Second-chance fantasy that, through the agency of a bewhiskered supernatural school janitor, sends the middle-age-crazy hero not back in time, but back in age, back to the high school of his youth, so that he must fend off the incestuous flirtations of his teenage daughter and make age-inappropriate advances to …
Zac Efron down on the farm! Dennis Quaid in the heartland! Cars! Guns! Family! Drama!
Lower what little expectation you have going in and you’ll still be disappointed. How does powerlifting two refrigerators and flipping tractor tires make one a better lifeguard? Not sure, but having that question cross my mind provided the only laugh in this otherwise deadening trip to the multiplex. Note to …
Sentimental, even goopy, ghost story about a promising young yachtsman whose near-death car wreck leaves him with the ability to See Dead People, most particularly and regularly, every day at sunset for a game of catch, the adoring younger brother who perished in the passenger seat. (The first time he’s …
Johnny Knoxville did it better. A career military nutjob (Robert De Niro) observes his future granddaughter-in-law texting at his wife’s funeral and decides a Hangover-style road trip is just what his uptight grandson (Zac Efron) needs to derail the pending nuptials. The script rat-a-tats like a gatling gun misfiring one …
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 …
We’ve devolved to a point in our paranoid history where remaking a movie about an off-the-grid government agency that knowingly employs a pedophiliac child killer to do its bidding could almost be as fresh as today’s headlines. Stephen King’s John Rainbird was such a man, but when it came time …
Chickie (Zac Efron) wants to support his friends fighting in Vietnam, so he does something wild—personally bring them American beer. What starts as a well-meaning journey quickly changes Chickie’s life and perspective. Based on the true story told in the book The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Memoir of Friendship, …
Director Michael Gracey sprinkles age-defying pixie dust all over song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman to produce a modern musical version of the PT Barnum story that transforms the Great American Flimflammer into Saint Circus, patron of the outcast and unwanted (but also profitable). It turns out that rounding up freaks and …
Director Michael Gracey sprinkles age-defying pixie dust all over song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman to produce a modern musical version of the PT Barnum story that transforms the Great American Flimflammer into Saint Circus, patron of the outcast and unwanted (but also profitable). It turns out that rounding up freaks and …
Candy-colored sequel to two Disney Channel television movies with which the viewer is presumed to be conversant. (In what way, you might have to wonder, did Gabriella change East High forever? And what’s the deal between Troy and Rocket Man?) Evidently intended as an anti-anxiety pill for growing tweens, it …
Writer-director Sean Durkin broke through in 2011 with Martha Marcy May Marlene, the story of a young woman who has escaped from a cult and must now find a way to reconnect with her family. But here, the cult is the family, and the only hope lies in escape, which …
The story of the rise and fall of the Von Erich family, a dynasty of wrestlers who made a huge impact on the sport from the 1960s to the present day. From writer/director Sean Durkin and starring Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Maura Tierney, Stanley Simons, with Holt …
A pretty Marine (Zac Efron) returns from un-pretty service in Iraq to seek out the pretty blonde (Taylor Schilling), whose pretty photo he felt was his lucky charm in combat. In pretty Dixie, she is the widow of another Marine, with a pretty son and a still-pretty mom (Blythe Danner). …
Filmmaker Richard Linklater fictionalizes, mythologizes, the Mercury Theatre’s mounting of a modern-dress Julius Caesar in 1937, the titular “me” being a stagestruck high-schooler who in one week lands a small speaking and singing part in the Broadway production, falls head over heels for the company secretary, sees her stolen out …