Watching W., you get a sense of the scrupulous care and respect with which director Oliver Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser approached their movie about the troubled presidency of George W. Bush. This is, for Stone, an unusually restrained and well-behaved film, one that is going to confound viewers expecting a free-for-all demonization of the 43rd president of the United States.
Max Payne accomplishes the nearly impossible. It is overloaded with excruciatingly long, brain-hurting, rambling scenes of dull exposition, yet manages to remain a muddled, confusing mess.
Movies like Porky's and American Pie set the raunchy standard for teen sex films. In recent years, Superbad and Road Trip have tried to live up to that standard, but they came up short.
The kind of movie so heartfelt and earnest it makes you feel like a grouch for not surrendering to it, The Secret Life of Bees emotes mightily but says precious little. There's something too perfect and precious about writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood's adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's bestseller, about a 14-year-old girl named Lily (Dakota Fanning) who flees her abusive father (Paul Bettany) in 1964 South Carolina.
Coyote, the opening night film of the 2008 Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, offers a unique spin on the well-trodden subject of illegal immigration. Director/co-writer Brian Petersen also stars as Steve, a 31-year-old Arizona millionaire who made his fortune during the Internet boom and is now a little bored with his life, having nothing to engage him except his impending marriage to Katie (Carley Adams).
The most amazing film of the year introduces us to a superhero -- in a documentary about Hurricane Katrina. Kim Roberts, aka Black Kold Madina, was an aspiring rapper in New Orleans' impoverished Lower Ninth Ward when the hurricane hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Kim and her husband, Scott, had no way to evacuate, and as the levees breached, Kim filmed the rising waters with a video camera that she had bought from a street hustler a week earlier.
Ernie Davis didn't carry a placard or attend sit-ins or register black voters in Alabama. He became a figure in the civil rights movement simply by running the football better than anyone else in college.
If the family-oriented fantasy City of Ember wasn't based on the 2003 novel by Jeanne Duprau, you'd swear it had been inspired by a theme-park attraction. Adapted by screenwriter Caroline Thompson (whose previous films include Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas), the movie is an exceedingly slight tale whose entire second half consists primarily of special effects and wonderful set designs.
The title Body of Lies sounds like something you might catch on Cinemax on a late weekend night -- a movie starring Heather Locklear as the sultry defendant in a scandalous murder trial. It's a generic, clunky title. The movie isn't quite as disposable, but it's not exactly memorable, either.
There's a well-defined line between wholesome and hokey, especially when depicting the life of one of the 20th century's respected religious figures.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, director David Zucker said distributor Vivendi Entertainment did not screen An American Carol in advance for reviews because 'those [who] don't like the politics will tend to label the film as `not funny.' '' The implication, of course, is that movie critics are a pitchfork-and-torch mob of raging leftist liberals who will tear down anything that opposes their personal ideologies.
The heavy-handed allegory Blindness suggests that society teeters on the edge of chaos, and that not much is required to shove us into anarchy and lawlessness. In the case of this inexplicably tedious film, based on the bestselling novel by José Saramago, the event is a sudden, unexplained epidemic of vision loss that affects the population of an unnamed city.
Toby Young's memoir about climbing up -- and then sliding rapidly down -- the ladder at Vanity Fair makes an engaging transition to the screen, thanks to a lively adaptation that embellishes greatly on Young's story but preserves the central fish-out-of-water theme and biting commentary on celebrity obsession.
It's the first day of school and Greg Kinnear, as a college engineering professor, writes the word ''ethics'' on the blackboard for his students to ponder.
Essentially a buddy movie in which the cops tote shotguns and travel on four legs instead of four wheels, Appaloosa takes the traditional notion of a lone lawman fighting injustice and turns it successfully on its head. Based on a spritely western by detective novelist Robert B. Parker, creator of the Spenser series, the film follows the exploits of Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), gunslinging partners in a ''peacekeeping'' business who are hired by town officials to keep...
Early on in the documentary Religulous, stand-up comedian/political commentator Bill Maher states his thesis -- ''Religion is detrimental to humanity'' -- and then spends the rest of the movie hopping around the world, trying to prove it.
The problem with most movie romances -- the thing that makes so many of them tough to sit through -- is that you're usually just waiting for the couple to get on with it and realize they're made for each other, so you can go home and continue about your business.
Only the meanest of grouches can resist a talking-animal movie. But no one, absolutely no one, is immune to the charms of a talking-dog picture. Even a film as shabby and humdrum as Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which never musters up the wit and beauty of a single frame of Lady and the Tramp, is not without its pleasures.
Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great (or so) aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, but whether that family tie is sufficient reason to dedicate an entire movie to her remains questionable.
In The Lucky Ones, three returning Iraq War veterans find themselves on an improbable cross-country journey. The word ''lucky'' in the title of the film has a relative meaning. The soldiers -- Colee (Rachel McAdams), TK (Michael Pena) and Cheever (Tim Robbins) -- were injured in the war. Colee has a wounded leg, TK caught a piece of shrapnel in his private parts, which aren't working, and Cheever had a porta-potty fall on him, giving him a bad back.
While I've never read a Nicholas Sparks' novel, in the films made from his books, his characters inevitably experience The Big Contradiction. Namely, that love is fleeting -- and it is eternal.
Towelhead, the film directorial debut of Alan Ball, is just as provocative and disquieting as his previous work (he wrote American Beauty and created HBO's Six Feet Under and True Blood). It may even be more unsettling. Right from the opening scene, in which a man helps his 13-year-old stepdaughter with a bit of personal hygiene he has no business whatsoever conducting, the movie rattles you, makes you squirm in your seat.
For further proof that actor Shia LaBeouf is a Hollywood superstar in the making, check out Eagle Eye, a ridiculous wrongly-accused-guy-on-the-run thriller in which the actor spends most of his screen time running, and yet still manages to hold the movie together. Barely.
In Spike Lee's long and eclectic career, Miracle at St. Anna is easily his most technically ambitious film. But he might not have been ready for the enormity of such a project. Miracle at St. Anna is wildly unfocused in terms of tone and, at two hours and 40 minutes, it is unjustifiably overlong.
Choke is the sunny, funny version of a Chuck Palahniuk movie. The insurgent novelist's only other book that's been brought to the screen is Fight Club, though.
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