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'Public Enemies'
You don't go to a Michael Mann movie for realism. You go for the sleek, threatening glamour of crime and punishment. From "Thief" to "Heat" to "Collateral" to another vein of wrongdoing in "The Insider," his films ruminate, beautifully, as they place their characters in settings of insinuating darkness, hunter versus the hunted, brothers under the skin. Read more »
'Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs'
The blockbuster "Ice Age" movies have, to a one, left me cold. Toons reliant on a large cast of critters (Happy Meal friendly) with famous voices making sitcom wisecracks as their impromptu "herd" makes its way through the frozen (but melting, in the last film) landscape of the distant past, the films seem like Fox imitations of the Dreamworks style -- verbal and scatological, with a message shoe-horned in as an afterthought. Read more »
'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'
As big, dumb summer "entertainments" go, they don't get much bigger or much dumber than " Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." The briefly amusing mash-up/crunch-up of a couple of summers back has been recycled into an epic two and a half hours of explosions, ponderous cartoon history, veiled racism and inept geography. Read more »
'My Sister's Keeper'
"My Sister's Keeper" is a horror movie for parents and a righteous weeper that earns its tears. Read more »
'The Proposal'
Sandra Bullock may be aging out of her the years when Hollywood sees her as "Miss Congeniality," but not without one last fling. "The Proposal" has her playing the icy boss who blackmails her younger assistant into a sham marriage to save her Green Card. It's a performance with real comic juice, a woman acting her age and matched by a co-star whose comic timing complements her own -- the very face of big-screen sarcasm, Ryan Reynolds. Read more »
'Year One'
"Year One" is more or less indefensible, but I'll gladly defend parts of it. It's the knockabout biblical lark Mel Brooks never got around to making, with Jack Black and Michael Cera playing Zed and Oh, outcast members of a Paleolithic tribal village whose wanderings bring them into contact with Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac and Sodom and Gomorrah and poop jokes and pee jokes and some pretty funny circumcision jokes. "What's with all the genital mutilation--" asks Oh, a sensitive gatherer (as opposed to hunter), upon hearing the circumcision action plan put forth by Hank Azaria's Abraham. Don't worry, the bearded one says. "It's a very sleek look." Read more »
'The Taking of Pelham 123'
Entire epochs have passed since New York City could plausibly be called "the biggest rathole in the world," a charge made by the subway hijacker played by John Travolta in the shiny, gentrified remake (the second; there was a TV version late last century) of "The Taking of Pelham 123." Read more »
'Imagine That'
Eddie Murphy finds his Inner Cosby in "Imagine That," a comedy that is long on Cosby-like, kid-friendly charm even if it falls short in the funny department. He keeps the mugging to a minimum and smartly allows the moppet (Yara Shahidi) playing his daughter steal scene after scene of this tale of a father-daughter relationship in need of fixing. Read more »
'Land of the Lost'
Like him or not (I like him), Will Ferrell remains at the mercy of his material. Is it sheer luck that "Blades of Glory" was so much funnier than "Semi-Pro"? No. Luck had nothing to do with it. "Blades of Glory" had jokes, pacing, dryly assured direction and the right comic attitude. "Semi-Pro" felt lazy and off-kilter and sour. Read more »
'The Hangover'
"The Hangover" takes care of its target audience's needs -- the target audience being males who, after seeing director Todd Phillips' earlier (and funnier) "Old School," dreamed of joining the "Old School" fraternity. But this film left a sour taste in my mouth. Only "Daily Show" alum Ed Helms, as a buttoned-down dentist along for the ride on a chaotic Las Vegas bachelor party, got me laughing, periodically, between the not-laughing parts. Read more »
'My Life in Ruins'
The adorable Nia Vardalos makes an obvious choice for a movie she hopes will recapture a bit of her "Big Fat Greek Wedding" mojo from 2002. Read more »
'Up'
You know the most heartening thing about the new Disney-Pixar film "Up"? It may be wonderful, but it isn't perfect. It feels nervy and adventurous and a little messy, the result of formidable creators and genuine wits working on an enormous budget, enormously well-spent. Read more »
'Drag Me to Hell'
Sam Raimi leaves Spider-Manliness behind and digs up his horror roots in "Drag Me to Hell", a terror tale almost as fun as its tease of a title. Raimi, who got his start with the "Evil Dead" movies, sure-handedly blends thrills with giggles in this old-fashioned, newfangled, over-the-top hair-raiser. Read more »
'Terminator Salvation'
"Terminator Salvation" is one of the most visually impressive films in the series. The action is non-stop and the look borders on dazzling. Read more »
'Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian'
I admit it: I was a little tough on the first "Night at the Museum." My son and I disagree all the time on movies, yet I suppose it took his delight in the film's simple but surefire premise (to preteens especially) to make me reconsider. Also, repeated encounters with the movie on a family vacation after it came out on DVD didn't hurt. That's the key to revising an opinion upward a half-star or so: hammering repetition. Read more »
'The Brothers Bloom'
The jaunty, energetic first 10 minutes of "The Brothers Bloom" are easily the best first 10 minutes of any film I've seen recently. And while the succeeding hour and 43 minutes doesn't hold up to the movie's opening scenes, the whole endeavor is still an awfully good time. Read more »
'Dance Flick'
After flashing a dismal dance move that would make "Dancing With the Stars" judge Len Goodman weep uncontrollably, the emcee in the Wayans brothers' latest parody, "Dance Flick," holds his nose and proclaims, "That's not just bad. That's everything on the CW bad." Read more »
'Angels & Demons'
There are a several moments of real pathos in Ron Howard's film of Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons", which is several more than he was able to conjure up in his film of Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." Howard has made a better, more entertaining thriller out of the first book in Brown's saga about symbols expert Robert Langdon ( Tom Hanks) and his research into skulduggery entangling the Catholic Church. Read more »
'Star Trek'
Here's a challenge: How do you implant a potentially lethal alien organism into a body that desperately needs the help but might die if things don't go just right? No, it's not the plot of an old "Star Trek" episode, it's the back story of the new "Star Trek" motion picture. Read more »
'Next Day Air'
Stoner runs afoul of bad men with guns: It worked (commercially) for the white boys of "Pineapple Express," why not for the African-American and Latino ensemble of "Next Day Air"? Read more »
'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'
A chaotic headbanger, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" is saved from pure flat-footed blockbuster franchise adequacy by six things, three of them on Hugh Jackman's left hand, three on his right. Read more »
'Ghosts of Girlfriends Past'
If you look up the word "typecasting" in the dictionary, you'll find Matthew McConaughey's smirk affixed to the title " Ghosts of Girlfriends Past." Nonetheless, director Mark Waters' Lothario-learns-a-lesson comedy is better than its already sour reputation. Read more »
'Battle for Terra'
"Battle for Terra" twists the premise of "The War of the Worlds" so that the invading aliens are humans, homeless (Earth is no more, owing to a war with colonies from neighboring planets) and desperate to find a new life-supporting residence. The invaded are noseless, tadpole-like creatures with dewy alien eyes, heretofore living a peaceful life devoted to the liberal arts and hang-gliding. Read more »
'Obsessed'
"Obsessed" is a thriller built around the married woman's worst fear -- the office blond after her husband. Make the married woman black and you take that to another level -- the black woman's fear of that skinny white blond chasing her man. Read more »
'The Soloist'
"The Soloist" is a duet for homeless street musician and crusading columnist. Another way to put it: The film showcases a 102-piece orchestra, in which a yearning solo cello struggles, mightily, to be heard amid 101 Hollywood strings of schmaltz. Read more »
'Fighting'
It's called "Fighting," and its unpolished, messy fracases are among the film's highlights. But there's much more to it than that: more than the easily sold idea of Channing Tatum as Shawn, a down-on-his-luck drifter, drawn by two-bit hustler Harvey (Terrence Howard) into New York's underground fighting scene; more than Shawn's romance with struggling single mother Zulay (Zulay Henao). Read more »
'Crank: High Voltage'
If Jason Statham is the greatest B-movie action star of our day (and he is), then the "Crank" movies are his showcase. These gonzo, amoral, politically incorrect rides put the ripped, bald and mean Statham through his paces like nothing else in his action repertoire. Read more »
'State of Play'
Like Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," "State of Play" compresses a British television miniseries into a stand-alone American thriller and does a pretty good job of it. It's best to see the remake first and catch up with the 2003 BBC miniseries afterward. That way you can enjoy the new version for what it is -- a sleek, reliable Hollywood package, wrapped in a mournful last hurrah for print investigative journalism -- instead of experiencing it through the prism of its superb predecessor, which came from a different era, one in which movie characters didn't go out of their way to remind audiences that "nobody reads the papers anymore." Read more »
'17 Again'
Zac Efron, looking cool, is movie enough for the makers of " 17 Again," a halfhearted fantasy that stars Efron in a role cryogenically frozen around the time of C. Thomas Howell's '80s heyday. He plays a high school basketball star who has everything going for him. His college sports career gets derailed by his girlfriend's unplanned pregnancy. This 1989 prologue doesn't last long, but the Boy George and Vanilla Ice references are intense. Read more »
'Observe and Report'
Seth Rogen is likely to get blamed for everything wrong with "Observe and Report," because he's overexposed at the moment and the film doesn't really work, even with its flashes of rude invention. But the fault lies with writer-director Jody Hill, whose microbudget comedy "The Foot Fist Way" got a strange amount of attention from the sleep-deprived regulars at the Sundance Film Festival, and whose new outing is a puny black-comic riff on "Taxi Driver," casting Rogen as Ronnie Barnhardt, delusional sociopathic mall cop. Read more »
'Hannah Montana: The Movie'
Miley Cyrus has had the "Best of Both Worlds" so long that she's a little reluctant to give it up, even when she's plainly ridden that Hannah Montana horse into the glue factory. She comes to the crossroads of her career with "Hannah Montana: The Movie" and can't quite walk away from the role that made her famous. Read more »
'Adventureland'
A summer away from college, a seasonal amusement park job and a little romance -- the ingredients of yet another "coming of age" dramedy, one that allows Kristen Stewart to try out her newfound "Twilight" fame. Read more »
'Fast & Furious'
"Fast & Superfluous" is the fourth film in the "Fast/Furious" franchise, a tepid, repetitive and digitally augmented hot cars-hot women thriller that might probably won't give Vin Diesel and Paul Walker the career boost that "The Fast and the Furious" did. Read more »
'Monsters vs. Aliens'
The animation wizards at Dreamworks leave "Shrek" and "Madagascar" sequels behind, and what do they come up with? Read more »
'The Haunting in Connecticut'
There's not much wrong with the house in "The Haunting in Connecticut" that a little WD-40 couldn't cure. Everything creaks, including the dialogue. You'd swear the place was haunted by the ghost of a sound designer whose predilection for metallic clangs every time an apparition swoops by a mirror turns this thing into a virtual anvil chorus. Read more »
'Duplicity'
"Duplicity" is a romantic comedy with spies, a heist picture with sex and a corporate intrigue thriller filled with funny banter. Read more »'I Love You, Man'
A minor but enjoyable entry in the boy-man comedy genre, "I Love You, Man" stars Paul Rudd as a guyless guy -- a heterosexual L.A. real estate agent engaged to be married but short on straight-up male companionship in general and a best man for his wedding in particular. Rudd has worked wonders in all sorts of comedies, from "Anchorman" (no one could turn to the camera, suddenly, with more phony intensity) to "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up." The reason Rudd wears so well has something to do with charm and, more important, spiking that charm with an unsettling dash of vinegar. He's easy company, but that smile seems to be hiding something. Read more »
'Knowing'
A man is privy to the details of upcoming disasters -- when, where and how many people will die. That man is Nicolas Cage. Knowing that, the moviegoer now makes certain calculations: Cage is not like other men. He is composed of 66 percent water, 21 percent forehead, 10 percent terrible movies and 3 percent movies that make you wonder why that other 10 percent has been so ridiculously high for so long. Read more »
'Race to Witch Mountain'
"Race to Witch Mountain" is the first kids' film in ages to have action beats that measure up to Hollywood's grownup action fare. Inspired by but not really a remake of Disney's much milder 1970s children's hit "Escape to Witch Mountain" (based on Alexander Key's novel), this "Witch Mountain" has a lot more in common with "Men in Black," "WarGames," "E.T." and "Close Encounters." Read more »
'Last House on the Left'
The violence is immediate, unflinching and relentless in "The Last House on the Left," a movie of shocking sadism and cruelty. Most shocking of all is the performance of Sara Paxton. The onetime teen star ("Aquamarine") is objectified by the camera long before the horrific, graphic rape that is the triggering event in this remake of the movie that made Wes Craven famous. But Paxton's humanity shines through. And as her character Mari suffers the insufferable, our heart breaks for her. Read more »
'Miss March'
What a mess "Miss March" is. And I'm not just talking about the repeated involuntary bowel-evacuation moments. Read more »
'Watchmen'
The long-awaited film of Alan Moore's classic comic book/graphic novel "Watchmen" is a work that's easier to ponder than enjoy. Director Zack Snyder has delivered a literal, almost page-by-page transcription of Moore and Dave Gibbons' messianic, End of Days superhero epic. It gives you a lot to chew on in its 2 hours and 40 minutes. But as striking as it is to absorb and behold, as literal as the adaptation is, Watchmen rarely hits the thrilling or entertaining stride that Snyder's "300" had from start to finish. Read more »
'Fired Up' Review
In comedy, "snappy" counts: "Whaddaya wanna do?" "The brunette in the third row.. .. ." Read more »
'Confessions of a Shopaholic' Review
If there is a single bright spot in the financial crisis, it is the possibility that one day producer Jerry Bruckheimer will run out of money. In a more just world, this would have happened before he gave the green light to "Confessions of a Shopaholic," a thin, largely unfunny comedy that marries lazy filmmaking with bad timing. Star Isla Fisher ("Wedding Crashers") is charming enough, and a gifted physical comic, but this material is so predictable and leaden that even she has no prayer of keeping it afloat. Read more »'Friday the 13th' Review
Let's celebrate Friday the 13th with a little red meat, shall we? And hard numbers. Read more »
'The International' Review
Some thrillers settle into a rut of adequacy, rarely spiking above or below the baseline. Not "The International." Director Tom Tykwer's new picture is all over the place, geographically and in terms of audience satisfaction. It's a case of creative interpreters working occasional pulp wonders with their own prosaic screenplay. Read more »
'Coraline'
"Coraline" may not be for all tastes and it's certainly not for all kids, given its macabre premise. But writer-director Henry Selick's animated feature advances the stop-motion animation genre through that most heartening of attributes: quality. It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, whacked and menacing in many others. Read more »
'He's Just Not That Into You'
According to Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo's dinky 2004 relationship-advice book "He's Just Not That Into You," if a guy you're interested in won't call you, won't sleep with you, won't marry you in spite of years of dating or is already married to someone else, you should accept that he isn't really emotionally invested in you. It's time to move on. Read more »
'Push'
The painfully inscrutable paranormal thriller "Push" introduces us to a host of characters with various gifts. Some can see the future, some can heal, some can plant ideas, some can make change for a dollar. By the times the credits roll, your most fervent wish is to run into a "wiper" (one who can erase memories) after stumbling into the lobby. That or a telepath who could convince you that you just watched "Slumdog Millionaire" instead. Read more »Advertisement
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