Cast against the blackness of night, a bleached, sandpapery-complexioned New World pirate known as The Admiral (Ron Perlman) pilots his ship across sand dune seas in pursuit of the subterranean creature his trackers have dubbed Diablos. Though budgeted at a mere $60 million, there was no scrimping on the special …
Animator Chris Wedge’s (Ice Age, Robots) first feature with a human cast successfully mixes live action and animation to produce a family film that isn’t a monstrous trek. High school senior Tripp (Lucas Till), eager to shake the dust of his crummy little town off his feet, spends his free …
The titular polycephalic freak of nature refers to both an unprincipled pharmaceutical company and Sonia (Jana Raluy), the wife caring for a cancerous husband who forces the fatcats at gunpoint to reconsider supplying her man with an experimental drug not covered by their insurance. Think Death Wish meets John Q. …
The front porch has a view to die for, a panorama the man stretched out on the living room sickbed can no longer enjoy. With dad days away from checking out, Cal (Owen Teague) returns to the family farm; the beeline he makes past the comatose old man to check …
All of the tropes are in order starting with a disgraced astronaut (Patrick Wilson) wrongfully blamed for a co-worker’s death who is unable to confront this dark moment from his past. Mother Earth is next placed on a collision course with another planet, in this case the moon hurtling out …
Best suited for those who found brilliance in Beasts of the Southern Wild, here comes a hackneyed tale of a young black man’s passage from childhood to maturity in a tough Miami neighborhood. Bullying, poverty, closeted sexuality, drug abuse, and racial strife combine to form an overworked agenda of cultural …
“Something inside me is about to act up the cancer cells,” K’s (Jasper Liu) rather janky subtitles proclaim. (In case you missed it, a CG fog occasionally appears as a lumbering harbinger of deteriorating health.) K’s death sentence is determined at a kill-or-cure point early on in writer-director Gavin Lin’s …
Everything you always wanted to know about honeybees but never thought to ask is answered in a sweet documentary. Who knew that one-third of what we eat would not exist without these plant-pollinating “messengers of love”? But across the globe, bees are rapidly and mysteriously dying off. Director Markus Imhoof …
A pre-code curio with a 63 minute running time. How can you miss? Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper’s warm up to King Kong — the nighttime jungle scenes share the same sets and sounds — introduces Leslie Banks as Count Zaroff, a tangible threat more terrifying and prevalent, …
A Chechen Muslim enters Hamburg in the guise of a homeless man seeking asylum and captures the attention of intelligence operative Philip Seymour Hoffman’s antiterror unit. Based on a John le Carré novel, this is the sharpest, most reasonable tale of espionage and intrigue since John Boorman’s Tailor of Panama. …
Given Hollywood’s dismal habit of overly sentimentalizing characters with nervous system disorders, the Cringe-O-Meter® pointed to red at the thought of a hardboiled detective drama that followed the exploits of a gumshoe with Tourette syndrome. But this was Edward Norton, who did such a faultless job playing the crook who …
After what seems like a good 10 minutes’ worth of blissfully (boastingly?) unmotivated aerial camera movements, writer-director Jennifer Peedom sets her documentary to doing what it does very well: detailing the history of (and fascination with) mountaineering. A mere three centuries ago, people believed that only lords and lunatics dwelled …
With all flights cancelled, a neurosurgeon who’s desperately needed in the ER (Idris Elba) and a journalist en route to her own wedding (Kate Winslet) split the cost of a charter plane, hoping to slip past a pending snowstorm. No sooner do they take off than pilot Beau Bridges earns …
Hugh Jackman has testicles where his Adam's apple should be. Richard Gere attempts to finger-bang a robot. Halle Berry dips a giant, unsheathed latex breast into a vat of guacamole. A cartoon kitty uses Elizabeth Banks's face to mark its territory. Movie 43 has gag potential, just not in the …