Compared to its madcap predecessors — the psychotic Holden Caulfield update Donnie Darko and the delirious welcome-to-the-21st-century extravaganza Southland Tales — the new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas. A mysterious stranger offers a nice American couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) an unusual deal:…
Seven months after its theatrical release in the United Kingdom and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore in U.S. theaters with a different title (it was formerly known as The Boat That Rocked) and most of its better bits excised. Writer/director Richard Curtis, paying homage…
The Men Who Stare at Goats: Did aliens abduct George Clooney’s sense of humor?
A Christmas Carol: A very CGI Christmas
This Is It: Michael Jackson goes out with a whimper
An Education and its star, Carey Mulligan, get good marks.
The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man: Bad for the Jews
Halloween: Horror DVDs turn your pad into a haunted house
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant sucks
New York, I Love You has hits and misses
Where the Wild Things Are: Let the mild rumpus begin!
Couples Retreat
The zombie movie — that evergreen vessel for all manner of social and political allegory — gets stripped down to its “Holy shit! Zombies! Run!” chassis in this fitfully amusing romp directed with little ambition and even less distinction by first-timer Ruben Fleischer. Set in a not-too-distant future (Roland Emmerich’s…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans such as “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films…
Ricky Gervais can get only so far with The Invention of Lying
A montage of news footage crisply introduces the not-too-distant future, where the world’s white-collar professionals live vicariously through plastic-smooth swimsuit-cut surrogate bodies, psychically remote-controlled by flesh-and-blood selves abandoned to storage and pallid vegetation. These superdurable avatars are free to live in (somewhat timidly imagined) consequence-free hedonism. No real victims means…
Bright Star is an ode to John Keats’s great love affair
Jennifer’s Body: A premeditated cult classic
As evidenced by The Informant!, it’s a hell of a tricky thing turning real-life pulp into floss sugar. The story of Archer Daniels Midland biochemist-exec-turned-crooked-federal-snitch Mark Whitacre is a tragicomedy. Journalist Kurt Eichenwald spent five years trailing the bipolar fuckup, and his 2000 book, The Informant, is so densely, richly…
If you are the director, producer, writer (adapting your own stage play), and costar of a film, you really show how bad you can do all by yourself. Usually thrilling in their lunacy, most Tyler Perry movies can at least keep up their momentum through the combination of an overstuffed…
It’s Thingamabob vs. Machine in 9
In this refreshingly quirky comedy, Sandra Bullock is Mary Horowitz, a Sacramento crossword-puzzle writer who is geeky and hyperactive and generally too much to bear. When her parents fix her up with a handsome cable-news cameraman named Steve (Bradley Cooper), Mary pounces, but quickly scares him away with talk of…
