Ramona and Beezus: Despite the presence of Mouse House starlet Selena Gomez, Ramona and Beezus is less Disney than Hallmark Channel, a loose adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s first novel in her beloved kid-lit series that’s wholesome to the point of dull. Elizabeth Allen’s innocuous film charts Ramona Quimby (Joey King)…
Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche…of writer-director Christopher Nolan, an Anglo-American action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass-consensus with The Dark Knight. Nolan’s follow-up offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes and GQ leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows—indicators of high-minded artistry,…
Implicit in its title, the premise of The Killer Inside Me—directed by Michael Winterbottom from Jim Thompson’s 1952 crime novel—could be summed up in a classified ad: Texas cop with pleasant boyish demeanor seeks compliant dames for sadistic sex games culminating in murder. What complicates this tale is its telling…
In the summer of 2007, two Western journalists dug in with a platoon of American soldiers on a 15-month deployment in the Korengal Valley, a strategic outpost near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The mountainous region was infested with Taliban fighters and possibly was also used by Al-Qaeda leaders as a…
Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist, in part by creating a romantic triangle between a longstanding, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple Nic and Jules (Annette Bening…
The Father of My Children, a drama about love, sorrow and the heartbreak of independent film financing, is sliced neatly in half by the sudden death of its protagonist, Grégoire Canvel. I’m not spoiling: Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve has admitted that Grégoire is based on the French producer Humbert Balsan, who…
As the lights were dimming before a preview screening of Despicable Me, the 6-year-old who lives in my house leaned over and said, “I hope this is funny–not like Toy Story 3.” Now don’t misunderstand: He adored that movie. It’s just that whenever the subject comes up, the first word…
In Cyrus, a freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them, the excellent John C. Reilly plays John, a middle-aged editor who lives like a stalled graduate student in his cluttered Los Angeles cottage. That’s where his former wife and close friend, Jamie (Catherine…
Why is Eclipse, the third film in the Twilight series, so fantastically successful? Why does the audience shriek and moan and giggle throughout in feverish joy? Well, perhaps they’d do that no matter what, but Eclipse is the least laughable installment yet in the series, and director David Slade efficiently…
You know and love Jason Bourne as an implacable killing machine. But what if he were a mouthy asshole instead? That’s the provocative question posed by James Mangold’s Knight and Day, which casts Tom Cruise as a Bourne wannabe who seriously can’t shut up. As Roy Miller, an agent gone…
“Never ask for what ought to be offered,” 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tells her little brother in Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik’s dark and flinty Ozark fairy tale. Those are words to live by for Ree and her people, scattered across the hardscrabble crooks and hollers of the southern Missouri…
As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino’s visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they finished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs. That it works so well—despite frequently risible dialogue (“Happy is a word…
Opening with a close-up of the crow’s feet around its subject’s eyes and expanding to reveal her Botox-frozen upper lip, the documentary-portrait Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work celebrates Saint Joan the Resilient, Showbiz Survivor. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg dogged the indomitable stand-up comic throughout the course of her…
Fifteen years after ushering in a new era of CGI animation, and 11 years after a colossally successful pre-millennial sequel, the Toy Story franchise returns to a changed world. Its irresistible conceit and snappy good humor remain largely intact, though now it also hauls a saltier and more anxious sensibility…
Like its predecessor, 2010’s Harald Zwart-directed The Karate Kid begins with an uprooting. Young Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother (Taraji P. Henson) are introduced in the Detroit apartment that he grew up in, now packed into boxes. Ralph Macchio shipped off to the Valley; Dre is going to…
Q’orianka Kilcher’s first role since her stunning breakout as Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World finds her playing to type as the last princess of Hawaii, struggling against the American takeover of a then-sovereign republic. It’s her second indigenous-versus-white people role in a row, which suggests troubling things about…
Passionate Republican, fervent Orthodox Jew, ruthless wheeler-dealer and super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff at his height fashioned himself into a human ATM machine who lined the pockets of politicians on every side of the aisle. Sooner or later, everybody from Tom DeLay to Patrick Kennedy was at least marginally in his debt…
Inspired by a drug ring that used Hasidic Jews to transport over one million pills of ecstasy to the United States in a six-month period between 1998 and ’99, Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers stars Jesse Eisenberg as a good old Brooklyn boy turned mid-level dope importer. Driven by the sense…
There are myriad moments during Get Him to the Greek—the roller-coaster spin-off of Forgetting Sarah Marshall—when it feels as if the thing will jump the rails and smash to the ground in a thousand pieces of what-in-the-fuck. It’s a complete and utter mess from the big-loud-dumb start to the awwww-that’s-so-sweet…
Though Sundance-screened and sporting an upscale cast, writer-director Vincenzo Natali’s Splice has a mad science quality. He has crossbred a self-serious psychodrama and a queasy creature-feature and unleashed this malformed freak on the world. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are Clive and Elsa, a married couple of “rock star” genetic…
Nicole Holofcener’s fourth feature, Please Give, is a notable rebound from the insufficiently examined self-absorption of her last, Friends With Money. Please Give is not quite Lovely & Amazing—Holofcener’s mordant, quasi-autobiographical “three sisters” spin—but it is, for the most part, witty and engrossing. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt)…
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time’s story hinges on a dagger that can rewind time, a narrative conceit that doubles as a taunt to those who endure this cacophonous, frivolous adaptation of Ubisoft’s Arabian Nights-themed video-game series. Bruckheimered to the hilt with the same rollicking period-piece cheesiness that typified…
