Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Release Date: September 24, 2010

Genre: Drama

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Director: Oliver Stone

Screenwriter: Oliver Stone, Allan Loeb

Movie Website: WallStreetMoneyNeverSleeps.com

Actors/Actresses: Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Frank Langella, Carey Mulligan, Susan Sarandon, Vanessa Ferlito, Charlie Sheen

Plot Summary: Shia LaBeouf stars with Michael Douglas, who’ll reprise his Gordon Gekko role. Langella will play Lewis Zabel, an old-time broker who mentors LaBeouf’s character, a young Wall Street broker.

When Gekko comes out of prison, he essentially has to redefine himself, redefine his character, he’s looking for that second chance.

LaBeouf portrays Jake Moore, who is the fiancé of Gekko’s daughter, played by Carey Mulligan; Josh Brolin as the head of an investment bank; and Susan Sarandon as Jake’s mother. Charlie Sheen, who played the central role of Bud Fox, a young trader, in the original, will make a cameo in the sequel.

You Again

Release Date: September 24, 2010

Genre: Comedy

MPAA Rating: PG

Studio: Touchstone Pictures

Director: Andy Fickman

Screenwriter: Moe Jelline

Movie Website: YouAgain-themovie.com

Actors/Actresses: Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Odette Yustman, Kristin Chenoweth, Victor Garber, Betty White

Plot Summary: Successful PR pro Marni (Kristen Bell) heads home for her older brother’s (Jimmy Wolk) wedding and discovers that he’s marrying her high school arch nemesis (Odette Yustman), who’s conveniently forgotten their problematic past. Then the bride’s jet-setting aunt (Sigourney Weaver) bursts in and Marni’s not-so-jet-setting mom (Jamie Lee Curtis) comes face to face with her own high school rival. The claws come out and old wounds are opened in this crazy comedy that proves that not all rivalries are forever.

The American

Release Date: September 1, 2010

Genre: Suspense Thriller

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: Focus Features

Director: Anton Corbijn

Screenwriter: Rowan Joffe

Trailer

Movie Website: TheAmericanthemovie.com

Actors/Actresses: George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli

Plot Summary: Academy Award winner George Clooney stars in the title role of this suspense thriller. As an assassin, Jack (Clooney) is constantly on the move and always alone. After a job in Sweden ends more harshly than expected for this American abroad, Jack retreats to the Italian countryside. He relishes being away from death for a spell as he holes up in a small medieval town. While there, Jack takes an assignment to construct a weapon for a mysterious contact, Mathilde (Reuten). Savoring the peaceful quietude he finds in the mountains of Abruzzo, Jack accepts the friendship of local priest Father Benedetto (Bonacelli) and pursues a torrid liaison with a beautiful woman, Clara (Placido). Jack and Clara’s time together evolves into a romance, one seemingly free of danger. But by stepping out of the shadows, Jack may be tempting fate.

Let’s say this upfront: The American is not an audience movie in the generally recognized sense of the term.

It is not an action movie.

It is not a thriller in any conventional sense.

Forget about the TV commercials and theatrical trailers that make it look like George Clooney is playing some Jason Bourne-like character, mowing down every bad guy who gets in his way.

It’s not that movie. Instead, it’s an art film. Anyone who goes in expecting it to be in any way a typical Hollywood product will be sorely disappointed.

Now, having said that, let me say how much I enjoyed The American. It is one of the most beautifully photographed, controlled, even formal films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a character study with a thoroughly European sensibility, an examination of one man coming to terms with his own sins and shortcomings. It is a film that rewards the patient viewer with a superbly understated Clooney performance; everyone else will, unfortunately, be bored silly.

As played by Clooney, Jack (or Edward, depending on who he’s talking to) is a professional killer whose last job went south in a bad way. Initially seen in a post-prandial pose in a Swedish cabin on a wintry lake with a naked woman, it ends with Clooney having killed three people.

As he rides a ferry back to whatever it is that his life is, the bearded Clooney has a decidedly haunted cast to his features. That slightly doomy countenance — not nervous but intensely alert, as much anticipating the hand of karma as guarding against the expected bullet from an enemy — rarely leaves Clooney’s face through The American.

Jack heads for Rome, where his employer (Johan Leysen) offers him a refuge and another assignment: a job that doesn’t involve killing anyone. Rather, he heads for a tiny town in the Italian hills, where he meets a woman (Thekla Reuten) in search of a custom-made weapon, one with the capacity of a machine gun and the range of a rifle. Jack’s job is to build it for her (though his mantra to anyone who asks is “I’m not good with machines”). She’s obviously a professional, but Jack is so much of a pro (and so withdrawn) that he only asks about specifications and otherwise speaks when spoken to.

And, really, that’s it.

Release Date: September 1, 2010

Genre: Suspense Thriller

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: Focus Features

Director: Anton Corbijn

Screenwriter: Rowan Joffe

Trailer

Movie Website: TheAmericanthemovie.com

Actors/Actresses: George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli

Our Verdict:

In Corbjin’s minimalist, European art thriller, basically a Western in disguise, George Clooney challenges himself–and the audience–with his quietest, stillest, most internalized part to date as a solitary gunslinger seeking redemption in seclusion.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Release Date: September 10, 2010 (3D/2D theaters and IMAX 3D)

Genre: Action, Horror

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: Screen Gems (Sony)

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Screenwriter: Paul W.S. Anderson

Trailer

Movie Website: ResidentEvil-movie.com

Actors/Actresses: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Kim Coates, Shawn Roberts, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Spencer Locke, Boris Kodjoe, Wentworth Miller, Sienna Guillory

Plot Summary: The fourth installment of the hugely successful “Resident Evil” franchise, “Resident Evil: Afterlife” is again based on the wildly popular video game series, and will this time be presented in 3-D.

In a world ravaged by a virus infection, turning its victims into the Undead, Alice (Milla Jovovich), continues on her journey to find survivors and lead them to safety. Her deadly battle with the Umbrella Corporation reaches new heights, but Alice gets some unexpected help from an old friend. A new lead that promises a safe haven from the Undead takes them to Los Angeles, but when they arrive the city is overrun by thousands of Undead – and Alice and her comrades are about to step into a deadly trap.

The Town

Release Date: September 17, 2010

Genre: Crime, Drama

MPAA Rating: R

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

Director: Ben Affleck

Screenwriter: Ben Affleck, Peter Craig, Aaron Stockard

Movie Website: TheTownmovie.com

Actors/Actresses: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper

Plot Summary: Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) is an unrepentant criminal, the de facto leader of a group of ruthless bank robbers who pride themselves in stealing what they want and getting out clean. With no real attachments, Doug never has to fear losing anyone close to him. But that all changed on the gang’s latest job, when they briefly took a hostage–bank manager, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall). Though they let her go unharmed, Claire is nervously aware that the robbers know her name…and where she lives. But she lets her guard down when she meets an unassuming and rather charming man named Doug…not realizing that he is the same man who only days earlier had terrorized her. The instant attraction between them gradually turns into a passionate romance that threatens to take them both down a dangerous, and potentially deadly, path.

Easy A

Release Date: September 17, 2010

Genre: Comedy, Drama

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Studio: Screen Gems (Sony)

Director: Will Gluck

Screenwriter: Bert V. Royal

Movie Website: LetsNotandSayWeDid.com

Actors/Actresses: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Cam Gigandet, Lisa Kudrow, Malcolm MacDowell, Aly Michalka, Stanley Tucci

Plot Summary: After a little white lie about losing her virginity gets out, a clean cut high school girl (Emma Stone) sees her life paralleling Hester Prynne’s in “The Scarlet Letter,” which she is currently studying in school – until she decides to use the rumor mill to advance her social and financial standing.

Real-life buddies Ryan Reynolds and Bradley Cooper are now attached to star in a Lethal Weapon-esque action comedy about two San Francisco detectives who need their retired-cop fathers to help them solve a case.

Reynolds and Cooper will be starring in an untitled action-comedy, which “follows two friends, who are also San Francisco cops, whose fathers were once partners on the police force. The older generation is forced out of retirement to help their sons crack a case, with typically antagonistic results.” No word yet on who will play the patriarchs. They guys will predictably be forced to deal with their own daddy issues.

Reynolds is currently filming the highly anticipated comic book blockbuster The Green Lantern, due out in June, and returns to the big screen next month trapped six feet under in the Hitchcockian indie thriller Buried. As for Cooper, after wrapping the thriller The Dark Fields opposite Robert De Niro, he’s slated to begin shooting The Hangover 2 in October.

A group of smooth-acting criminals (Paul Walker, Idris Elba, Chris Brown, et al.) rob banks. A pair of worn-out cops (Matt Dillon and Jay Hernandez) try to stop them. Sound oversimplified? Welcome to the world of Takers, where slick passes for smart, motivation is for wimps (Why do they steal? Because it’s cool!), and our merry band of robbers look like they spend more time laying out their hep-cat outfits than they do plotting their next charmingly retro, money-stuffed-in-a-duffle heist. At least they do look sharp in those suits.

Release Date: August 27, 2010

Genre: Action

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Studio: Screen Gems (Sony)

Director: John Luessenhop

Screenwriter: Peter Allen, Gabriel Casseus, John Luessenhop, Avery Duff

Trailer

Movie Website: WhoAretheTakers.com

Actors/Actresses: Matt Dillon, Paul Walker, Idris Elba, Jay Hernandez, Tip “T.I.” Harris, Michael Ealy, Chris Brown, Hayden Christensen

Plot Summary: “Takers,” directed by John Luessenhop, revolves around a notorious group of criminals (Idris Elba, Paul Walker, T.I., Chris Brown, Hayden Christensen and Michael Ealy) who continue to baffle police by pulling off perfectly executed bank robberies. They are in and out like clockwork, leaving no evidence behind and laying low in between heists. But when they attempt to pull off one last job with more money at stake than ever before, the crew may find their plans interrupted by a hardened detective (Matt Dillon) who is hell-bent on solving the case.

Our Verdict:

With no emotional heft to the performances, it’s hard to care whether anyone’s dreams are dashed or fulfilled. That leaves the heist itself to compensate, but it only digs deeper into tired action movie cliches.

Any movie with the word exorcism in the title is inviting you to compare it to a movie that a great many people consider the scariest horror film ever made. That’s a hook, commercially — but it also raises the bar for shivers mercilessly high. The image of Linda Blair as a leering, ranting, head-swiveling, pea-soup-spewing harpy demon-child in The Exorcist (1973) struck an unholy fear even in those who thought that they didn’t believe in the devil. The movie was a blasphemous nightmare for a jaded, skeptical time; it shocked the secularity right out of you. So let’s say this much for The Last Exorcism, a low-budget fake-documentary horror film that tries to raise a little hell in the jittery-cam this is really happening! spirit of Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project: It’s nothing if not clever about toying with your expectations.

The central character is a charismatic Southern yuppie preacher named Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) who’s a self-confessed fraud. The basic conceit is that he’s allowing a documentary to be made about him. He plans to leave his career of fire-and-brimstone baloney behind him by taking a film crew along on one of his sham exorcisms — spooky, rigged rites of devil conjuring that he stages in the homes of deluded rednecks who believe that they have a ”possessed” family member in their midst. (The rituals work, explains Cotton, through the power of suggestion.) For his final bogus exorcism, Cotton visits the home of Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum), an ignorant, alcoholic farmer who thinks that his 16-year-old daughter, Nell (Ashley Bell), has got the devil inside her. His animals keep showing up slaughtered, and Nell, with the beatific smile and avid eyes of someone who could be a Sunday-school valedictorian or a Manson girl (or maybe both at once), is just ambiguous enough to fascinate us.

When Cotton performs his initial exorcism, with fake devil sounds and a crucifix that shoots out smoke, the joke is that all his tricks come right out of The Exorcist. The movie, of course, is just setting us up for something even more gothic and yucky. The Last Exorcism is structured to be Cotton’s comeuppance (the first scare is the jolting sound of Nell’s surly teenage brother pelting Cotton’s car with mudballs). From the moment he approaches the Sweetzer farm, we’re waiting for this flimflam savior, who thinks that the devil is as fake as he is, to learn that Satan is not so fake after all.

So what does the devil look like in The Last Exorcism? I’d be the Antichrist if I spoiled it, but I will say that the movie, directed by Daniel Stamm from a script by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, with Eli Roth serving as producer, is a nightmare vision of the rise of Christian fundamentalism. It’s about the dark side of piety — the cultish wrath that can emerge out of the high and the mighty. At the center of it all, once again, is a teenage girl’s gnashing madness. The original Exorcist came out a few years after the feminist revolution kicked into gear, and Linda Blair’s she-devil expressed our primal fear of a newly furious, newly empowered, and newly sexualized generation of young girls, the first that seemed to be channeling wanton forces far beyond their control. The best thing in The Last Exorcism is Ashley Bell’s performance: She knows how to make rage the flip side of innocence. Especially when the camera follows her into the barn, and we see how those animals really died.

The Last Exorcism is a movie that operates by stringing us along, feeding off our anticipation. For a while, the movie shrewdly exploits our voyeurism, all built around the teasing question of whether there’s actually anything supernatural going on. The payoff, however, simply isn’t scary enough. The movie is like The Exorcist without a spine-tingling catharsis. Still, it does leave you with creepy images of a newly severe Bible-thumping underground America. That’s the thing about the devil in movies: He’s really just a mirror.

Release Date: August 27, 2010

Genre: Horror

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Studio: Lionsgate

Director: Daniel Stamm

Screenwriter: Huck Botko, Andrew Gurland

Trailer

Movie Website: TheLastExorcism.com

Actors/Actresses: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell

Plot Summary: When he arrives on the rural Louisiana farm of Louis Sweetzer, the Reverend Cotton Marcus expects to perform just another routine “exorcism” on a disturbed religious fanatic. An earnest fundamentalist, Sweetzer has contacted the charismatic preacher as a last resort, certain his teenage daughter Nell is possessed by a demon who must be exorcized before their terrifying ordeal ends in unimaginable tragedy.

Buckling under the weight of his conscience after years of parting desperate believers with their money, Cotton and his crew plan to film a confessionary documentary of this, his last exorcism. But upon arriving at the already blood drenched family farm, it is soon clear that nothing could have prepared him for the true evil he encounters there. Now, too late to turn back, Reverend Marcus’ own beliefs are shaken to the core when he and his crew must find a way to save Nell – and themselves – before it is too late.

Our Verdict:

Though sharply uneven and marred by a compromised ending, this cheaply-made horror flick still manages to be creepy for half of its time and provocative in its ideas about religion, faith, and the very medium of film.