A couple’s relationship is put to the test when her adorable relatives decide to pay a visit. Never heard that one before, probably because I gave up on network sitcoms decades ago. Julie Delpy’s follow up to 2 Days in Paris is so sickeningly sweet, theater chains will want to …
Fatuous chatter between mid-thirties lovers, two years together, an uptight American designer and a carefree French photographer, visiting her parents in Paris. Julie Delpy, surrounding herself with her actual family, and showing unknown depths of self-indulgence, is the star, director, writer, editor, composer, and vocalist over the closing credits. And …
Is the title a score? -- as in, the Fast and the Furious all knotted up at two. Or is it a head count, a poll? The ex-cop from Los Angeles (Paul Walker, resuming his role from the unquantified The Fast and the Furious of two years earlier) is undeniably …
Long before fake news became the rage, the promises of fake press releases defined Hollywood hype. The deception lives on with the following heartless pledge: “For two couples, the future unfolds in different decades and different places, but a hidden connection will bring them together in a way no one …
Like Sin City, this takes its material from a "graphic novel" by Frank Miller, and in turn it takes from the film treatment of that one — or to be more precise, director Zack Snyder takes from director Robert Rodriguez — the same, or similar, unnatural light, "virtual" backgrounds, coarse-grained …
Casino heisters disguised as Elvis impersonators (including Kurt Russell, who had plenty of practice in John Carpenter's made-for-TV biopic on the King). Not the most logical starting point, this, for the slo-mo bloodbath that soon follows. The tone never does stabilize: coolness, callousness, phony sentiment, ga-ga action scenes, sadism and …
Zack Snyder, who has made a couple of comic-book movies of his own (300, Watchmen), wrote the script for this, perhaps his most comic-book movie to date. Some clarification is of course in order: "comic book" here indicates: a complete detachment from the actual constraints of physical reality (cascading sheets …
A tribe of subtitled vampires strategically targets the northernmost town in the U.S., Barrow, Alaska, hunkered down for a sunless month, free rein for nocturnal bloodsuckers. The majestic clouds and snowscapes on the last day of light ignite hope for a sense of style, but the superhuman strength and speed …
Can a healthy young heterosexual male keep a vow of celibacy for the duration of Lent? Can he get over his old girlfriend and make a true "connection" with a new one in that time? Can we care? Very youthy, very hip, very glib, very one-track-minded, very cocksure. Not very …
The hero is not what he is by reason of any philosophy, religion, or phobia: "It just never happened." But now his colleagues at the Smart Tech electronics store, cottoning on to his condition, are pitching in to cure him of it. Though not unsympathetic in treatment, the character is …
High-concept romantic comedy about a love-'em-and-leave-'em ladykiller, a marine-park veterinarian in Hawaii, who tumbles for a brain-damaged blonde who can retain no short-term memories since her year-ago car accident and who is doomed every day to relive the day of the accident with no knowledge of intervening days: a scoop …
An ill-timed release, mere months after Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco. Written and directed by a starry-eyed Mark Christopher, it purports to grant us entree to the "real" Studio 54, as against Stillman's fictional "composite," and it predictably and conventionally gravitates more toward the "inside" and the "top" …
Say this for Cassie Sullivan (Chloë Grace Moretz): no matter how bad things get during the alien-wrought apocalypse, her hair looks great. And usually, her lipstick as well. Lucky thing, too, since she spends a fair portion of the film in the company of Evan Walker, the world’s prettiest hunk …
A Peter Greenaway erudition display, or in other words a film to bang your head against. Arch, artificial (and harshly recorded) talk of sex, death, money, religion, Fellini (hence the title), Mondrian, Austen, Hardy, etc., in flat, rigid, squared-up compositions, sometimes containing antiseptic nudes. The photography (the venerable Sacha Vierny …