Color Dr. Seuss’s “earth-friendly” children’s book gloomy green and Illumination Entertainment’s animated counterpart a blinding shade of pestled pastel. (Consider sporting two pair of 3-D specs.) The ecological message holds firm, only this time our young hero does it all to impress a chick. Throwaway gags (Nemo can be found …
Here’s one war that I loved being dragged through. Johnnie To’s latest logical progression of action scenes (and his first mainland production) is this nifty thriller concerning a high profile Chinese meth dealer (Louis Koo) forced to go undercover to avoid facing the firing squad. Captain Zhang (Sun Honglei) is …
It’s been decades since a film with “National Lampoon” in its title has been worth watching, let alone applauding. For the first 10 years of its existence, the humor magazine was my comedy Qur’an, a monthly dose of unrepentant shock and bad taste that merrily went out of its way …
DTF: Down to Fornicate. It’s impossible to imagine the eponymous initialism was there from the outset. Doting filmmaker Al Bailey (he played matchmaker for the film’s subject “Christian” and his late wife Charlotte) initially intended a documentary feature on how airplane pilots use dating apps to find true love. From …
In my youth, a film such as this was vanquished to the “old people’s movie” bin. Now that I snugly fit the demographic, I take even greater offense to such simple-minded geezer-porn. Jim Broadbent stars as Kempton Bunton, a real life taxi driver/frustrated playwright outraged over a television tax imposed …
The artistry and emotion inherent in Walt Disney’s original is lost on goth babysitter Tim Burton’s pixelated pachyderm. Half the time, Dumbo stands around looking like a pair of soaked fireplace hand-bellows parked in a corner and left to dry. Burton’s decision to mute the animals and instead focus on …
If David Lynch couldn’t make heads or tails of Frank Herbert’s famously unfilmable novel, what was it about Denis Villeneuve that pegged him as the visionary needed to tame the 412-page beast? Sure, he did a splendid job of piloting the equally indomitable sequel to Blade Runner, but this time …
Clearly and weirdly blind to the limitless potential afforded by an animated feature set during the dawn of man, the usually imaginative Nick Park (Chicken Run, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) squanders 90 minutes sketching a wearisome soccer match between the Stone Age and the Bronze World. Add to this …
Standup comic Jo Koy wanted so much to have a sitcom of his own that he pitched what is essentially an audition reel for a theatrical pilot — a bald-faced ripoff of an even more contemptible series of Greek nuptials — that was eventually produced on Spielberg’s dime. It’s My …
Not a Jet in sight, nor shark on the menu. Juana, a single Hispanic mother (Diana Elizabeth Torres), laughs in the face of ethnic and cultural bigotry to make it as a sushi chef in this video dropcloth stained with good intentions. Torres does her own impressive cutting board stunt …
Not a remake of the Rodney Dangerfield rollick, but a Swedish crime thriller brought to American shores under the aegis “Martin Scorsese Presents.” A coke dealer who looks more like a tennis coach (Joel Kinnaman) is forced to draw allegiance with an ex-con (Matias Varela), hunted by criminal and lawman …
Newcomer Andrew Slater is credited with directing and co-writing what is ostensibly a documentary tribute to the influential Laurel Canyon music scene of the ‘60s. Alas, this is as much a Jakob Dylan vanity project as it is a documentary. Jakob hosts! Jakob sings! Jakob produces! Be it a soft …
What a joy! We open in Eddy Goldfarb’s kitchen, the 98 year old toy inventor at play with one of his 800 creations, that childhood perennial: the bubble gun. The frenetic energy that triggers the solar powered toys that line the window could use a good winding when compared to …