Note to mothers and teenage boyfriends accompanying Twilight fans to the theater: Bring earplugs. You'll want to protect your hearing from the shrieks and screams coming from teenage girls.
''I like creepy guys,'' says Kate Breck (Sophia Myles) in a bar, after one too many drinks, to the young lad named Hallam Foe (Jamie Bell). In Mister Foe -- a pervy and poignant tale of a boy on the brink of manhood, still reeling from the death of his mother -- the late-20s Kate and the just-18 Hallam tumble into a strange romance.
There are two sorts of modern-day Disney cartoons: The ones made by Pixar and everything else. Bolt, the studio's newest release, has traces of Pixar-ish humor and characterizations: The cast of talking animals includes a hamster named Rhino (voiced by Mark Walton) personable enough to have landed a job in Ratatouille's kitchen.
There are certain times in life when hearing the words ''You can tell me everything; you can talk to me'' is the greatest gift a person can receive. Juliette, the protagonist of I've Loved You So Long, is in the midst of a period of withdrawal, silence and great, unnamed inner torment. In a way, the entire movie is one long, expectant wait until Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) reaches the point at which she can build the courage to stop wielding her unspoken pain as a shield against the world...
Quantum of Solace is the first James Bond picture that technically can be labeled a sequel -- and it feels like one, too. The plot of the 22nd 007 adventure picks up directly where the previous one left off, with Bond (Daniel Craig) looking to avenge the death of his beloved Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), who was killed at the end of Casino Royale.
Issues drama at its patchiest, Battle in Seattle takes the 1999 street siege protesting the World Trade Organization conference as the jumping off point for a simplistic diatribe. The minnows vs. whales setup gives us idealistic march organizers in conflict with avaricious corporate henchmen and their governmental stooges whose policies, according to the marchers, are a raw deal for workers, the environment and Third World countries.
Mikey (Matt Boren), a sad sack visiting the Lower Manhattan loft of his parents, is immobilized by . . . what exactly? Lethargy? Fear? The fact that he is a parent (to a daughter in Los Angeles) but wants to himself remain a child? Momma's Man, insightful and involving, is a shaggy-dog story about Mikey's quarterlife crisis.
For its first 20 or so minutes, Synecdoche, New York, the directorial debut of the Oscar-winning, mind-bending screenwriter Charlie Kaufman appears to be a meditation on death. We first meet its protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), while he's lying in bed listening to a radio talk show host prattle on about how the arrival of fall announces the beginning of the death of everything that bloomed in the spring.
At this weekend's 2008 Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, practically every movie being screened between Friday and Tuesday's closing night festivities will be accompanied by a famous face. Jane Lynch, who also stars in the Hollywood comedy Role Models, will attend Friday's screening of I Do & I Don't, followed by Superman Returns' Brandon Routh, who is coming to support his film Fling.
Role Models proves that a drab and formulaic Hollywood studio comedy can still make you laugh hard enough to choke on your popcorn. The casting is the key to the success of this absolutely hilarious crowd-pleaser, which is a spiritual throwback to the 1980s comedies that made Eddie Murphy a superstar by combining a simple premise with loads of ingeniously used four-letter words.
With The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, writer-director Mark Herman attempts to do on film what John Boyne did on the printed page in his 2006 novel: confront the horror of the Holocaust in a story aimed primarily at older children (the movie is being released under the Disney banner in the U.K.)
We know we've lost Bernie Mac. And it takes only about 10 minutes of his next-to-last screen appearance, Soul Men, to show us just what we've lost.
The best part of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa comes in the opening moments. A group of military-minded penguins rebuilds a crashed airplane in an animated tip of the hat to Flight of the Phoenix. The penguins plan to use the makeshift aircraft to escape from the jungle.
The title of Clint Eastwood's new movie has a vague horror-flick vibe to it, and Changeling is, in large part, a horror film -- a fact-based story built around the notorious Wineville Chickenville Murders in late-1920s California. But the great darkness and evil at the heart of J. Michael Straczynski's script are not intended to make you jump in your seat and laugh nervously in the dark.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno is writer-director Kevin Smith's funniest, sharpest and most polished movie to date. It also is his most mature and emotionally engaging picture, even if it happens to contain one of the grossest sight gags I've ever encountered in a mainstream Hollywood film -- a bit of business so breathtakingly vile I cannot even begin to describe it here.
You should know going in that you will not be able to digest the beautifully convoluted narrative of Ashes of Time Redux in one viewing, no matter how closely you're paying attention. Originally made in 1994 (the same year Wong Kar Wai made his U.S. breakthrough with Chungking Express), the film has been released in a number of alternate versions and cuts over the ensuing 14 years. This new edit is the director's definitive imagining of his martial arts fantasy, but that fact doesn't make this version...
Think of Happy-Go-Lucky, the latest work by British filmmaker Mike Leigh, as the anti-Vera Drake. That film, which earned an Oscar nomination for Imelda Staunton, used a dark, repressive, gloomy London as backdrop for a story about a backstreet abortionist in the 1950s.
After the turgid, creatively bankrupt mess of 2005's Revolver, I naturally assumed that writer-director Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch) had finally exhausted the tough-guy milieu that had launched -- and essentially sustained -- his filmmaking career.
The problem with Hollywood movies about the Hollywood film industry is: You've seen one, you've seen them all. What Just Happened, which is based on the nonfiction book by veteran producer Art Linson (The Untouchables, Fight Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High), purports to be truer than most backstage tell-alls because its story was lived by someone who was actually there (Linson also wrote the screenplay).
Thank goodness Lionsgate made another Saw film! Otherwise, how would we as a country get to feel good about ourselves while watching humans suffer through prolonged torture, degradation and death?
Heading into a screening of Pride and Glory, a fellow critic remarked the plot sounded suspiciously similar to We Own the Night, director James Gray's drama from last year about two embattled brothers -- one a cop, the other a miscreant -- whose father was a decorated NYPD veteran.
High School Musical 3: Senior Year can't be dissected and discussed the same way as most movies. By design, it is not intended for the general masses, but for a young audience. So if you want to appreciate it like its target audience of tweeners, you have to look at the movie through their eyes.
If you're going to take on fundamentalist religion, it's less wise to use a meat ax than a rapier. Which is exactly how writer-director David Volach engages ultra Orthodox Jews of his My Father My Lord, a highly provocative, unmistakably critical drama set among Israel's Haredim (the director is himself the product of a Haredic community in Jerusalem).
Morning Light has populist ambitions, which may frustrate fans of art house documentaries. The yacht-racing drama is set up like a reality TV show, including a who-stays-and-who-goes climax that isn't far removed from a rose ceremony on The Bachelor.
''Everyone in the house is looking at me like I'm a sociopath!'' complains the high-strung Kym (Anne Hathaway) in Rachel Getting Married. ``What do they expect me to do, burn the house down?''
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