I was 13 when Stephen Sommers’s 1999 remake-in-name-only of The Mummy came out — just about the ideal age. Sommers is definitely some kind of junk-addled auteur, and if The Mummy didn’t achieve its obvious goal of topping Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was close enough as far as…
Swing Vote is an election-themed comedy that’s about twice as smart as you expect it to be and still only half as smart as you wish it was. The clever premise, which would have seemed like pure science-fiction no more than eight years ago, concerns a U.S. presidential election whose…
The truth is still out there, like an unsold lawn chair at a garage sale, in this just plain lousy second big-screen outing for erstwhile FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Since we last saw them, she’s become a doctor in a Catholic hospital, he…
I haven’t seen much at the movies in the past two years that has given me as much unbridled comic pleasure as the sight of Will Ferrell as the win-at-any-cost NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, calling on Jesus, Tom Cruise, and Oprah Winfrey to put out the psychosomatic flames engulfing his…
Dad, which was your favorite part of Space Chimps?” the four-year-old asked the day after a media sneak peek. “Dunno, Harry. Probably the part where Kilowatt lets the giant monster swallow her.” Kilowatt is an alien with a giant, glowing head perched atop a teensy-tiny body; blows high-pitched raspberries when…
What a brooding pleasure it is to return to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City — if pleasure is the right word for a movie that gazes so deeply and sometimes despairingly into the souls of restless men. In The Dark Knight, the continuation of Nolan’s superb 2005 reboot of the Batman…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, heavily overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral…
If you’re an eight-year-old boy who’s never heard of E.T. or Liar Liar, then Meet Dave might be your new favoritest movie of all time. On a mission to save his dying planet of miniature aliens, the captain of a human-shaped spaceship (both played by Eddie Murphy) flies to Earth,…
Hollywood’s Endless Superhero Summer rolls on with the arrival of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, but before this review goes any further, I must confess — head hanging low in shame — I haven’t read a comic book since I was 12 years…
Let’s be clear about one thing: Journey to the Center of the Earth is more a demo reel than a narrative feature. It’s a decent if overly familiar and yawningly obvious compendium of look-at-me moments intended to show off the latest and greatest in stereo 3-D filmmaking, in which the…
The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis as a dead man, was writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough, but its followup, Unbreakable, starring Bruce Willis as the walking dead reborn as a superhero, was the filmmaker’s masterpiece. It remains the most quietly influential of all recent superhero movies, the unacknowledged template for…
You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance, and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander, and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. “Do not scorn the weak cub; he may become the brutal…
Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these does justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate — and,…
Of the summer’s many revenge-of-the-nerd fulfillment fantasies — from The Incredible Hulk all the way down the megaplex food chain to The Foot Fist Way — Wanted stands the best chance of dislodging Fight Club from fanboys’ Facebook pages. It has the same dizzying flipbook style, the same kicky ultraviolence,…
Mike Myers likes ice hockey. He also likes Deepak Chopra, a little too much. So he pulled together a bit of hockey and a whole lot of Chopra and called it a plot. Building a movie around the efforts of an also-ran celebrity guru to sort out the internal politics…
Nothing snaps a child’s head around quite like a dying parent, especially when the parent is a cantankerous old sod like Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent), whose nominally adult son Blake (Colin Firth) still clings to childhood grievances. Directed by Anand Tucker with the same quiet tact he brought to Hilary…
As old Broadway shows are revived, new Broadway shows get spun from old movies so that new movies may be fashioned from ancient TV series. It’s an iron law of the culture industry that turns out to be a pleasant surprise in the case of Get Smart, the late-Sixties sitcom…
What a bunch of nonsense — effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. This is what happens when M. Night Shyamalan tries to play both John Carpenter (bloody) and Stanley Kubrick (cold-blooded) while writing and directing what the literalist will either dismiss or embrace as the horror-film…
It’s been 20 years since Errol Morris made The Thin Blue Line — a found “noir” that served to free an innocent man convicted of murder. Gathering evidence and dramatizing testimony, Morris’s movie circled around a single, unrepresentable event — the death of a cop on a lonely stretch of…
In recent days, Universal has been running a TV spot for The Incredible Hulk that gives away what should come as no surprise to any fanboy worth his action figure collection: the appearance of Robert Downey Jr. as, natch, Tony Stark. From the delighted, deafening squeals of at least one…
By all means, gather up the little ones and take them to this perfectly pleasant, very good-looking, modestly funny, dispiritingly unoriginal variant on the nerd-with-a-dream recipe that’s been clobbered to death in animated films for at least a decade. Hectic as ever, Jack Black voices Po, a potbellied panda who’s…
Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsize codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad superheavy: catching barbecue fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…
