The scuzzy but lovable owner of a ramshackle amusement park (Johnny Knoxville), hoping to compete with a newly built corporate theme park, decides to make the threat of physical danger his venue’s biggest attraction. The verdict is in: Knoxville’s first attempt at folding Jackass-style tomfoolery into a narrative structure finds …
The Navy granted “filmmakers” Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh permission to play with their toys, and the result is a gung-ho recruitment film that’s as incompetently acted and slapped together as it is propaganda. If the two former stuntmen could direct as well as they fight, the film would kill. …
Maudlin, minibudgeted tale of drug addiction. (The tone is set with the opening slide-show of childhood photos, to the tune of "Paper Doll.") The autobiographical nature of the work makes it more personal for the filmmaker, Rosemary Rodriguez, though not necessarily more interesting for the outsider. With Ana Reeder and …
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 — …
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 …
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 snooty admissions officer puts her career on the line when trying to get the son she secretly gave up for adoption accepted into Princeton. This is 117 minutes of prefabricated shit for people who are constipated. The performances are uniformly lazy; not for one second do Tina Fey and …
A bottomed-out narcissist (Nick Kroll) is forced to temporarily move in with his semi-estranged sister (Rose Byrne) and brother-in-law (Bobby Canavale) and play nanny to his infant nephew. With a director at the starting gate (Ross Katz), flanked by a pair of rudimentary screenwriters (Jeff “Blades of Glory” Cox and …
Jean Reno, Shu Qi, and Andy Lau star in this Hong Kong action film from Stephen Fung.
A terrible embarrassment for anyone old enough not to be babysat. The terriblest moment: four suburban white kids improvising a blues version of the plot-so-far in front of a nightclub audience of glowering blacks. The peaks of excitement: the Crystals singing "Then He Kissed Me" at the very beginning and …
You know where it'd be cool to live? California! They do fun stuff there!
The reputation of the Mark Twain novel is not so unimpugnable that it can afford an ally such as the Disney studio: stress on the affected folksiness and sentimentality (underscored by the Aaron Coplandisms of composer Bill Conti). With Elijah Wood, Courtney B. Vance, and Jason Robards; written and directed …
Among them, a battle with river rapids, a pinch from a crab, the defense of a chicken egg against an inquisitive hedgehog, and a ride on the back of a turtle. Milo, you understand, is a cat, Otis a dog. The biggest hardship either of them faces is a superslick …
Normal teen confusion, compounded by a mop-haired stepdad who's undergoing a sex change ("He still wants to be with my mom, so I guess that makes him a dyke"). A coming-of-age tale, circa 1983, with that special American-independent spin -- or wobble. Unreal, unfunny, uninvolving. With Adrian Grenier, Clark Gregg, …