose-jointed, shuffle-footed, hands-in-pockets postures; and his Woody Guthrie impression becomes, at the same time, a generalized Depression impression, nicely self-contained. The higher-up creative people are more overbearing in their similar efforts to hit and hold a one-note Depression mood. Hal Ashby's direction keeps …
Mutiny thereon. You might presume that if someone were going to bother to make a third version of the famous and infamous events aboard H.M.S. Bounty, they must have thought of something to do with it that their predecessors hadn't thought of something akin to Brando's dandified interpretation of Fletcher …
Laboriously contrived rom-com action thriller, laboriously directed by Andy Tennant, wherein a pair of hostile exes, he a skip-tracer and she a bail-jumper, re-bond while solving a murder and dodging a hit man en route to the hoosegow. Not a good showcase for the assets of Jennifer Aniston, apart from …
Tae-ra Shin directs this story of five bounty hunters who traverse Asia hunting people and making money. In Chinese and Korean.
A spiritless, secondhand ripoff of first rate social satire. It’s Mad Max meets Death Proof to form the basis of another bloody dumb apocalypse comedy. With Corporate Wars having reduced the planet to near-unlivable conditions, a band of grubby futuristic human hunters are hired to beat the bushes and anything …
Those who had been backing Doug Liman as a vital new maverick director (Swingers, Go) will have their work cut out for them on this one, a middle-of-the-road adaptation of the Robert Ludlum best-seller about an amnesiac spy, previously made as a two-part TV miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn …
Jeremy Renner, apparently tiring of his second-tier superhero status as Hawkeye in The Avengers, takes a page from the more glamorous Captain America (better living through chemistry). Also a page from his franchise predecessor (ruggedly handsome sandy-haired super-agent seeks refuge from government baddies with a fetching female). But this time, …
The Bourne sequel. Admittedly, the basic premise of an amnesiac spy who remembers none of his assignments but all of his training is intrinsically ridiculous, internally illogical. (His unusual handicap -- groping along a fogbound Memory Lane -- never seems to slow him down, never lets his scheming adversaries get …
The Bourne absurdum. It isn't just that Part III in the adventures of the amnesiac superspy adds more ridiculousness. It's that, at these lengths, the ridiculousness multiplies exponentially. More ridiculousness, that is, and more and more ridiculous. (The sentimental soft spots found in Parts I and II are here concentrated …
The life of Bobby Bowden, patriarch of college football's most winning coaching family.
Hollywood satire so out of touch with reality, so willfully ignorant of actual practice, that it nullifies itself as satire. The idea is that an Ed Wood-caliber producer could shoot a superstar blockbuster, Candid Camera-style, without the superstar's co-operation. (He calls it cinéma nouveau. The film itself is called Chubby …
Michael Moore's engaging and enraging documentary on gun culture in America, and by extension violence, homicide, and the climate of fear in America. Dishevelled as ever in his baggy clothes and collection of ballcaps (one of them emblazoned with "Writer"), usually unshaven, a definitive schlump, he is still his own …