A cup of weak tea indeed from director Joe Wright, one that sorely needs a shot of something stronger to brace it for the unenviable task of manufacturing drama out of the question of whether Prime Minister Winston Churchill will take Britain into war with Germany or sit down for …
Two American businessmen (Emile Hirsch, Max Minghella) meet two nifty girls (Olivia Thirlby, Rachael Taylor) in a Moscow dance bar. Then the aliens arrive, looking like falling Christmas décor as they land but invisible as they track and kill. Chris Gorak’s generic film falls into clichés and isn’t very scary, …
Another teen dystopia franchise first chapter, notable chiefly for its willingness to be honest — even “good” teens can and will do very bad things when scared or upset or just full of adolescent emotion. No, dude, it’s not romantic when you use your telekinetic powers to drag a girl …
Several Chekhov stories blended together, with most of the delicacy that that name stands for ruthlessly expunged: aristocrats and bureaucrats of Eisensteinian exaggeration, musical peasants, a lovers' embrace in a blizzard of chicken feathers. Marcello Mastroianni, as a skirt-chaser in genuine love, behaves in that unbuttoned manner he tends to …
Stephen King's Jekyll-and-Hyde variation is as convoluted and garbled as we have come to expect. A college Lit. professor and writer of "serious fiction" is threatened with the exposure of his pulp-novelist pseudonym. Why on earth — given the heritage of Kenneth Fearing, Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, et al. — …
Fantasy fulfillment for those wondering what would happen if Ma & Pa Kettle hauled Mr. Ed to Del Mar and pulled up a stall adjacent to the high-hatted muckety mucks. This effortlessly charming documentary focuses on a group of 23 pub patrons who invest in a Welsh cocktail waitress’ dream …
Dark Horse is Todd Solondz’s most watchable film since Welcome to the Dollhouse. Come to think of it, it’s his only watchable film since Welcome to the Dollhouse. Solondz has long positioned himself as the heir to the Woody Allen throne. One look at his first feature, Fear, Anxiety, and …
Fashionably “dark” comic-book movie, the first one to think of putting the darkness right up in the title — a synonym, that, for “the bat man,” as he is frequently and unfamiliarly referred to, or simply Batman to you and me. Aside from the title, the second installment in Christopher …
The final installment of director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is long and loud and chock-full of his great love for plotting and abstraction. Sometimes, it works, but often, it doesn't, and the honest interaction of characters is ground under the wheels of storytelling necessity. The film might feel like an …
Just another Batman, but with all due modesty. And beyond modesty, all due shame. (Modesty on the production level; shame on the level of the plot.) The demands of bloody revenge, it develops, have taken their toll on his inner self; and the Phantom-of-the-Opera scar tissue over three-quarters of his …
Nameless, malevolent forces dim the lights in an isolated country house, pilfer the colored pencils of the current residents' youngest child, and inflame the nervous condition of the man of the family. Prosaically scripted, pallidly photographed, frenetically edited thriller from Spanish filmmaker Jaume Balagueró, but spoken in English in a …
Greg McLean directs Kevin Bacon in the story of the dangers of visiting the Grand Canyon.
Not just the name of a movie, but the name of a New England town where Matilda the Tooth Fairy, hanged as a child-killer in the deep dark past, and now a fluttering flapping thing in a porcelain mask, still makes vengeful visits on the occasion of a resident's last, …
Ten years separate The Priests and The Priests 2: Dark Nuns, an in-name-only successor that, apart from the satanic heave-ho, a pair of holy-rolling role reversals, and an eleventh hour cameo by Gang Dong-won, barely qualifies as a sequel. Director Hyeok-jae Kwon’s idea of establishing a character’s insubordinate streak involves …
It didn’t have to end this way — in such thoroughly standard smash ‘em up fashion, with minor heroes dutifully duking it out with faceless hordes for punchy-power bolt minute after punchy-power-bolt minute until the mayhem quotient has been met and the principals can finally square off for their climactic …