As devoid of spontaneity as a D.A.’s defense strategy, this adaptation of fiction machine Michael Connelly’s 2005 legal thriller is both convoluted and completely predictable, which fans at least should appreciate. The title refers to Mick Haller (Matthew McConaughey), an L.A. ambulance chaser who conducts business from the back of…
The eight gentle Trappist monks depicted in Of Gods and Men uphold the faith that brought them from France to Algeria, only to be abducted and massacred, presumably by fanatics of a rival religious persuasion. The movie, based on a 1996 event that continues to resonate in France, opens on…
The romanticized commitment-phobia that keeps Judd Apatow in gilt-fixtured man caves is brought down to earth (or Park Slope, anyway) in this inventive indie thriller from Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro. Monogamy follows thirtysomething Brooklynite Theo (Chris Messina) as he simultaneously slogs through his day job as a wedding photographer,…
Who said animation should look real? Robert Zemeckis, for one, though as evidenced by Disney’s recent closing of his ImageMovers Digital studio, he increasingly appears to be alone in that sentiment. Mars Needs Moms stands as the potentially final Zemeckis-produced motion-capture effort, and like The Polar Express, Beowulf and A…
Cheerfully diffident, garrulous yet uninflected, blithely self-absorbed, the mumblecore brand proliferates: Last year’s star vehicles Greenberg and Cyrus introduced the concept of mega-mumble. The low-budget musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench pioneered mumble-chord; Tiny Furniture was part psycho-drumble, part sit-cumble. Premiering with the latter at last spring’s South…
Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries but rarely do, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot. It begins with context: In 2000, Mark Hogancamp, an Upstate New York…
In Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter George Nolfi’s directorial debut The Adjustment Bureau (an extremely loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story “Adjustment Team”), Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race apparently on the strength of his charisma and the…
Ink still wet on his MIT degree, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in hometown Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHSes of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt re-encounters…
Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are two domesticated husbands whose long marriages (to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, respectively) have achieved somnolent routine in suburban Providence, Rhode Island. Yet the wives worry. Rick is a girl watcher; Fred masturbates in the privacy of their parked Honda Odyssey…
Leanly scripted, directed for maximum tension, fast moving, and filled with a surprising amount of droll humor, writer-director Will Canon’s Brotherhood (co-written with Doug Simon) illustrates the catastrophic consequences of boys being boys when group-think, machismo and the survival instinct all converge. When an ostensibly fail-safe fraternity initiation (robbing a…
It would be unwise to consider Four Lions a movie that has much to say about radical Islam or the threat of terrorism. Instead, think of Four Lions as Airheads, except that instead of the idiots wanting to get their song played on the radio, the idiots want to blow…
Fifty years after Kim Ki-young’s postwar hothouse original, Im Sang-soo attempts a sleek, breathless update to The Housemaid, the tale of a household riven by a sexy domestic. This time around, instead of a family-man music teacher getting ensnared, a bored, feckless maid (Jeon Do-yeon) is seduced by a rich…
Rule of law scarcely discourages the endless reprisals in Rachid Bouchareb’s Algerian War–era family-ties drama Outside the Law, which shows the FLN’s militant campaign for Algerian independence, as fought on French soil, through the experiences of three brothers. Reuniting in a Nanterre shantytown, this tattered family brings with it the…
Fresh from Sundance, Miguel Arteta’s amiable Cedar Rapids is a mild comedy of embarrassment, set in the dark heart of Middle America and starring sitcom secondario Ed Helms (The Office’s obnoxious angry salesman Andy Bernard) as Tim Lippe, a prematurely middle-aged man-child. Taking an airplane for the first time in…
To age brutishly is Liam Neeson’s apparent career goal—with Taken, Clash of the Titans, The A-Team, and now Unknown, the actor continues to follow the Nicolas Cage path from respected thespian to big-budget ass-kicker. In this tepid thriller from Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan), Neeson is Dr. Martin Harris, who, after arriving…
The late Canadian writer Mordecai Richler, best known south of the border for the film version of his 1959 novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was a bellicose practitioner of Jewish fiction in the manner of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, with a mad helping of Joseph Heller. The joyfully…
The Eagle, directed by Kevin Macdonald and adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 historical novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, a bestselling tale of second-century Roman legions and youthful derring-do on the far side of Hadrian’s Wall, is a thunderous boys’ adventure of the old-school type—there’s not a female speaking part…
In past years, the theatrical release of the Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts has provided a fun peek into intriguing bite-size cinema from across the globe. But for the 2011 edition, the series is at last making room for the five nominated documentary shorts as well. Unfortunately, this year’s nonfiction…
A not-quite sequel to the 1984 L.A. punk classic Repo Man, Alex Cox’s Repo Chick is both an extreme formal experiment and a genre-mashing goof-off. Starring some of the same actors but none of the same characters, and still using the grungy edge-of-L.A. milieu as ground zero for apocalyptic panic,…
Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist breathes life into a celluloid fossil, lovingly animating an unproduced script by the great filmmaker Jacques Tati. Chomet sets The Illusionist on the cusp of the ’60s, around the time Tati wrote the script as a follow-up to his hit Mon Oncle. The title character, a…
An apocalyptic take on the social network comes from, of all places, Mamoru Hosoda’s childlike, yay-go-team japanime, Summer Wars, about a hijacked Second Life-esque world. Shy math whiz Kenji joins pretty, older schoolmate Natsuki on a trip to her family’s rural ancestral home, where he’s supposed to pose as her…
An adaptation of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Ayelet Waldman’s novel of Upper Manhattan entitlement and sanctimony, 2009’s The Other Woman has been dusted off to capitalize on insatiable, inexplicable Natalie Portmania. Portman, who also executive-produced, stars as Emilia Greenleaf, the home wrecker of the title who becomes the second…
