Movie Review: Joyful Noise

Joyful Noise, a squeaky-clean pop-gospel fairy tale featuring Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah in canned catfights, reflects the inspiration of Glee and God, in that order. The Glee side, at least in my book, doesn’t exactly amount to a recommendation, but it does mean that the movie’s musical numbers are catchy and rollicking and, in their bright sunshiny way, rather soulful. In the small town of Pacashau, Ga., times are hard — every other storefront is empty — but the Divinity Church choir has lifted local spirits by rising to become a semifinalist in the National Joyful Noise Competition. Read more

Movie Review: Contraband

Given how low our expectations are — or should be — for January thrillers, it’s always a pleasurable surprise to encounter one that approximates ingenuity, or even a hint of wit. So I appreciated the showpiece sequence in Contraband in which a trim, lightning-quick Mark Wahlberg, cast as a retired smuggler who’s drawn back into the game, attempts to score a pile of counterfeit bills in the tin-shack streets of Panama City. Read more

Movie Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo gives off a ripely kinky, menacing glow. It opens with psychedelic music-video credits, scored to Karen O’s caterwauling cover of Led Zeppelin’s ”Immigrant Song,” that set a mood of evil dipped in black rubber. That fanfare lets you know that the movie is going to have a sensuality and danger that the 2009 Swedish screen version, dutifully effective as it was, did not. Directed by the high-grunge master David Fincher (Zodiac, Se7en, The Social Network), the new Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sticks close to the spirit and most of the details of Stieg Larsson’s Swedish serial-killer novel, in which an officially disgraced left-wing journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), is hired to investigate a homicide that has haunted an aristocratic family for 40 years. Larsson’s plot is nothing more (or less) than a clever conventional whodunit festooned with glimmers of depravity. Fincher, however, teases out the full mythological grandeur of the material. He’s not just a great director — he’s an artist with the eyes of a voyeur, and he has made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden, looking for the sick and twisted things we can’t see. Read more

Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Tom Cruise, as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, is trying to break into the suite that houses the skyscraper’s ­computer servers, and this is the only way he can do it without being detected from within. Brad Bird, the director of Ghost Protocol, knows all too well that the audience will be on the lookout for any tell-tale cut, any obvious digital image, anything at all that reveals that Tom Cruise isn’t really on the side of that skyscraper. And damned if we can find one! This is a sequence so ingeniously conceived and shot that even the audience doesn’t want to look down — a sequence so death-defying that it gets you laughing at your own susceptibility (especially if, like me, you happen to have a fear of heights). Shimmying up and down and around the building’s surface, with the ground looking as if it must be a mile below, Cruise becomes a fearless human bug (think Spider-Man without the superpowers). Then, just as we’re sure that our hearts couldn’t dig any deeper into our throats, one of his gloves begins to short out and lose adhesive power. Don’t you hate when that happens?

Ghost Protocol brims with scenes that are exciting and amazing at the same time; they’re brought off with such casual aplomb that they’re funny, too. Read more

Movie Review: Hugo

A mysterious mechanical man with the ability to write and draw holds a place of honor in Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s exquisite adaptation of Brian Selznick’s magical, award-winning children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. And the author’s description of the automaton’s construction — ”A cascade of perfect movements, with hundreds of brilliantly calibrated actions” — is an equally good way to describe Scorsese’s achievement in making art that uses the most advanced of 3-D technology to sing a song of love to the movies, from the very dawn of the medium. For a lay audience, the result is a haunting, piquant melodrama about childhood dreams and yearnings, enhanced with a pleasant survey course in early film history. Read more

Movie Review: The Muppets

As a theatrical troupe, the Muppets haven’t exactly been AWOL these past dozen years; the gang rocked YouTube in 2009 with their kick-ass rendition of Queen’s ”Bohemian Rhapsody.” But they’ve certainly been lying low while our twitchy, tweet-y times have favored snarkier, more air-quote-driven entertainment, even from puppets. And in a way, that showbiz hiatus has worked in favor of The Muppets. For adults, the movie’s gentle, clever, unironic humor feels freshly, trendily retro now, enhanced by laughs provided in cameos from a very up-to-date roster of stars, including Rashida Jones, Jack Black, Neil Patrick Harris, Selena Gomez, and Emily Blunt. And for kids, blessedly unironic by nature until wised up by nurture, the movie is just shiny, funny, and filled with songs, including a curse-free chicken rendition of Cee-Lo’s ”F- - - You.” Read more

Movie Review: The Rum Diary

The Rum Diary marks the second time that Johnny Depp has played the proudly dissolute, candle-burning-at-both-ends gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson — or at least a thinly fictionalized version of him. It’s easy to see what’s lured him back to the role. Thompson was a lifelong student of bad behavior — it’s there in the subjects he was drawn to (the Hells Angels, Richard Nixon) and in his drug-addled, often violent antics — but he was also a born agitator, a messed-up rebel-addict with a cause. That makes him the perfect saintly sinner to be played by a Hollywood superstar who still wants to think of himself as a bad boy. Read more

Movie Review: Anonymous

According to Anonymous, the plays and sonnets attributed to lower-class William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) were in fact written by Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), the upper-class Earl of Oxford. According to Anonymous, Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave and daughter Joely Richardson, depending on Her Majesty’s age) was a lusty bed-hopper who bore more than one illegitimate child. Read more

Movie Review: Footloose

Actor Kenny Wormald arrives in Craig Brewer’s thoroughly winning remake of Footloose with a lot to prove, just like his character, Ren MacCormack. Ren’s a big-city high school rebel who relocates to a small town, takes up the right to dance to loud, groovin’ music as his cause (laws on the books forbid it), and eventually wins over everyone from the town preacher’s trouble-making daughter, Ariel (Julianne Hough), to the reverend himself (Dennis Quaid). Read more

Movie Review: Abduction

Even playing the hunted, jacked-up, dude-on-the-run hero of a ”realistic” action film, Taylor Lautner still looks like the world’s sexiest werewolf in Abduction. There’s a stylized quality to his features — not just the lupine snub nose, but the daggerish Son of Spock eyebrows that lend him a squint of intensity even when not very much is going on. That face gives Lautner one advantage as an actor: He’s a great camera subject, like the young Matt Damon crossed with Tom Cruise. Read more

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