Knowing that it doesn’t take a man to raise a man, single mom Annette Bening duly deputizes surrogate “daughters” Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning, assigning them the role of dual consigliere to look after her 15-year-old son (Lucas Jade Zumann). Once the fastidiously worded dual voice-over narration commences, the characters …
Takeoff from a true story, presumably far, far off, about a team of MIT math whizzes who, drilled by a Mephistophelean mentor on the faculty, visit Vegas on weekends to beat the house at blackjack. The film is not able to make the frowned-upon practice of “card counting” comprehensible, much …
At last. After the "We're too old, but who cares?" middle-aged hijinks of The Hangover and the "We're too young, but who cares?" high-school hijinks of Project X, the Drunken Bromedy genre takes up the entirely age-appropriate collegiate hijinks of 21 and Over. Miles Teller plays the master-bantering mastermind, Skylar …
For those of us who have seen the trailer more times then they have their hand, I say it's about time this opened!
The first English-language feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu brings together disparate characters by the same matchmaking method of his Amores Perros: by car accident. Benicio Del Toro, a born-again ex-con, runs over the husband and two daughters of Naomi Watts, and the husband's heart is transplanted anonymously into …
An “update” to the ’80s television series, this time involving two high school polarities (the dumb jock and the smart geek) who are recruited for an undercover assignment to pose as high school students and infiltrate the supplier of a new “super drug.” The film is a pinball machine: loud, …
Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill advance from high school to college, while the overall level of humor plunges from ninth grade to third. I laughed once: the action momentarily trips over itself to deliver a sternly graphic anti-drug message before quickly returning to the business of trying to milk laughs …
For what turned out to be his crowning work, Abbas Kiarostami, the perdurable experimenter opted, for the first time in his career, to try his hand at animation. Some segments were filmed in color, the majority in black-and-white. Not a word was spoken, there is but a single movement of …
Michael Winterbottom's re-creation of the Manchester pop scene from the mid-Seventies through the Eighties: i.e., from punk to rave. Breathless, chaotic, self-consciously "postmodern" -- which translates into raggedy, uneven visuals and a main character who addresses the camera with full knowledge of future events and full awareness that he's in …
A shared load of working-mother stress and pressure, not everyone's notion of moviegoing fun. Director Nancy Savoca (True Love, Dogfight, Household Saints) makes little personal movies about small-as-life people, mainly women, in small-as-life predicaments, almost as if she were operating in the field of the serious novel rather than the …
Pretentious, heart-on-sleeve New York movie pointedly set post-9/11: the blue beacons of light that stand where the Twin Towers once stood; the clean-up operations in the pit below the windows of one of the main characters; the Osama bin Laden wanted posters; the firefighter shrine at an Irish pub; the …
Girly fairy tale to do with the proverbial always-a-bridesmaid, twenty-seven times by actual count, with a closetful of once-worn gowns to prove it, who stands mutely by as her slutty younger sister returns home and steals her dreamy boss right out from under her nose. Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and …