Tom Tykwer’s The International is one of those movies in which shadowy men meet in parked cars, abandoned buildings, and inconspicuous public spaces (museum galleries are a particular favorite), travel under assumed names, and always glance nervously over their shoulders, fearful of being spied on through a sniper’s lens. Some…
If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, were 12 years old, the movie might make a touching, if not noticeably fresh, romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t nurse unhealthy crushes and regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation, which might be…
There are maybe two or three laugh-out-loud moments and a handful of chuckles to be culled from Steve Martin’s overlong Pink Panther 2, the latest installment in the lackluster overhaul of Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers’s iconic Pink Panther comedy franchise. That’s as good as it gets. After several of…
The smirky, overbearing, and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That into You — which sold a regrettable two million copies when it was published in 2004 — seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times,…
Two weeks after the reach-out-and-touch gore of My Bloody Valentine in 3-D, the splatter-free teen chiller The Uninvited feels sweetly old-fashioned. Sixteen-year-old Anna (Emily Browning), who attempted suicide after her mother’s death, leaves a psych hospital and returns to the gorgeous Maine lake house of her novelist father (David Strathairn)…
She’s too thin. She’s a bobble-head. Her forehead doesn’t move. Where has that Jerry Maguire girl gone, the one we once knew and loved? Did the Oscar from Cold Mountain ruin her forever? Or is Kenny Chesney to blame? It’s not easy being America’s sweetheart. Nor any easier being Lucy…
The original Underworld, released six years ago, introduced a high-concept/low-excitement war between vampires in fetish gear and videogame-caliber werewolves — and “in the spirit of equanimity,” someone wrote at the time, “the movie both sucks and bites.” No such draw here: This deadly prequel explaining the roots of the bloodsucker-fangface…
Attention, Jews of generations X through Z: In case you missed it, novelist Joseph Epstein laid down a pretty severe gauntlet in last week’s issue of Newsweek. After deriding your parents for giving you inflated trust funds and WASPy first names, he accused you of frivolity, assimilation, and too-frequent intermarriage…
Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex day-care as “Mo” Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts from which they’re reciting. Mo has abstained…
In theory, 3-D filmmaking should amplify the effect Roland Barthes foresaw in Cinemascope — that of the viewer becoming a “little god” free to float about at will in the frame’s capacious space. In practice, it’s typically like watching a shitty movie with the added sensation of getting poked in…
Notorious, about a crack dealer who becomes an iconic rapper who becomes a tragic legend, is the first film George Tillman Jr. has directed since 2000’s Men of Honor, about a sharecropper’s son who becomes the first black diver in the Navy who becomes the first amputee to return to…
For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works, in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman very, very slowly approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind. Yustman…
No writer ever gazed deeper or more despairingly into the prison of middle-class American conformity than Richard Yates, which might explain why none of his books sold more than 12,000 copies in his lifetime and why it has taken more than 40 years for one of them to reach the…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly curious — a modest F. Scott Fitzgerald story, about a man born in the twilight of life and gradually regressing toward dawn, that has been adapted into a two-ton, Oscar-season white elephant. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Eric Roth,…
Walt Kowalski growls a lot — a dyspeptic rumble that wells up from deep inside his belly when he catches sight of his midriff-baring teenage granddaughter text-messaging her way through her grandmother’s funeral, or when his good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law suggest he sell his house in a gang-infested corner of…
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…
It’s July 20, 1944, and Adolf Hitler has been assassinated—the victim of a bomb blast organized and executed by a cabal of high-ranking German army officers seeking to wrest control of the country away from the Third Reich and, with luck, bring an end to World War II. Duped into…
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19 — and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with the…
With the fanboys eagerly eying Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation, Frank Miller’s version of The Spirit sneaks into theaters almost unnoticed Christmas Day — good thing too. Miller, comics-writing icon turned director, has rendered comics-industry revolutionary Will Eisner’s crime fighter Denny Colt a grim shade of dull — all talk, no…
For so major a movie star — at least, once upon a time — Jim Carrey seems to make a lot of awfully minor films, several of them over and over again. Isn’t Yes Man, in which Carrey’s self-absorbed Debbie Downer green-lights every bad decision in an effort to reinvent…
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Writing at the time, I…
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it’s no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic over-reacher Darren Aronofsky’s relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It’s also a canny example. You want to make a comeback…
