Asperger’s romance (and high time, too, after Tourette’s, Alzheimer’s, etc., have had a whirl at romance) about a socially handicapped astronomy buff and his pretty upstairs new neighbor, an aspiring children’s writer, in a New York apartment house. Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne, the afflicted and the normal respectively, play …
Forced gay-ety around two men -- a Central Park nature guide and a germophobic psychologist -- who meet up again, without recognizing one another, seventeen years after their disastrous first date. The disaster is of gross-out proportions, a prologue that sets the sustained tone of trying too hard. With Craig …
Animated holiday greeting card — Christmas and Hanukah both — addressed to Adam Sandler's flock: juvenile tastelessness sprinkled with sugar. Besides being the model for the bah-humbug protagonist, Sandler supplies four different voices, all of them irritating in different ways. And the brand names and corporate logos on parade — …
Stagy, kitchen-sinky drama about three generations of women in one Soviet apartment: Grandma is paralyzed; the elder daughter can't get her boyfriend to commit; the younger has gotten herself pregnant; Mom is looking for a life of her own. Another of those heralded "advances" in the Russian cinema which nevertheless …
Husband and wife square off in the courtroom as District Attorney and defense advocate. The emphasis in this juridical battle of the sexes is on "cute" comedy (he summons a tear to his eye at will, he paddles her derriere, etc.). With Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Holliday; directed …
The reteaming of the writer and the director of Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, has produced no less madness but much more method. Or anyhow more meaning. Kaufman, playing fast and loose with the truth, evidently set out in reality (though it doesn't seem his sort of …
A power surge on an International Space Antenna nearly knocks career astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt, in his earnest, Robert Redford mode) out of commission. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that Ad Astra, Latin for “to the stars,” is Apocalypse Now in space — there’s a lot of Capt. Willard …
Black comedy for kids, specifically those too young to remember the mid-Sixties television sitcom of the same name. The pattern of inversions is simple to grasp -- the bouquet of rose stems with the blossoms snipped off, the children holding a TV antenna outdoors in a lightning storm -- and …
They had me at Uncle Fester’s nipples. And kudos to Nick Kroll for restoring Jackie Coogan’s insensitive lisp to the character! Much closer in spirit to Charles Addams’ ghoulishly byzantine etchings (Lurch was indeed an escapee from a home for the criminally insane) and the '60s sitcom it spawned than …
America fell in love with Uncle Fester’s nipples. Why else would a topless Fester be there to greet audiences at the outset, the first big guffaw in a rapidly narrowing field of laughs? The press release promised “many new kooky characters” before asking “What could possibly go wrong?” New kooky …
Monotony in nothing flat. The Addamses have a new addition (a mustachioed bundle of gloom named Pubert), and the two jealous older kids are packed off to summer camp, and the hired nanny is actually a black-widow serial killer who has set her cap for Uncle Fester. In the nanny …
James Franco plays a writer who needs a chemical bump to help him focus and produce. Pamela Romanowsky directs.
Conscienceless romantic revenge comedy about a couple of rejected lovers who team up to spy on and sabotage the love nest of their respective exes. (The setting-up of a camera obscura as a surveillance device is a nice scene on purely technical grounds.) Meg Ryan, with punkish dark roots and …
A modern-day vampire tale with a rock-song soundtrack ("You're my sanctuary./ Baby, let me in./ You're my addiction"). Always a flexible metaphor, the blood-thirst in this instance is not just a synonym for drugs, as the title might imply, and as the hypodermic syringe bears out, but an all-purpose synonym …