Movie Review: Moneyball
September 25, 2011
The supersmart and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since Bull Durham, is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way. Based on Michael Lewis’ 2003 nonfiction book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the picture was scripted by the powerhouse team of Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin and directed by Capote’s Bennett Miller, here proving his major-league mettle. Read more
Movie Review: Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark
August 25, 2011
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark opens with a brutally unsettling sequence: In a stately stone manor, a man traps a pretty housekeeper and smashes her teeth with a hammer (he’s already done the same thing to himself), all to offer up those teeth as a ritual sacrifice to the spirits who live there. (The spirits must sit around watching Saw sequels.) Read more
Movie Review: Our Idiot Brother
August 25, 2011
How beaming doofus Ned (Paul Rudd), the idiot in question in Our Idiot Brother, grew up to be such a mellow male in such a nutty family of females is a mystery of nature versus nurture, wrapped in a Rudd-y grin. Ned is a sunny, Jesus-haired, go-with-the-flow kind of dude who sticks to his word, tells it like he sees it, and finds the good in everyone. Ned’s three sisters, on the other hand, are tightly wound malcontents, each character fleshed out by a choice comedienne: Read more
Movie Review: Crazy, Stupid, Love.
July 29, 2011
For an actor who tends to wrap his lines in tightly clipped irony, and who from certain angles resembles Rowan Atkinson’s handsome brother, Steve Carell has an unexpectedly sincere gift for playing men who have just had the hope pulled right out from under them. In the opening scene of Crazy, Stupid, Love, Cal Weaver (Carell), a fairly typical nice-guy suburbanite, dressed in rumpled Dockers and worn sneakers, learns that his wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), has been having an affair and plans to divorce him. Read more
Movie Review: The Smurfs
July 29, 2011
The Smurfs may be blue, but their movie is decidedly green, recycling discarded bits from other celluloid Happy Meals like Alvin and the Chipmunks, Garfield, and Hop into something half animated, half live action, and all careful studio calculation. Read more
Movie Review: Cowboys & Aliens
July 29, 2011
When you go into a high-powered summer sci-fi action thriller called Cowboys & Aliens, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’re going to spend two hours watching cowboys and aliens. But what you hope to see is a film that fuses those two familiar pop-movie elements into something with a tasty, original flavor — a genre mash-up that’s greater than the sum of its clichés. Read more
Movie Review: Zookeeper
July 8, 2011
Kevin James was fine as an affable sitcom schlub and Adam Sandler sidekick, but when Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out just after the 2008 economic meltdown and became a sleeper smash, he no longer seemed an innocuous loser. Suddenly, he was America’s loser. His puffed-up myopic bravado stood in for a nation whose dreams outstripped its reality. I was hoping James would go on to develop his charismatic fecklessness, but Zookeeper (I can’t believe I’m even writing this) is a dumbed-down Paul Blart. Read more
Movie Review: Horrible Bosses
July 8, 2011
There are few comedy pleasures better suited to the medium of movies than that of watching supposedly normal people behaving terribly. And if those transgressing characters are played by popular movie stars, so much the better. Everything naughty is a little bit nicer with, for instance, Billy Bob Thornton in the title role in Bad Santa. To this sweet list of sourball comedies we can now add Horrible Bosses, a bouncy, well-built, delightfully nasty tale of resentment, desperation, and amoral revenge that does for employer-employee relations what Danny DeVito and Bette Midler did for the bonds of matrimony in the great 1986 Zucker brothers comedy Ruthless People. Read more
Movie Review: Super 8
June 10, 2011
Loving, Playful, and spectacularly well made, Super 8 is easily the best summer movie of the year — of many years. And I make that declaration with full knowledge that the season has just begun. It’s been eons since a movie has conjured up such intense, specific feelings, images, memories, and nostalgic fantasies about American summertime youth — everyone’s American summertime youth, regardless of current age, nationality, sex, or climate. It’s been ages since adolescent innocence, fatherly authority, and everyday awe were in movie vogue. Read more
Movie Review: Bridesmaids
May 12, 2011
With a bit of training, a starlet can radiate strength, flair, poise, and well-being on screen. But to project skittish insecurity and self-loathing, and to make those qualities funny and sympathetic, and to do it all with an inner glow — that takes a special kind of performer, one who can stake out an almost confessional connection to the audience. That’s what Kristen Wiig
