Fly Me to the Moon is the first feature-length computer-animated 'toon made specifically for 3-D. This is a good thing, because the movie would be unwatchable without it.
The people who made Bottle Shock obviously love their wine. They're not that crazy about the French. And they are firm believers in the screenwriting rule of leaving no underdog-formula cliché unused, even when your movie is already dangerously overloaded with them.
What would possess a man to string a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and then spend 45 minutes walking and dancing on it, suspended 1,350 feet stories above the ground?
Every time you're ready to count Woody Allen out for good, he comes back and surprises you. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the fourth picture Allen has made in what will become known as his European exile (Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra's Dream), has the lightness of touch and astute insight of Manhattan and Husbands and Wives. It's not on the same level as those movies -- it's not nearly as lasting or haunting -- but it has the same inviting quality and emotional accessibility, and there are long stretches...
The frustratingly uneven comedy Tropic Thunder has moments of full-on, bust-a-gut hilarity, along with long stretches where you can hear the crickets chirping in the theater.
A more accurate title for the ensemble comedy Smart People might have been Unhappy People, since it's their mutual mopeyness that links all the film's characters. First-time director Noam Murro, working from a script by novelist-turned-screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier, is content to let us wallow in the cast's photogenic, witty sadness: By film's end, everyone is still pretty much as miserable as they started, if a little wiser and more open to the possibility of doing something about it.
Among the extras to be included in the two-disc Iron Man DVD and Blu-ray discs due on Sept. 30 will be Robert Downey Jr.'s screen test, along with cast rehearsals before the start of shooting, further proof that it was Downey's performance and not his superhero alter-ego that really drove the unexpected success of that film.
Woody Allen didn't choose Spain as the setting for his new movie. Spain chose him. Allen only had a vague idea for the premise of what would become Vicky Cristina Barcelona -- two women on summer vacation in Europe -- when he received a call from the Spanish film distribution company Mediapro offering to finance his next film if he shot it in Barcelona.
SMALL SCREEN Belarussian Waltz (2 a.m. Thursday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- This is why God gave us TiVo: WPBT has unaccountably scheduled this engaging documentary about one of the world's weirdest little countries at a time when the only people who can watch are bartenders and vampires just getting home from their shifts. Airing as an episode of the PBS series P.O.V., it examines the strange tale of the last dictatorship in Europe, the one-time Soviet state of Belarussia. Neo-Stalinist strongman Alexander...
In concept, the movies that form Judd Apatow's canon sound like a grab bag of 10-minute comedy skits: A schlub gets a hot girl pregnant. Two high school losers try to score alcohol for a party. An ordinary guy gets dumped by his TV-famous girlfriend. A 40-year-old virgin tries to remedy his situation.
The American teenager has been the subject of so much dissection and analysis in popular culture that a documentary titled American Teen initially sounds redundant. What could a film that followed a group of Indiana high school students for a year possibly offer that a dozen reality-TV shows or a surf through MySpace don't already provide?
SMALL SCREEN Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone (9 p.m. Thursday, IFC) -- Smut peddler or First Amendment paladin, helpful political gadfly or just plain jerk, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt has inspired a lot of rancorous opinions over the years. This documentary isn't going to settle anything, especially your blood pressure, but it's an interesting chronicle of 30 years of free-speech fireworks.
Pineapple Express is the world's first weed-action comedy. It's what might have ensued, say, if Cheech and Chong suddenly found themselves inside a Quentin Tarantino picture. This is an endearingly slovenly, profane movie with bursts of startling violence, but it's all played for nyuk-nyuk laughs, and it has been directed with more care than it might initially appear by David Gordon Green (Snow Angels, George Washington), here making his first genuine bid for mainstream success.
The Holocaust drama The Counterfeiters won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language film and grossed a healthy $5.3 million during its theatrical run (a great number for a subtitled movie), which explains why it has received such thoughtful treatment for its release on home video (Sony, $29 DVD, $39 Blu-ray).
Further proof that Blu-ray discs are taking hold: Studios are beginning to schedule respected classics on the format to go along with all the flashy action pictures. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has been announced for Feb. 3 (yeah, it's a long way off, but at least it's coming). Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove will debut on Blu-ray on Dec. 9. A fat box of all the Planet of the Apes pictures arrives on Nov. 4, a special edition of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein lands on Oct. 7 and Oliver Stone's...
For decades, movie purists scoffed and scowled when they heard the term 3-D -- a synonym for the headache-inducing gimmick Hollywood studios popularized in the 1950s to pry audiences away from their newfangled TV sets and get them back into the theater.
In a different year, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor might have squeaked by as a pedestrian but serviceable time-killer, much like the first two Mummy pictures (or even the spin-off The Scorpion King). But this has been the summer of The Dark Knight and Iron Man and Hellboy II and even Wanted and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This summer, even the merely tolerable has a new standard.
Male arrested development has been the subject of enough comedies in the past couple of years to warrant its own mini-genre. But even the man-children of Step Brothers would be puzzled by the protagonist of Full Grown Men -- a 35-year-old husband and father who walks out on his family after an argument over action figures.
The exuberance of the storytelling in Reprise, the impressive debut by Norwegian director Joachim Trier (who also co-wrote the script), makes a fine foil for the film's darker moments. This story about two aspiring writers in their early 20s has the fearlessness and vivacity of a first novel, and its playful approach to chronology and voice-over narration serves to amplify its themes instead of coming off as a show-off trick.
Every time you think there isn't a movie left that Doomsday hasn't ripped off, writer-director Neil Marshall proves you wrong. A cheeky melange of Escape From New York, The Road Warrior, 28 Days Later, Gladiator and Braveheart, Doomsday has everything except a singular identity, but the story moves so quickly, and often in such outrageous directions, that the derivativeness becomes a pleasure of its own.
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