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Pirate Radio tepidly looks back at broadcast rebels
on 11/13/09 at 9:00 am | Despite a title change from The Boat That Rocked to Pirate Radio, this British import exudes about as much outlaw swagger as Tom DeLay in a dance competition. Forget about historical veracity. The film's offshore radio broadcasting ship Radio Rock is a fictional stand-in for the actual operation Radio Caroline, which was shut down by the British government in 1967. |
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Up
on 11/13/09 at 9:00 am | Up: Pixar tops itself with an animated film about a solitary codger who hooks up his house to thousands of helium balloons, flying high with a young scout accidentally in tow. This isn't just a kids' movie, but one that will provide complete satisfaction for all viewers, no matter their age. |
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An elegy for Michael Jackson in This Is It
on 10/30/09 at 9:00 am | Ever see a dream moonwalking? Well, I did. Michael Jackson's posthumously released film about the preparations for his 50-concert comeback extravaganza is a strange creature indeed. |
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A Serious Man retells the Job story
on 10/23/09 at 9:00 am | Embrace paradox; accept life's mysteries. These are some of the things that serious men learn. God owes us bupkis in the way of answers. With A Serious Man, the Coen brothers have made one of their best and most personal movies. It is rich with ideas and packed with the sort of existential jokes that tickle the Coen boys so. |
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Whip It: Skating party
on 10/02/09 at 9:00 am | Drew Barrymore's directing debut, Whip It, based on a screenplay about women's roller derby by Shauna Cross, teems with girl-power spirit and exudes an all-encompassing benevolence. |
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Capitalism: A Love Story: Filthy lucre
on 10/02/09 at 9:00 am | The aspects of Michael Moore's filmmaking that we have come to embrace over the years -- his prominent roles as sloppy court jester and self-appointed spokesman for the American people -- are the very things that get him into trouble in his new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. |
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The Informant!: Exclamation point
on 09/18/09 at 9:00 am | Although The Informant!'s screenplay is based on Kurt Eichenwald's book of the same name, the movie's addition of an exclamation point to its title is revealing. |
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Adventureland
on 08/28/09 at 9:00 am | |
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The Stoning of Soraya M.: Brutal punishment
on 08/21/09 at 9:00 am | The Stoning of Soraya M., an impassioned, American-financed drama, is in service to the filmmakers' opposition to the religiously sanctioned stoning of inconvenient or insubordinate Muslim women in Iran and elsewhere. So far, so good. |
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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen brings more noise
on 06/26/09 at 9:00 am | Michael Bay's follow-up to his international smash hit of 2007 ups the ante on big and dumb. His new Transformers movie, whose extraterrestrials are based on the Hasbro toys which can morph from cars and other prosaic metal objects into awesome fighting machines, aims for impact over sense, clobbering viewers with its sensory overload and bludgeoning us into weary submission. |
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Confessions of a Shopaholic
on 06/26/09 at 9:00 am | Isla Fisher plays a journalist with out-of-control credit card debt in this predictable romantic comedy. |
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Shall We Kiss?: Friends-plus
on 05/22/09 at 9:00 am | Quintessentially French in its preoccupation with the vagaries of l'amour, Shall We Kiss? is painfully dunderheaded about the proclivities of the human heart. |
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Frost/Nixon, Notorious
on 04/24/09 at 9:00 am | |
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Elegy
on 03/20/09 at 9:00 am | A New York critic and part-time academic (Ben Kingsley) becomes sexually involved with an admiring student (Penelope Cruz). |
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Bottle Shock
on 02/06/09 at 9:00 am | |
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Gran Torino: Clint Eastwood is perfect in latest role
on 01/09/09 at 9:00 am | Nick Schenk's Gran Torino screenplay wasn't written with Clint Eastwood in mind as the film's star and director, but you'd never guess it. |
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Doubt: Power struggle
on 01/01/09 at 9:00 am | Playwright John Patrick Shanley adapted his Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning play Doubt for the movies and also decided to direct the film -- an activity he hasn't pursued since his one other directorial effort in 1990, the ill-received Joe Versus the Volcano. The cast he gathered for Doubt is peerless, and, if nothing else, this assemblage is always a pleasure to watch. |
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Cadillac Records: Bluesmen and -women
on 12/12/08 at 9:00 am | Cadillac Records looks at postwar Chicago and musicians who gravitated there — Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Chuck Berry and Etta James — and the Chess Records label, which recorded and promoted so much of their work. Although writer/director Darnell Martin's movie plays fast and loose with many of the historical facts, her aim is dead-on in terms of nailing the spirit of the thing. Cadillac Records bobs and weaves, strides and duckwalks, samples and smiles on the sounds that made urban Chicago such a blues melting pot. |
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Elegy: Hot for teacher
on 08/22/08 at 9:00 am | Old age is creeping up on David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), something that this New Yorker has managed to outrun until recently. In his 60s, with enviable work as a cultural critic and part-time academic, Kepesh remains strong in body and mind, but his illusory island of self-preservation begins to crumble once he becomes sexually involved with Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz). |
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Tropic Thunder: Heart of snarkness
on 08/15/08 at 9:00 am | Instead of entering the jungle to find the heart of darkness, Ben Stiller (the director, co-star, and co-writer of Tropic Thunder) goes in to take aim at the Achilles heel of Hollywood: its utter pomposity and self-importance. |
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The Counterfeiters: Faking it
on 04/11/08 at 9:01 am | What we call the moral compass often fails to operate in the fog of war. This is the subject of the Austrian film The Counterfeiters, winner of this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film. |
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Smart People
on 04/11/08 at 9:00 am | Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), a widowed professor of Victorian literature at Carnegie Mellon, is the central "smart person" in Smart People. He's a guy who would be able to spell "dysfunctional" with ease but never recognize the word as a description of himself and his family. Lawrence is acerbic and demanding, yet wholly uninterested in his students, family and career. He's remote toward his two nearly grown children, James (Ashton Holmes) and Vanessa (Ellen Page), a high school senior whose character traits are even worse than her old man's. |
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Sicko
on 11/09/07 at 10:00 am | |
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Away From Her
on 09/14/07 at 10:00 am | |
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Delta Farce, Georgia Rule
on 09/07/07 at 10:01 am | Georgia Rule: A willful teenager (Lindsay Lohan) is sent by her alcoholic mother (Felicity Huffman) to live with her grandmother (Jane Fonda) in a small Idaho town rife with Mormons. In spite of excellent performances, the blend of melodrama and humor is awkward and incongruous. |
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Gal meets guy!
on 08/10/07 at 11:01 am | At the heart of this romantic comedy is Parker Posey's lovely, toned-down performance as Nora Wilder, the single, mid-30s Manhattanite. The role calls on her to utilize more of her dramatic acting chops than are usually on display in the more arch comic roles in which she's usually cast. |
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Mistakes were made
on 07/05/07 at 3:22 pm | Given the general state of things these days, we should feel grateful for a woman-centered Hollywood movie that stars an abundant number of award-winning actresses, was co-scripted by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Michael Cunningham of The Hours), features an outstanding number of women among its technical crew and is helmed by the highly accomplished cinematographer-turned-director Lajos Koltai. In fact, Evening has so much going for it that it's painful to report that all this window-dressing is to no avail. |
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U.S. health-care system is diseased
on 07/05/07 at 3:19 pm | With Sicko, his latest documentary, professional gadfly Michael Moore examines the shortcomings of the American health-care system, and he's crafted his most accessible and least divisive movie to date. The film contends that the American system of managed health care is conceptually misguided, dictated by the for-profit motives of the insurance industry. |
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Black Snake Moan
on 06/28/07 at 1:28 pm | |
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Kill if you must
on 05/31/07 at 9:09 am | Serial killers are a dime a dozen in Mr. Brooks. It’s an often beguiling but essentially ludicrous movie that flirts with the idea that the urge to kill is just another one of the pesky addiction problems that plague modern society. |
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