Disenfranchised earthlings invade a distant planet in clayey 3-D animation. Stirring music and excellent space-travel effects at the start, and a well-imagined other world, and an anti-war, anti-imperialist (i.e., anti-Earth) campaign that offers no easy solution, only a naive one. With the voices of Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson, Justin …
Stephen Auerbach's documentary chronicles the 2005 edition of the Race Across America, a 3000-mile cross-country bicycle race.
Soft warm cozy sports story from the maker of The Rookie, John Lee Hancock, about a headstrong well-to-do white Memphis housewife who takes under her wing and under her roof a homeless black gentle giant, an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Sandra Bullock stays obstinately on the surface of …
Live-action replay of a Japanese anime dated 2000, a license for a swordswoman in a sailor dress, or swordsgirl more accurately, to slice-and-dice a legion of humanoid demons en route to “the oldest, vilest demon of them all,” who killed the heroine’s father. Moderately stylish and extravagantly mindless, the movie …
Catherine Breillat, director of the assorted sexual provocations of Fat Girl, Romance, and Anatomy of Hell, is a name likely to strike terror in the hearts of filmgoers far more than that of George Romero, say, or Dario Argento. But where the 19th-century setting and idiomatic Romanticism of her previous …
Richard Kelly's blow-up of a Richard Matheson short story titled "Button, Button" is a would-be cult film from the writer and director of the already-been cult film Donnie Darko. Commingling space exploration, Arthur C. Clarke, Jean-Paul Sartre, body-snatched zombies prone to nosebleeds, and mid-Seventies period trappings, it's an overelaborate and …
Through a booking mix-up, two “inseparable” girlfriends are locked into simultaneous June weddings at the Plaza Hotel, whereupon they take leave of their senses in their efforts to sabotage one another. A deviously insulting chick flick. Anne Hathaway, although she looks like she’s in training for a concentration-camp film, doesn’t …
As recounted by Jane Campion, unusually taking sole screenwriting credit in addition to directing, the ill-starred love story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne is such as to make us ask ourselves when we last had on screen a love story we could believe in. (In the Mood for Love, …
Almodóvar, as is his wont, gives you splatters and splashes, swatches and swaths, of vibrant color, and he gives you the occasional rock-you-on-your-heels image (a teardrop on a ripe tomato, lovers writhing within a white-sheet cocoon), and he gives you deliberately over-the-top domestic melodrama played steadfastly straight: a blind filmmaker …
Jim Sheridan’s Hollywood do-over of Susanne Bier’s Danish original is a wartime soap opera served up as kitchen-sink realism, photographed by Frederick Elmes with a clear and cold albeit clichéd eye for Middle American mundanity. The Good Brother (Tobey Maguire) is off to war in Afghanistan, currently the Good War, …
Self-admiring con artistry that sets the ideal of the “perfect con” as one where everyone involved gets what he wants. If that includes the wary viewer, the ideal is missed by miles. With Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi, Robbie Coltrane, and Maximilian Schell; written and directed by …
A reteaming of the star and director of Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles respectively, to peddle the same or a similar shtick in a different persona: a different funny accent, different funny wardrobe, different funny hairdo. The shtick, should you need to be reminded, is to inflict the …
Michael Moore's overview of the American economy is, needless to say, not a love story. "Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil." In other words, Capitalism: A Horror Story, the moral of which might best be summed up as capitalism, no; democracy, yes — a tricky distinction for …
A compaction of two Colette novels, written by Christopher Hampton and directed by Stephen Frears, about the grand amour between a brink-of-retirement Parisian courtesan and the androgynous bastard son of an already retired courtesan, the older woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) hitching her wagon to the younger man (Rupert Friend), who after …