Muscle-bound, knuckleheaded remake of the 1971 British film by Mike Hodges: an old story (mobster in search of answers in the mysterious death of his brother), muddily plotted and modishly styled, with an overdose of semi-hallucinatory visual tricks. Michael Caine, the original Carter, is on hand in a small role …
Muscle-bound, knuckleheaded remake of the 1971 British film by Mike Hodges: an old story (mobster in search of answers in the mysterious death of his brother), muddily plotted and modishly styled, with an overdose of semi-hallucinatory visual tricks. Michael Caine, the original Carter, is on hand in a small role …
The feature debut of director Aaron Schneider starts like a house afire, meaning it starts literally with a house on fire, and proceeds from there to shave off a thin slice of folksy baloney purportedly based on fact, something to do with a misanthropic old Tennessee hermit who throws himself …
Spike Lee's first- anniversary commemoration of the (as it turned out) optimistically labelled Million Man March. It tells of one motley group of fifteen or so who travel together to Washington, D.C., aboard a chartered bus from South Central L.A., and conduct a sort of mobile open forum of views …
File under: bravura openings to set the theme. Director Tate Taylor (The Help) has the intestinal fortitude to start this James Brown biopic with the Godfather of Soul in full meltdown: baked, aged, and enraged that someone has taken an unauthorized dump in his building. But when he stops to …
Cultural appropriation shifts from “problematic” to “horrific” in writer-director Jordan Peele’s sharp take on the scary world of stuff white people like — starting with the “total privacy” of isolated country estates, like the one black photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) visits with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) on …
Boudoir comedy about a young married woman, suffering fainting spells out of sheer ennui, whose husband tries unsuccessfully to pep her up by providing her with an additional lover, but who eventually finds contentment in the arms of a thirteen-year-old snot with an I.Q. of 158. The situation is artlessly …
The slight transformation of a mere gangsta into a gangsta rapper. Notwithstanding the biographical parallels to the life of its star, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (the internecine drug wars, the prison stint, the nine bullet wounds, etc.), it is lethally banal. "50 Cent," a two-bit actor, supplies an unarticulated, uninflected, …
Barry Sonnenfeld's further popularization of Elmore Leonard's already popular novel, chronicling the comic adventures of a Miami mobster in the Hollywood film industry. Anything that was broad to begin with has only been broadened; anything dark or darkish has been lightened; anything semi-dry, sweetened. The plotting, transplanted more or less …
Big-screen reincarnation of the late-Sixties TV spy spoof, no longer a saboteur of a thriving genre, but just another copycat grave-robber. Diligent homage is paid to the original (“Would you believe...,” “Missed it by that much,” etc.), and the jokes are cranked out industriously, and both Steve Carell and Anne …
Macaulay Culkin foils felons again. The eleven-year-old towhead (wet look) is dropped off with his ex-con father by his newlywed aunt (Kathleen Wilhoite, colorful cameo), and, in addition to gumming up a rare-coin heist, he does more in three days to rehabilitate the old man than Folsom Prison did in …
Odd choice of project for Randal Kleiser (Grease, Blue Lagoon, Big Top Pee-Wee), an adaptation of a very adult, very British novel about a heterosexual hairdresser still a virgin at thirty-one (and with nothing really "wrong" with him). The novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, has been allowed to write the script …