Redemption for Steven Soderbergh, after the crass commercialism of Ocean's Eleven (and, in lesser degrees of crassness, Traffic and Erin Brockovich), to say nothing of the self-indulgence of Full Frontal. Not that this one is without self-indulgence: a fifty-million-dollar science-fiction film devoid of action and sparse in special effects. Yet …
It may be possible — perhaps by squinting and turning your head just so and maybe crossing your eyes a touch — to see why director George Clooney juxtaposes, at a climactic moment, the sick comedic violence of a man finding himself unable to extract his golf club from the …
Serioso. Molto serioso. Not so much a drama as a diagram, didactic in purpose, of the chain-link interconnections, the slow-burn chain reactions, in the Middle Eastern oil trade. What screenwriter Stephen Gaghan did for the illicit drug business in Traffic, he attempts to do again, as both screenwriter and first-time …
Director George Clooney hit a grand slam his first time at bat (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), then set the blandness bar high with Good Night, and Good Luck, and has gone down swinging ever since (The Monuments Men, The Ides of March). This steeped-in-sentimentality adaptation of newspaperman, novelist J.R. …
A kind of update of Kelly's Heroes, in deportment as well as in period: an insanity-of-war movie, set impudently at the end of Desert Storm, centered around four American soldiers (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and, immediately recognizable as expendable, Spike Jonze) who have extracted from a captive Iraqi's …
George Clooney and Julia Roberts reunite as exes who find themselves united on a shared mission to stop their lovestruck daughter from making the same mistake they once made. Filmed on location in Queensland, Australia, and directed by Ol Parker.
Hey kids! The world is in trouble! You know what it needs? Optimists! Hopers! Dreamers! Fixers! And most of all, Specials! You know, the genius inventors (identifiable by their DNA and can-do spirit) who could solve everything if the rest of us would just get out of the way and …
A comedown from Jason Reitman’s auspicious first two features, Thank You for Smoking and Juno, narrowly centered as it is on a narrowly self-centered hero, a travelling corporate downsizer, a hired hatchet man, now a potential dinosaur whose way of life is threatened — by long-distance terminations via the innovation …
Co-written and -directed by the brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, this counts as the second American remake, after Louis Malle's crummy Crackers in 1984, of Mario Monicelli's prototypical caper comedy, Big Deal on Madonna Street. The freshness and flavor, naturally, are long gone. But considered as a repertory piece, like …
Roman centurion Sean Bean goes looking for the boy Jesus, long before Roman Centurion Joseph Fiennes went looking for the risen Jesus, and almost as long before Roman centurion George Clooney stumbled upon the crucified Jesus. Cyrus Nowrasteh directs.