As well-intentioned as an Activia commercial. Grade: B-
Todd Solondz's twenty-first century oeuvre has tended to be experimental and workshoppy. In that regard, Life During Wartime is more of a reckoning with 1998's Happiness than a conventional sequel. It's thoughtfully presented and ably performed but it lacks the original's spark of cinematic vitality. Grade: B
About a half hour of really funny material stretched excruciatingly thin. Marky Mark, don't quit your day abs. I almost would rather have watched the Dwayne Johnson-Sam Jackson fake-out. Grade: C
Preposterously entertaining Cold School thriller, directed with Early Nineties expertise by a Clear and Present Phillip Noyce. Grade: B
Tom Hardy is the second coming of Oliver Reed. Grade: B
Pretty good for a threequel and then just pretty fucking great. Grade: A-
Notoriously difficult directors make the most uncompromisingly awful movies. Grade: F
Director Michael Patrick King has an uncanny ability to make any shooting location resemble a backlot in Burbank. That said, if you know what you're getting into, this live-action Chipmunk Adventure is watchable the way reruns of The King of Queens are watchable when you're stuck in a hotel room or on a long flight. Grade: B-
It's Jerry Bruckheimer's world—Mike Newell's just flailing in it. Grade: C-
Where Nicole Holofcener's previous ensemble piece Friends With Money was sunny, humane and keenly observed, Please Give is dreary, humane and mostly observed from Catherine Keener's point of view. The lower light levels and narrower focus exact a toll. Grade: B
Messy, meandering pageantry from Ridley Scott, who ought to know better. Grade: B-
Colorful, eventful, playful—Tony Stark is the new old James Bond. Too bad neither Mickey Rourke nor Sam Rockwell is Blofeld. In this case more is a little bit less. Grade: B
Basically an R-rated comic-book movie for tweens. Color-grade: B
Here's Noah Baumbach with another dirge about privileged youth and stalled adulthood. Fortunately, unlike Margot at the Wedding, this one's actually—even eminently—watchable. Grade: B+
Paul Greengrass has taken the Green Zone from Rajiv Chandrasekaran's thoughtfully observed Imperial Life in the Emerald City and fashioned it into his own heart-pounding Greengrass Zone; and while it's a skillful transformation, it's debatable how much of the source material's subtlety and insight remain. It may be time for the filmmaker to move outside his own comfort zone and venture beyond political thrillers. PS. Nice Henry Czerny impression, Greg Kinnear. Grade: B-
Tim Burton is an Ambien overdose away from becoming an Adobe After Effects plug-in. Grade: F
You'd think Disney would be willing to take more risks with traditional animation now that the Pixar brain trust is firmly in place. You'd be wrong. The Princess and the Frog is so tasteful that it barely leaves an aftertaste. It's chaste, pretty, colorful—and almost completely lacking in immediacy or dramatic tension. There's no heroic journey to speak of because no one actually goes anywhere or does anything interesting. Even the villain—that mainstay of classic Disney storytelling—is more of a nuisance than he is a threat. This is a nice story about well-behaved people who end up in a sunny place, respectfully told. There is nothing primal or vital here—and that's a disappointment. Grade: B-
Sags considerably in the midsection like most of Gilliam's movies; but unlike his more recent work, the vital parts are electric—poised along that knife's edge where threadbare invention yields to lush fantasy, and where the director's more memorable efforts reside. Grade: B
Starring Sherlock Holmes as Harry Potter. Visually eventful, technically proficient, generally playful; convolutedly plotted. Grade: B-
A by-the-numbers tale of romance, rehab and redemption that's elevated by ingratiatingly naturalistic performances and, some clunky second-act machinery notwithstanding, a refreshingly un-exploitative plot. Here's another number: one hundred minutes. More movies should be so concise. Grade: B+
The fecundity of James Cameron's world-building is not in dispute—nor his sincerity, ambition or virtuosity. His ponderous worldview, however, makes Avatar the kind of lush, exhilaratingly arduous journey you'll embark upon once out of completism and possibly never revisit. The auteur may be able to convince us that the heavens can uproot mountains but his sermons are earthbound. Grade: B+
Where Thank You For Smoking was gimmicky and Juno irritatingly mannered, Up in the Air marks Jason Reitman's maturation as a filmmaker—one in command of both the medium and the message. There isn't much to dislike here; the performances are pitch-perfect and Eric Steelberg's cinematography gets Lost in Translation at just the right moments. Grade: B+
As square, stolid and ultimately gratifying as the proverbial “well-balanced breakfast” from a children's cereal commercial. Just remember that that meal comes with a massive carbon footprint. Grade: B
Lifetime melodrama with indie pretensions. Grade: C+
Speaks to the shiftless, ordinary girl in all of us whose thighs quiver in the presence of 'roid rage and the unbathed—I mean undead. Grade: C-
Harald Kloser composed the score for The Day After Tomorrow. He co-wrote the screenplay for 2012. Draw your own conclusions. Grade: C-
For all its Aspergerian twee-ness, far more ingratiating and less of a hipster horror show than the trailers and marketing have suggested. In the end it's still hermetically sealed in its own whimsy but at least it isn't pickled in formaldehyde. Grade: B
This is one of those movies where Clooney has a mustache. Grade: B-
The Coen Brothers train their cinematic astrolabe on the moral firmament of 1967, with beautiful and morbid results. Grade: B+
Director Spike Jonze knows how to work the sides but not the middle: What starts out being a movie I would have very much liked to see—a series of crisp episodes illustrating the immediate and ordinary dangers of being a little boy, rendered with the utmost warmth and delicacy—quickly detours to a visually monotonous desert island, where the production becomes mired in boogers and birth imagery. The titular wild things are, unfortunately, not so much manifestations of a child's id as they are feral mental cases who shuffle around in a lithium torpor, neither bathed nor bidden, occasionally erupting into bum fights before retreating to their private torments. The bulk of the film is a bipolar mess of tedious silence and manic violence, until the boy finally returns home and polishes off a giant hunk of cake in front of his mother, who falls asleep from boredom. Roll credits, audible sigh from studio. Grade: C-
I really identified with the tuxedo cat and the little red-haired girl. Grade: B
If somebody wants to reboot the Scooby-Doo franchise with Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, I'll get behind that. Grade: B+
Imagine a dot-com commercial from Super Bowl XXXIV stretched to fit the dimensions (barely) of a feature film. More product placement than laughs. Grade: C+
On a scale of Peter Hyams to Paul Verhoeven, director Jonathan Mostow is Roger Spottiswoode. Grade: C+
When it's good, The Informant! is the kind of sunny, unblinking satire Alexander Payne used to make. When it lags, you become acutely aware of the pointless cameos by stand-up comics; production design that's mired in the Seventies despite being set in the Nineties; the fact that no real effort is made to examine the main character beyond his numbskull-cipher charades; and that there's no way said numbskull could have watched the 1993 thriller The Firm at a suburban multiplex circa 1995 (well, it bugged me, at any rate). Grade: B
Mike Judge once again trains his keen observational sense and crude cinematic technique on suburbia, and the result is yet another amiable shambles of a comedy—interestingly peopled and frequently funny but mostly meandering before it abruptly peters out. Grade: B-
It's easy to get a contact high from Doug Pray's survey of great advertising. Unfortunately, the elevation is brief, as Pray's sample is neither wide nor deep—frequently no more comprehensive than the advertorial puff pieces local news broadcasts trot out every Superbowl, replete with an over-reliance on obvious brands (Apple, Volkswagen), clips that appear to have been culled from YouTube, and broad, gaping lapses in chronology. Next time more art, less copy. Grade: C+
In recent years Nora Ephron has veered disastrously into big-B broad comedy. What she's always excelled at is a specific kind of comedy of manners—populated with fussy, privileged white people in scenes and states of intimate anxiety. This return to smaller-b "broad" comedy is therefore a qualified success—a double-fisted biopic that's breezy and generic in many of its details but undeniably crowd-pleasing and ultimately ingratiating. The cast itself is a stacked deck, in the best sense. Grade: B
I suspect Joe's last name may be Eszterhas: Scene for PG-13 scene, the movie contains more penetrative imagery and deaths by stabbing than one of the self-proclaimed Hollywood Animal's vintage scripts. Otherwise Stephen Sommers' de-imagining of the Hasbro franchise mostly captures (and then freeze-pans around) the more gee-whiz aspects of playing with your toys in front of a green screen—before burdening each of those toys with unnecessary backstories involving all sorts of expressionless betrayal and chaste mannequin romance. Spoiler: Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance dampens fanboy suggestion that he should take up Heath Ledger's makeup in the next Batman. Grade: Z
The most unexpectedly gratifying interspecies-buddy/self-actualization fable of the year. Brutal, alien and ultimately human. Grade: A-
Print is black and white, movies are light and shadow. The luscious, just-believable marvel of the Harry Potter franchise is that it started out as one thing (the stilted, literal Chris Columbus entries) and has blossomed into the other—thriving with incident, vivid with detail, musical with grace notes, intimate with feeling. This is what it looks like when the state-of-the-art comes together in an old-fashioned way: seamless entertainment. I exited the theater not just giddy, but greedy—grateful that there are still two more installments left to enjoy. Grade: A
The critical plaudits have been somewhat overstated—more of a commentary on the state of movies set "over there" than on the particular merits of Kathryn Bigelow's contribution to the genre, although there are merits to be considered—authenticity, immediacy and restraint among them. It's just that we've seen these characters in this setting before, and not fucking the whole thing up isn't as exciting as bringing something new to the table. Nevertheless…. Grade: B
Second verse same as the first. It's hard to find fault with a movie that knows exactly what it is. The fault here lies with the audience. The grade I'm giving myself for watching this: D+
Duncan Jones' modest sci-fi head trip draws inspiration for its solid production design from the usual sources, although the director presents his lunar backdrops with a distinctive tilt-shift charm. What the film lacks in a sturdy premise—suggesting a world that's a few shades too engineered to be plausible—it makes up for with a refreshing lack of the genre's tendency toward horror, despite a freeze-dried evil-corporation subplot. Moon is a sad, dreamy little diorama about the cost of life amidst lifelessness and the residue of humanity in unexpected places. Grade: B
More like The Warmed Over. The usual cocktail of dick jokes, misogyny, homophobia, lazy setups and lazier acting. Lick it up, baby. Lick. It. Up. Grade: D
Pixar finally devotes an entire feature to its animators' longstanding fetish for cantankerous codgers. As such, Up is an efficiently calculated, if somewhat trite, meditation on aging, loss and—aw fuck, it's a bunch of pet jokes wrapped around an animated short's worth of plot, drizzled with Michael Giacchino's almost diabetically treacly score. As much as I enjoyed its surfaces, the movie left me somewhat unsettled. It's basically the sentimentalized story of a friendless shut-in who becomes violent once his wife's no longer around to share his codependence. When his increasingly erratic behavior prompts the state to institutionalize him, he flees the country—accidentally kidnapping an ADHD-addled Boy Scout along the way. The two journey to Donkey Kong Country—I mean Paradise Falls, South America—where they proceed to murder an elderly explorer (voiced by Christopher Plummer since Peter O'Toole already did Ratatouille) and steal his zeppelin—returning Stateside just in time for the boy to receive some merit badges and the old man to face no consequences whatsoever for his crime spree. At least the 3-D wasn't super-obtrusive. Grade: B
The butler did it. Grade: B-
The latest reframing of the ad-lib Terminator mythos brings both schlock and awe to the franchise, with Sam Worthington's young-dumb-and-full-of-come cyborg making up for Christian Bale's nuked-over messiah. Director McG's workmanlike craftsmanship references better, more austere science-fiction when it isn't laboring under a summer blockbuster-mandated Bed Bath & Beyond Thunderdome yolk. This installment doesn't so much move the story forward as it doesn't set it back (in time or otherwise). Grade: B
A rollicking, resounding franchise resuscitation—busy with charismatic casting, youthful exuberance, shiny production design and general space-sexiness. The likable leads turn in surprisingly subtle performances, restoring primal emotion to the Prime Directive. My main beef, almost grief, with the architects of the new beginning is this: As fearless as their reinvention of the Star Trek universe is, the genocidal violence they inflict to do so is also, at its molten core, pretty heartless. Grade: B+
Legends of the Fall meets Airwolf … meets Thunder From Down Under. Grade: D
Joe Wright's direction is as tasteful as his white man's burden. Susannah Grant's screenplay is spun from the finest recycled gossamer. The onscreen talent and production values are hopelessly carbon neutral. Grade: B
Unexpectedly sweet, authentic, romantic—with nary a fart joke to be heard. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart's chemical romance is damaged, incendiary and pleasurable. Grade: B+
Director Alex Proyas mounts this apocalyptic New Age garbage with almost defiant handsomeness. The disaster-porn sequences are particularly striking, managing not only to seem fresh despite the preponderance of such scenes in blockbusters but also disturbingly visceral without veering into flamboyant gore. The same cannot be said of Nicolas Cage, who continues his transformation into an animatronic version of himself—a stuttering barrage of theatricality and tortured decibels. Grade: C+
Turns out uninspired sitcom gags are shitty no matter how "naturalistically" you shoot and edit them. Anna Faris is criminally underutilized. Grade: D
Tony Gilroy's corporate espionage caper has the infectious energy of Julia Roberts and Clive Owen on a romp—and unfortunately the tedium of being trapped with the stars on the transatlantic flight that's taking them there. Grade: B-
Apparently the War and Peace of graphic novels is also the Valley of the Dolls of graphic novels. Grade: B-
What's presumably intended as a populist red-state revenge fantasy about the dangers of sexy foreigners instead unfolds as an aggro-trash video game where the player is a middle-aged man who fetishizes sexual paranoia and doesn't feel completely alive unless his daughter is staring down the barrel of a loaded cock. The bodies pile up and the villains only get swarthier as the porno-conspiracy snakes its way up Euro society. Fortunately it's over quickly and you hardly feel a thing. (That's what she said.) Grade: C-
Director Ken Kwapis is really into staging scenes where two actors basically run lines in front of the exposed brick wall from a generic early-Nineties comedy club. Grade: D+
This German-engineered thriller somehow manages to be deliberate and detailed without once making a lick of sense. Clive Owen shoulders the burden of a plodding plot while an underutilized Naomi Watts executes a flawless impression of a saucer of milk. Oh, but there's a gunfight in the Guggenheim that's notable primarily because it makes you wonder who at the venerable museum thought it would be a good idea to let the filmmakers stage a massacre in that iconic space. Grade: C
Angsty and inert when it should be exploitative and busy, this dull gloss on hyperkinesis is almost avant-garde in its refusal to be entertaining. Grade: F
The intrinsic claustrophobia of stop-motion animation lends itself to this tale of a little girl who flees entrapment in an ordinary life only to risk imprisonment in a far more fantastic one. The movie is essentially one hundred minutes of great texture and atmosphere—which, while compelling enough, ultimately aren't a substitute for good storytelling. Grade: B
Stop me if you've heard this one: It's a Jim Carrey movie where the star lives in a world comprised entirely of counterfeit coincidences and cardboard friends with whom he shares no evident affinity and who stampede through scenes only to bark-reiterate the premise before vanishing in a rampage of bad editing. Grade: C-
David Fincher's fantasia on F. Scott Fitzgerald's fantasia on love and death is by turns music box and snow globe—expensive, elaborate, tranfixingly cool to the touch. The homilies are folksy but spun from the finest nanofiber. A consummate prestige production: middlebrow, lyrical, finally moving. Grade: B
The kind of posturing high-tone sci-fi message movie where a tastefully muted color palette is no substitute for listless storytelling and autopilot performances from the dead-eyed leads. Grade: C+
Baz Luhrmann tempers his more pop-operatic impulses to present some simulacrum of an Old Hollywood historical epic; only, denuded of the director's typical flourishes, the safety-scissors tearjerker exhibits more pastiche than sweep. There are lyrical bits and pieces but they mostly resonate because they suggest better films. On its own, Australia is eventful but seldom impactful—the picturesque portrait of middlebrow entertainment. And maybe it's just me—and as pretty as they individually are—but Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman have about as much chemistry as an ostrich and a giraffe. Grade: B
Magic realism wrapped in gritty vérité. Brutal and big-hearted. A bouquet of fresh faces. Grade: B+
Marc Forster, some of whose previous movies I've seen but am presently at a loss to recall the contents of, is clearly uncomfortable with the demands of kitchen-sink action overdrive—executing early set pieces with a visual robo-stutter that squanders every expensive shot and renders the lavish devastation skullfuckingly painful to watch. He seems to calm down somewhat in the later going, or the second unit becomes more assertive, and the movie settles into a crashsploitative rhythm while sporadically attempting to recover the plot—but unfortunately not before a sequence wherein … erm, "operatic" violence is … staged around and intercut with scenes from … an actual opera. Daniel Craig glares, Judi Dench glowers, Mathieu Amalric goggles, Jeffrey Wright grimaces, Olga Kurylenko and Gemma Arterton ARE REALLY HOT RIGHT NOW and … roll credits (no fatties). Grade: C+
Director Clint Eastwood brings his trademark "spare" (gloomy) style to a period melodrama that, superficial similarities to the likes of L.A. Confidential aside, actually has more in common in its execution with supernatural horror than deco noir. The almost unspeakably gruesome crime spree that haunts the film also threatens, at times, to derail it—but a strong supporting cast keeps the proceedings rooted in the human dimension. In the lead role Angelina Jolie certainly looks the part: a doe-eyed, cloche-hatted Edward Hopper subject sprung lusciously to life; and the actress does what she emotionally can with the material; but it's a curiously subdued embodiment, dramatized along the periphery of major events—the character floating diffusely through the admittedly convoluted, if gripping, story—reacting here or there but never quite seeming fully motivated, realized or alive. The apparition at the center of Changeling may be a missing child, or his doppelgänger, but it's the heroine who's the ghost. And maybe that's the idea. Grade: B
Insofar as Oliver Stone's W. is as disappointing a film as its namesake is a president, the exercise may be said to sustain some sort of meta exegetic verisimilitude. On its own terms, however, the movie simply doesn't rise to the level of its constituent talents. The screenplay frequently feels like a series of familiar leftist-blog snarking points, and Stone's movie-of-the-week direction and the chintzy production values don't do much to enrich or inform that impression. The supporting cast is an embarrassment of riches: clearly numerous purported "liberal media elite" wanted to take part in this barn-burning; but in the absence of either historical sweep or topical immediacy, the film feels strangely becalmed, stranded in some basic-cable Bermuda Triangle. What little Stone does to enliven the proceedings—portraying Texans through a haze of gluttony that recalls the final line of George Orwell's Animal Farm—just feels lazy and passive aggressive. Only Thandie Newton's monster-in-the-closet creepshow portrayal of Condoleezza Rice—suggesting she wandered in from a Michael Jackson video directed by Tim Burton, and rendering Jennifer Jason Leigh's Kate Hepburn riff in The Hudsucker Proxy a lithium stupor by comparison—aspires to a level of oddball hatchetry that, failing authenticity, sustains amusement. You almost wish she and Dubya could have starred in their own hyper-hypo office-stalker rom-com, away from the dour demands of pseudo-factual rectitude. Grade: C-
Body of Lies is distinguished not so much by what's onscreen as who's behind the scenes: Ridley Scott—no stranger to this terrain, having covered it both exceptionally (Black Hawk Down) and with qualifications (the sumptuous but narratively challenged Kingdom of Heaven). Lies doesn't straddle those efforts; it's more interested in bridging Syriana and the later Bourne movies. Its ultimate failure to do so, given its pedigree, is a sticking point. While Scott's participation ensures that the performers and locales are more specific and vivid than Hollywood's usual "over there" fare, the episodic and occasionally preachy screenplay could really just as easily have been rendered by the more bombastic Scott-eur, Tony, in generic "prestige" mode. The result is a serviceable but forgettable political thriller—although Mark Strong deserves notice for his sleek, imperious supporting turn as a Jordanian superspook whose charismatic scene-stealing presence only serves to underscore that the film is bent on following the wrong leads. Grade: B-
Keira Knightley is ingratiatingly courtly-coltish in this period potboiler that hits all its drawing-room marks without spilling its watercolors anywhere you wouldn't expect. Grade: B
More masturbation than Oscar bait, this nevertheless cheerful Coen brothers wank (until it reliably segues toward their trademark violence and paranoia) is so arch, and the various and multitalented performers so on the wavelength of that weirdness with their every odd line reading and subtle one-point-five-take reactions that unless one can also subscribe to that frequency, the whole po-mo throwback clever-serviceable trifle may bounce right off one's perceptual atmosphere, so shallow is the angle of entry. But I enjoyed it: in one eyeball and out the other. Laughs were plentiful. Grade: B
Moribund mishmash of the usual us-versus-them(-but-we're-more-alike-than-we-realize) political thriller tropes sidelines its capable headliners in favor of leaning too heavily on the same four or five swarthy day players who tend to portray the Tom, Dick and Harari in every example of this demi-genre. The story is well-meaning but insipid, hedging its stereotypes with politically correct sermons while the plot trudges toward the only surprise in the entire movie—an almost Flannery O'Connor-ish turnabout that feels airlifted in from one of the Saw movies. The twist is presumably meant to register as poetically just and profound; instead it wrings some much-needed laughs from an otherwise glum, dumb current-events lecture. Grade: C-
The trouble with lavishly overproduced satires about how expensive and not that good most Hollywood blockbusters are is that the takeoffs frequently end up being expensive and not that good themselves. And so it is with Ben Stiller's latest sendup. To his ongoing credit, he helms the comedy with visual wit and an eye for detail that few of his peers aspire to. To his discredit, he's essentially mounted a series of steroidal MTV Movie Awards sketches, episodic and discrete. The sense of compartmentalization extends to the performances, where every headliner is given his own carefully tended plot of scenery to chew over and over-chew. Even Tom Cruise's vaunted "loose, funny" prosthetics-reliant cameo as a studio honcho is essentially a meta prank banking on the audience's awareness that the star is in on the joke for a change, and not really that amusing on its own grating one-note terms. Ultimately Tropic Thunder ends up feeling as phony and self-indulgent as the industry it parodies. Its bark may be Dolby Digital Surround EX, but the bite is all veneers. Grade: C
At this point reefer-movie madness is suitably pandemic that it may be time to reconsider the meaning of the term potboiler. Pineapple Express nevertheless manages to feel fresh and funny for the majority of its running time. The story's coked-up weedy rhythms cross-pollinate the verisimilitude of Out of Sight with the manic intensity of the first Kill Bill, with Seth Rogen and James Franco sustaining a believable, dewy dude-on-dude chemistry that mostly sidesteps the more predictable gay-panic tropes (with one gratuitous exception). If anything belies the loose anything-goes sensibility, it's that some of the exchanges, while still uproarious, have a slightly worked-over sketch-comedy feel. Still, a laugh's a laugh, especially in the heat of August. Grade: B+
Much as Bruce Wayne knows what he must become by the time The Dark Knight has fully visited its devastation, so does director Christopher Nolan know what this summer blockbuster must be—bearing not just the usual comic book tent pole considerations, but also the burden of a talented actor's abbreviated legacy and the high standard set by Nolan's own Batman Begins: a riveting spectacle for the multiplexes, and an object lesson in morality for the masses. Does the movie occasionally gloss over contrivance and coincidence? Sure. Does any of that end up mattering in the face of a franchise behemoth executed with this much precision and skill, juggling shattering set pieces and intimate character arcs with complete assurance? Not even a little bit. The themes are operatic, the rising sense of panic and dread tidal in their force; and Heath Ledger unleashes his own tsunami as a Joker who's basically as stone-evil as a misbegotten creature can be and still have both feet rooted firmly, grimly to the ground. Grade: A
At this point the breadth and depth of Guillermo del Toro's raw talent are undeniable. He's been reliably elevating pulp to pop art since he left his mark on 2002's shoulda-been-forgettable Blade II. His ability to elicit wonder and joy via the sorts of set pieces that many of his peers increasingly execute on autopilot, and to continually present visual effects in ways that feel fresh and tactile in an era of impersonal, overblown spectacle (where "wonders tend never to cease," to borrow a phrase Owen Gleiberman once used to describe feature animation), are rare gifts. Hellboy II is packed with enough technical flourishes to nourish several summer blockbusters; indeed, the eye-popping density of some shots occasionally borders on the exhausting; however, it speaks to some achievement that the imagery frequently registers as gorgeous despite the director's proclivity for poop-creatures, vagina-dentata face-huggers, tumor babies and orifice anxiety. The inventiveness almost makes up for what is otherwise a routine story, affectionately if predictably plotted. Also predictable: del Toro's upcoming Hobbit adaptation is going to set a new standard for mainstream fantasy entertainment. Grade: B+
Arguably the truest example of "pure cinema" I've seen in my adult life. That it manages to be completely accessible, completely engaging, never boring, never cold, is as much a testament to the sophistication of its technical and artistic underpinnings as it is to the timeless virtues of this simplest of love stories. It's a miracle that events set against environmental apocalypse, the vacuum of space and the pristine surfaces of an automated post-consumer hyperstructure can support an adventure with this much character and, yes, heart. It's almost beside the point that the film is typically Pixar-packed with clever details and encyclopedic references: when its corroded-metal hero and and sleek polymer heroine come together, cooing each other's names in simple, adoring electronic tones, the whole knowing universe falls away. Grade: A
The director may be Russian, the star may be British, but there's something completely American about everyone's favorite Ayn Rand-reading tattoo aficionado Angelina Jolie firing a gat. Fight Club's dark humor collides with the Wachowski Brothers school of cartoon physics in an agreeably frenetic (but never out of control) shoot-em-up about self-improvement through panic attacks and exploding rats. Just watch out for those moral boomerangs. Grade: B
Remember that episode of The Office where Michael Scott wrote a screenplay for a thriller entitled Threat Level: Midnight, envisioning himself as the star? Get Smart is basically that movie, only with Anne Hathaway instead of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Grade: B-
Hiring lettered Hollywood superego Ed Norton to portray the quintessential Marvel Comics id is what's known as interesting casting—and it basically works, although the role doesn't necessarily demand much from the polyvariously skilled thespian. In a sense, director Louis Leterrier and screenwriter Zak Penn have fashioned a leaner, meaner take on the growly green giant that is itself all id. Whereas Ang Lee's 2003 reimagining was well-meaning but misbegotten—pensive and painterly in its approach to a genre that thrives on quick cuts and broad strokes—the now-Incredible Hulk is almost entirely delivered via second-act set pieces and minimal fussy character development or internal conflict. And while Lee practically oozed disdain for his source material with his highfalutin Shakespearian flourishes and Freudian obsessions, Leterrier dispenses his bumps and jolts with workmanlike efficiency—pausing occasionally to pay sly respect to the franchise's forbears. There isn't much in the way of depth or nuance to this do-over, but it also manages not to be boring or overtly preposterous for nearly two hours—which is a qualified success in its own right. (PS. Bruce Banner? The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants called. They want their Mom Jeans back.) Grade: B
I think a more truthful subtitle might have been, Jesus Fuck, Will Aslan Just Show Up Already? The absence of the lion king from much of the plot's machinations (spoiler: he spends most of the tale hiding offscreen in the forest like a ... well, like a huge pussy) is a buzzkill, and establishes this second entry in the wannabe-epic Narnia franchise as the "war movie" of the bunch—deliberately devoid of the earlier film's sporadic enchantments, offering day-for-night palace intrigue in their stead. It's worth noting that the sequel retains its predecessor's general ABC Family hokiness, so that aforesaid sequences of faux-dark plotting and scheming frequently register as a Golan-Globus gloss on Shekhar Kapur's Elizabethan England. That's the other thing about Caspian: it inexplicably looks cheaper than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The computer-generated flora and fauna are blurrier, the battlements rubberier, the acting more wooden. Well, that last quibble isn't really a technical shortcoming, although it's difficult to apply the word "artistic" to Ben Barnes' performance as the titular liege, even when describing its utter failure thereof. The actor's limited emotional range and hammy pan-European accent make it unclear whether he's dueling to reclaim his throne or merely auditioning to be Paris Hilton's next fiancé. Even a tantalizing non-canonical appearance by Tilda Swinton's White Witch fails to enliven the proceedings. The plain fact of this installment is that the marginal source material has been so overburdened by the demands of summer blockbuster warfare that the story's human elements, and indeed the likable young quartet at its center, become completely lost amidst the listless, relentless and interchangeable scenes of pixelated battle. Next time, less action, more acting please. Grade: C+
Sunny absurdism, replete with an assist from the peerless Robert Smigel, elevates this Adam Sandler vehicle beyond the usual bland ambitions of his oeuvre, although the star's typical perfunctory storytelling rhythms ultimately bring the production back down to earth. A cheerful, if overlong, exercise in Borat lite. Grade: B-
Professional film critics have understandably exhibited a jaundiced attitude toward this feature-length continuation of the HBO serial. On standalone terms, and to the uninitiated, the movie version of Sex and the City often registers as arrhythmic—awkwardly edited, with intermittent interruptions by seemingly inscrutable minor characters. But of course the production, despite its rough edges, is intended as a glossy valentine to the show's fans, and bearing that baggage in mind, it's a reasonably crowd-pleasing, or at least crowd-respecting, exercise that manages, for the most part, not to fix what wasn't necessarily broken to begin with in the eyes of its core audience. The transition to a larger format doesn't always work, with some of the series' themes and attitudes attaining a new stridency in the upscaling, but for the most part it's an uneven but satisfying confection. Ironically, this steroidal drag-ball of a chick flick may end up being the ultimate critic-proof summer blockbuster—or as Kim Cattrall's Samantha Jones might pun: cockbuster. Grade: B
Watching post-millennial Spielberg riff on fin-de-siècle Spielberg is good fun, and revisiting Indiana Jones and company, however belatedly, is a welcome nostalgia trip; but something has definitely been lost along the way. Gone is the earlier films' undercurrent of mortality—the invigorating tension between popcorn inspiration and weightier philosophical considerations that elevated the Saturday-matinée adventures to full-fledged pop culture mythology. Instead, we now have a protagonist who can withstand ground-zero atomic blasts and successive spills over multiple deadly waterfalls with the resilience and nonchalance of a video game character. Frustratingly, the ingredients for a more satisfying story are all present: the Cold War, weapons of mass destruction, the archeological imperative to preserve the past versus the threat of political expediency to destroy the future—literally tied together with a ribbon of species-consciousness-raising alien intervention; only no one seems to have bothered to assemble the pieces. The resulting absence of any real stakes reaches its apotheosis during an anticlimax where the vaguely menacing bad guys are essentially nonplussed into oblivion by the irritatingly obtuse extra-terrestrials in a sequence that's the visual-effects equivalent of word salad. Cheerful and inconsequential, this latest franchise outing is ultimately, for better and for worse, a pleasant letdown. Grade: B-
With apologies to Dolly Parton: It takes a lot of money to look this cheap. For all of Speed Racer's visual ambition, and what I'm sure was the the Wachowski Brothers' deeply internalized and groundbreaking conceptual approach to rendering live action according to anime aesthetics, the plain fact of its execution is that when you sacrifice depth of field and and saturate every color to the point of chromatic bloodshed, the resulting clutter is invariably chintzy. That said, and despite its problematic pacing, the movie does intermittently achieve the kind of brute-force pop potency that its filmmakers surely intended—even managing to induce an almost synesthetic trance during its climax that borders on physical exhilaration. Grade: C+
A crowd-pleasing kickoff to the summer blockbuster season and a solid franchise starter. Reliably hits all the origin-story moral-courage-awakening notes, enlivened by playful star turns and director Jon Favreau's palpable presentation of the physics and pitfalls of iron manhood. Grade: B+
Efficient, unpretentious filmmaking with some surprisingly graphic twists and an unexpectedly poignant finish. Cool and fun. Jason Statham is an elegant thug. Grade: B
This would-be caper about gaming the system is so predictable, and its story so by-the-numbers, that its numeric title itself serves as a sort of weak meta commentary. Here's another number for ya: 1985. That's the approximate vintage of most of the character arcs and plot points. I mean, fuck, there's even a robot. A goddamn robot! And it wins a prize! Director Robert Luketic's helmsmanship is slick the way dog shit is slick. Grade: C-
All surfaces, but what surfaces. A tremendous display of technical facility in front of and behind the camera. If you can tolerate frenetic, meticulously choreographed period farce, and a story that glides like it's on rails, there are simple pleasures to be derived from this jazz-age fantasy set in London on the eve of the Second World War. Grade: B
The audience I saw this purported political thriller with was in nonstop stitches once the extent of the movie's inept narrative gimmick became fully apparent. (Without giving too much away, let's just say it borrows liberally from the conceits of both Groundhog Day and Dave. It's worth pointing out that those films were intentionally and successfully comedic; Vantage Point falls into a different, campier category.) In the hands of a more skilled technician—say Ridley Scott, Paul Greengrass, Phillip Noyce; Brian De Palma on a good day—this series of preposterous shenanigans and ill-used A-list acting talent just might have been credibly executed despite its facile and ultimately nonsensical interpretation of geopolitics; but in television director Pete Travis' hands it's literally the celluloidal equivalent of the multi-car pileup that serves as a hastily knotted conclusion to the story's rat's nest of loose ends. Grade: D+
I didn't want to like this Frank Capra fable for the YouTube set; this populist cannonade across the ramparts of the filmmaking establishment; this hipster subversion of intellectual property mores and celebration of every denomination of mass culture; this preciously analog take on what is largely a digital phenomenon; but like the imperative at the very center of its title—BE KIND—it eventually won me over with its glad heart and irresistible fondness for the very medium it lovingly deconstructs. At one point a character even suggests that we, as an audience, become "stockholders" in our own happiness through the act of participating in, and creating, the art that we adore. And any movie that evokes The Purple Rose of Cairo by giving us the gift of Mia Farrow's rapt expression as she watches a film within a film already has too many odds in its favor for me to maintain much cynicism in its presence. As for its technical merits, Gondry is up to his usual perception-warping tricks, to comic and moving effect. If the schmaltz gets thick at all, it's only near the very end, by which time the preceding hundred minutes have made a lasting impression. Grade: B+
Imagine if Renny Harlin had directed Time Bandits. Basically a ninety-minute continuity error. Grade: C-
Deeply moving story, intriguingly shot by Janusz Kaminski. Given the Julian Schnabel imprimatur, I was expecting un peu plus surrealism and un peu moins literal emotional telegraphy, but accomplished filmmaking nevertheless. Max von Sydow in particular delivers a heartbreaking turn in a minor supporting role. Grade: B+
Ne plus ultra presentation, fin de siècle characters and story. Grade: B
I wasn't gobsmacked. I came away wondering what someone like Terrence Malick would have done with the same material. Treason, I know. Grade: B
Your usual Mike Nichols affair—high-wattage cast, quality dialog, vaguely stagy mise en scène and slightly quaint politics cut with a reliable sardonicism. It's a pleasant, if slight, portrait of an interesting juncture in American diplomacy with obvious repercussions to this day. Minor quibble: did Julia Roberts acquire her steel magnolia schtick by studying Melanie Griffith in The Bonfire of the Vanities? I mean, it's not a performance that detracts from the movie by any means ... it's just a little ... regional-theater Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Know what I'm sayin'? I'll shut up now. Grade: B
Like I, Robot before it, this 28 Days Later-Castaway hybrid is a Will Smith vehicle with a little bit more on its mind than the average blockbuster. That said, and as able, if unexceptional, as Francis Lawrence's direction is, there simply isn't that much story here. Much like its abandoned environments, the movie is expensively empty. It's a lavish vignette, a Twilight Zone episode pumped up just enough to justify a theatrical presentation. Nevertheless, a very decent outing for all concerned, although I did find the flashbacks to be somewhat awkwardly integrated. Nice Emma Thompson cameo, by the way. Grade: B
Ambitious, lavish, uneven, frustrating. The first act is pure tedious exposition; the second act more confusing mythology punctuated by awesome bear fights; and the third act thrilling but curiously abridged, suggesting sequels that will now surely never materialize. Grade: B
A tedious orgy of bong-hit philosophizing and warmed-over eighth-derivative cyberpunk. Practically unwatchable. Grade: F
Essentially an extended, and excellent, action sequence—except for the unnecessarily expository third act. Nevertheless, a satisfying pseudo-conclusion to the Bourne series. Grade: B+
Typical Danny Boyle genre exercise, by turns beautiful and ponderous. Alex Garland's script somehow manages to come across as overthought without making a lick of sense. I think I would have preferred it if the sci-fi had remained hard and the metaphysics had remained in the margins. As it stands, the movie's velvet goldmine vision of space travel gets muddled amidst the unwelcome trappings of psychological horror. Grade: B-
Essentially a supersized episode of the television show with lightly upgraded South Korean animation ($75 million sure doesn't go as far as it used to), The Simpsons Movie, while often chuckle-worthy, never achieves the scaled-up grandeur of, say, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Where there should be gonzo joy at the liberation of the big screen, there is instead clever calculation. The canvas may be a little broader but its colors don't run particularly deep. Grade: B-
Director David Yates brings an unexpectedly deft touch to the fourth Harry Potter sequel, delivering an entry that ranks second only the inimitable Alfonso Cuarón-driven Prisoner of Azkaban as the franchise's best chapter. Grade: B+
Michael Bay's first kid pic. Rest assured, there are still fake breasts in them thar hills (albeit clothed), curse words aplenty (albeit only one fleeting f-bomb), wooden, unlikable characters and a screenplay that was apparently written in crayon. Nevertheless, the nostalgia factor is sky high, and the movie's liberal theft of conceits from far better films (Terminator 2 and The Iron Giant to name only a couple) elevates it above the usual Bayhem. Grade: B-
Episodic, uneven. Good, not great. Liked it, didn't love it. Grade: B
Sweet indie romcom lays the simple sugars on a bit thick for my palate but it leaves a pleasant enough aftertaste. Grade: B
Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Grade: C-
Expensively, meticulously, painstakingly unengaging. Grade: B-
A simple story well presented, although I didn't completely buy the psychic connection between a traumatized girl's fantasies and the brutalities of fascist Spain. Grade: B
I can't say The Fountain is enough of a misfire to elicit hatred or scorn. It didn't inspire much feeling in me one way or the other. It's competently mounted and mercifully brief, albeit twee and incoherent. I don't see eye-to-eye with a lot of Aronofsky's cinematographic decisions. The visual effects, including the pretentiously hand-tooled cloud-tank depictions of outer space, overreach and often look flat. This is a small, personal film, almost a triptych of one-act plays. If it aspires to depict love as an epic odyssey, interior or otherwise, it falters—suggesting instead claustrophobic monomania. Grade: B-
It's frequently incredulously funny, albeit one-note and repetitive—and I don't know how much of its vaunted cultural incisiveness is just literal dumb luck. The cinematic framework is perfunctory and unnecessary. Grade: B-
Subdued cat-and-mouse thriller doesn't live up to the hype generated by its principal talents, although it suffices as a solid, if languidly paced, genre exercise. Grade: B-
Trashy, hyper-violent action pic wears out its welcome a little too quickly for an eighty minute thrill ride, but the unapologetic silliness, executed with reasonable flair by directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, offers its own repetitive pleasures. The ending is literally a corker. Grade: B-
Mike Judge's amiable future-schlock satire is smarter than it looks—bursting with ideas, and plenty funny if you can get past the auteur's basic discomfort with storytelling and mise en scène. An immediately underrated movie. Grade: B
Antique potboiler generates steam until its supernatural pretense gives way to pedestrian narrative gimmickry and an over-reliance on CG. The strapping Jessica Biel is woefully miscast as an Austrian duchess. (Yes, you read that correctly.) I'm looking all the more forward to Christopher Nolan's Prestige. Grade: B-
Yet another cinematic hand-job about a bunch of over-privileged/under-developed characters whose jerk-off problems nobody cares about. Bart Freundlich, you are no Nicole Holofcener. Also: Billy Crudup has the approximate charisma of a cold sore. Grade: F
Sloppy, sentimental indie-sitcom pap; Happy, Texas for neurasthenics. Abigail Breslin's one overrated trick is that she can apparently sob convincingly on command; she has a bright future as a trained seal. The script is late-period Douglas Coupland bad. Grade: D
A soporific college thesis masquerading as summer entertainment. Shyamalan's idiosyncrasies have degenerated into a sort of creative torpor overrun with wooden characters and, in this instance, topiary monsters. The entire movie is a spoiler. Grade: F
Richard Linklater's wannabe techno mind-fuck is more of a mind-numb-er, unfolding in a series of the director's typically meandering, talky scenes with little regard for storytelling or logic. If you're in the mood for wanky pseudo-fi, you're far better off renting Vanilla Sky. Grade: C
So long as the swashes buckle and Johnny Depp swishes, this Pirates sequel keeps its head well above water. Unfortunately a second act steeped in murky metaphysics and festooned with hideous, if impressively rendered, Cronenbergian villains strands our main characters along divergent arcs—to be reunited, and the film salvaged, only in the final rundown. That great sagging middle is a waterlogged slog. More Monkey Island whimsy next time, less benthic boogaloo. Grade: B-
Bitingly funny comedy of manners is buoyed by ingratiating performances and confident direction. The story gallops at such an agreeable clip that you almost don't notice the general absence of character development. Almost. Grade: B
If The Incredibles, Batman Begins, Spider-Man and X2 have proved that dated superhero concepts can receive thrilling generational makeovers, Bryan Singer's Superman retread proves that no matter how sincere your nostalgia, serving up a self-indulgently paced state-of-the-art facsimile of late-Seventies kitsch is a one-way ticket to camp. (Not that Supes, that most schizoid-gay-stalkerish of superheroes, from his mile-high red platform boots to his all-rubber-external-undergarment aesthetic, needs much help in that area.) Throw in an unsettling absence of internal conflict and a not-ready-for-vaudeville super-villain subplot and you've got Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow minus the kickin' deco production design—i.e., not much to write home about. Grade: C+
If Cars had been made by any other studio it would probably have registered marginally higher on my scale, but given that Pixar's films have earned the right to be judged only against one another, Cars must be received as a sincere but miscalculated bore. Even setting aside my complete ignorance of and bewilderment at so-called NASCAR culture, the movie's a clunker—from its sagging midsection to the filmmakers' problematic decision to place their characters in a world that, lacking the necessary context of human habitation, comes across as profoundly lifeless. Throw in a musical interlude that would challenge the harshest Trey Parker parody in its corniness and you've got a proper misfire. Worst of all, a preponderance of fart jokes and immediately dated pop cultural flotsam suggests the unwelcome influence of DreamWorks' bottom-line mentality. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Grade: C+
I'm not that familiar with Dan Brown's novel, although what little I've read of and about it has suggested it's execrable. By that measure, the movie is a distinct improvement, merely plodding, relentlessly expository and episodic. Cinema sometimes completely transcends its literary source material, but this is an Akiva Goldsman-Ron Howard collaboration, so that isn't the case here. Goldsman's screenplay is lazy and literal (it's rare to find footnotes so poorly disguised as dialog outside the realm of Star Trek), Howard's direction square and uninspired. The excellent cast is mostly on autopilot—Ian McKellen does his Ian McKellen impression while Tom Hanks does his Michael Douglas/Harrison Ford impression, while Alfred Molina does his best totem pole impression. Only Paul Bettany and Audrey Tautou seem really alive here, and their commitment to thankless roles energizes what could have been an interesting reworking of the novel's core premise, which is somewhat intriguing if overblown. Grade: B-
There's some top-notch French chop-sockey in the opening scenes of this cheapie actioner—until the Luc Besson-scribed story, such as it is, gets mired in preachy civics and a tortured plot that plays out like a partially rendered video game. The rest, mercifully eighty minutes or so in toto, is an exercise in diminished returns and indifferent direction. But that opening sequence would make a great PS3 cut-scene. Grade: C+
It took a lot of people to make a movie as multitiered in its awfulness as this one, although the lion's share of the blame goes to "director" B-Rat and "screenwriters" S-Kin and Z-Pen. X3 is a continuity-disabled blight on what has otherwise been a reasonably sharp franchise. It's dumbed-down, bloated and shoddy in a tacky-pricey Stealth way, as though no one could actually be bothered to look at the dailies or hold the entire screenplay in their head or even rent X1 and X2 before birthing this abomination. X3 is so tone-deaf and botched on every level that going into specific details would merely be punishing, besides already having been written up ad nauseam and more eloquently elsewhere. Simply put, shame on everyone for giving this sloppy mess a great opening weekend. You've validated a campaign of ugly marketing and poor creative decisions that will resonate for years to come. (Okay, one specific gripe: Why did so much of this movie remind me of the early-Eighties Disney misfire Condorman in its cheesiness? Was it the oblivious camp surging beneath the wings of the why'd-they-bother character Angel? Hmm. And that's a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg.) Grade: F
It's difficult to fault an unpretentious disaster flick for unpretentiously delivering destructo-porn sans pesky story or character development. Poseidon is a serviceable mid-Nineties movie of the week, cementing Wolfgang Petersen's status as an expensive hack. It's coherent. It's disposable. It floats. Grade: B-
Begins pretty much the way you'd expect a Clowes-Zwigoff collabo to—loose, funny, offbeat. Then the story falls off a cliff, stumbling through a tedious murder-as-commentary-on-art subplot for what feels like several hours—in some ways recalling Cindy Sherman's ill-advised 1997 cinematic foray Office Killer (maybe that's the joke/how's that for a reference); suffice it to say, the movie never recovers. Grade: C-
While lacking the grace and economy of Brian De Palma's 1996 franchise outing, J.J. Abrams' contribution to the Impossible Mission canon is sturdy and competent enough not to beg comparison with John Woo's sloppy, florid 2000 entry. M:I:3 is essentially Alias on steroids, replete with an episodic rhythm that suggests commercial breaks but minus Jennifer Garner's unifying charisma. The set pieces are budgetarily spectacular; the emotional connective tissue, however tenuous, is nevertheless tedious. And incidentally, in case it isn't abundantly queer by now, Tom Cruise really cares about the ladies in his life, with whom he constantly has totally spontaneous, unchoreographed sex and who consistently get mixed up in his covert existence … as a spy. Got it? Good. The movie's biggest misfire is Philip Seymour Hoffman. As written, his heralded villainy is so vague and constricted by the demands of Cruise's star turn that he registers with scarcely an iota of the evil reputation that precedes him. He comes across as a churlish petty-psycopath, easily dispatched just in time for the penultimate sponsor identification. Grade: B
If Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was essentially a seamless movie, story and artistic vision cut from whole cloth, The Science of Sleep is a major step back for Michel Gondry—not an outright debacle along the lines of the director's earlier Human Nature, but nowhere near the accomplishment of his last film. Working from his own screenplay, which is perhaps the entire problem, Gondry presents a love story without any actual love or story—merely characters behaving absurdly against a dissonant, intermittently striking collage of his music video tropes—time slicing, stop-motion animation, oversized hands. It's a vision of cotton-cloud sunsets and yarn unicorns that never snaps into focus, despite the sincere and likable efforts of Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg as the would-be romantic leads. There's just enough to admire here to really regret the absence of a better film. Grade: C+
Nicole Holofcener's graciously unforced ensemble piece about bourgeois Los Angelinos is loose, funny and surprisingly satisfying for a movie that doesn't really adhere to a conventional cinematic structure. And Jennifer Aniston is fortunately more money than Friends in an uncharacteristically palatable turn as a depressed recent dumpee (heh). The rest of the cast is as good and relatable as expected. Grade: B+
Hard-candy noir isn't half as smart and twisty as its numerous and unnecessary voiceovers would suggest, but there's some sweet scenery chewing by Morgan Freeman and an ingratiatingly vivacious turn by Lucy Liu to spice up an otherwise cold dish. (Why is Josh Hartnett starting to remind me of Ashton Kutcher?) Grade: B-
14 years and a $14 million payday after Sharon Stone moneyshot to stardom in the original Basic Instinct, the actress returns to obliterate her signature character in this comatose sequel. Sure, there's some mild camp to savor—namely Stone barking bitter double entendres in a series of increasingly Muppety drag-ball ensembles, her boobs badly 'jobbed, her trademark smirk reduced to a lopsided Botoxed sneer—but mostly this is a dull, surprisingly sexless movie about a lousy shrink (a doughy David Morrissey) with a great office and a curiously unmotivated fixation on Stone, the latter reduced to a supporting role in her own vehicle. Michael Caton-Jones' dour direction doesn't help, comparing unfavorably with Paul Verhoeven's lurid, seamless stewardship of the first film. If Basic Instinct 2 presents us with anything remotely redolent of graceful aging, it's in the person of Charlotte Rampling, who, despite an even more thankless role, could teach Stone a thing or two about sex and death. Grade: Z
Essentially one long set piece, this solid genre pic is the perfect antidote to a rainy afternoon—Mos Def's grating man-child routine notwithstanding. (In terms of serviceable vehicles for aging action idols, this is the kind of movie Firewall should have been.) It's easily director Richard Donner's most competent work since 1994's Maverick. Grade: B
If you can get past Spike Lee's rote racial commentary and a penchant for putting his actors on dollies that's hardened into a visual tic, Inside Man stands as one of the director's more accessible movies. The plot is admittedly transparent and the story overstays its welcome by about forty minutes, but the cast is outstanding—particularly Jodie Foster in a confident, ingratiating turn as a high-class fixit woman. The only full-on miss here is Terence Blanchard's bleating score. It compromises every scene it intrudes upon. Grade: B
Schlocky, stilted and didactic until it finds its Baz Luhrmann-meets-1984 doesn't-know-it's-a-musical musicality, and then it's a guilty pleasure. The usual Wachowski caveats apply: terrible college-dissertation dialog, particularly in scenes where characters debate each other dryly rather than have actual conversations, and a certain unrelenting fetish for gender-dissociative violence. V is basically Evita with a bang—a baroque, dated, contradictory, problematically compelling extended pop-operatic video. It's not exactly good, but it has some sweeping movements. Grade: B-
The only thing Hitchcockian about this alleged thriller is its omnipresently bad blue-screening, recalling rear-projection distractions of yore. Harrison Ford slaps a piece of bologna into a greasy envelope and mails it in fourth class past a series of lazy setups and bloated, disinterested villains that makes 1994's Disclosure look like The Matrix. Speaking of the mid-Nineties, there are times when Firewall feels like some sort of time shifting experiment wherein Irwin Winkler directs the script for Panic Room in the style of The Net, replete with listlessly unconvincing techno-speak and borderline-Socratic expository dialog. If these comparisons don't make much sense, it's because the movie is muddled and doesn't seem all that interested in its premise—or any premise beyond Ford's backend, really. The venerable action figure officially enters his late period here. If Indy 4 ever alights, it may be (or, perhaps, may it be) his swan song. Grade: F
Michael Winterbottom's po-mo meta-adaptation of the titular novel is good for a few laughs thanks to an ingratiating cast and a pace that's simultaneously leisurely and spare. That said, this is at best an upgraded variant of the Jarmusch school of wankery or, more generously, a glorified episode of Extras. It's not cinema. Grade: B-
Rumors of Woody Allen's Hitchcockian triumph have been somewhat exaggerated—almost as exaggerated as ScoJo's grating, mommy's-high-heels sexpot routine—but with its ingratiatingly shtick-free observations about class and a genuine corker of a twist ending, Match Point is easily the most entertaining Woody Allen movie in years. Grade: B
Overlong and somewhat unfocused, Brokeback Mountain works best as a searing character study, as well as a sweeping portrait of the way longing and denial transcend societal boundaries. Heath and Jake are, of course, fine, but the unexpected standouts are Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway and Linda Cardellini in flinty supporting roles that, underwritten as they are, simmer with heartbreak and anger. Prudes/prurients dreading/anticipating hot cowboy-on-boy action will likely be disappointed with Ang Lee's customarily square, self-important direction. Aside from a few brief grunts and some light petting, the film's central coupling is handled with a retrograde chasteness that will arouse, at best, an MTV Movie Awards parody featuring Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott. Grade: B
Keira Knightley is expectedly luverly but I may have to recuse myself from commenting on the movie as a whole. Truth is, I find Jane Austen's drawing-room sensibility to be so overstuffed with innumerable sighs and a general, unrelenting "chaise-longueur" that I am frequently rendered narcoleptic in the presence of her work. And it's not like I'm some dude's-dude, "Movies For Guys Who Like Movies"-TiVoing adrenaline addict. Epistolary handwringing just strikes me as an un-cinematic motivation for romantic intrigue. Okay, I'm a boor. Grade: B-
You know how in Barbra Streisand movies there's always that scene where the male lead pulls Babs aside and literally forces her to acknowledge her alleged beauty? (PS. I don't watch Barbra Streisand movies.) I got the feeling watching King Kong that Peter Jackson was working out similar childhood self-image issues. For starters, in this version, Ann Darrow doesn't just feel reluctant pity for the great ape; she unequivocally wants to jump his monkey bones. I'm not exaggerating. Either Ann rolled some E on the way to Skull Island or she has the inter-species hots something fierce. (This despite the fact that Kong keeps biting the heads off her friends. What an asshole.) Her interaction with Kong is punctuated with the kinds of orgasmic moans and sighs one usually encounters in the clip reels of George Clooney's ex-girlfriends. And earlier in the film, a major point is made of Adrien Brody's physical unattractiveness as Darrow's potential (and subsequently sidelined) human love interest. If Jackson inexplicably deviates from the cherished Kong of his youth in some ways (do we really need an extra ninety minutes of repetitive digital lizard/bug brawls and fetishistic immersion in CG effluvia?), he pays misguided "homage" to the film in other ways—e.g., directing his cast to hammy acting suicide (excepting Jack Black, whose inability to deliver dialog without air quotes is merely a congenital defect) and larding the visual effects with smug, expensive winks to the limitations of the original film. (Personal beef: is the green-screening jarringly atrocious on purpose or the result of rushed postproduction?) I could go on, but basically King Kong is so belabored, so tone-deaf and so unrelentingly botched that I'm absolutely mystified by the raves it's been receiving from critics. Maybe they rolled some E on the way to Skull Island too. Grade: C
Stephen Gaghan's clearly an intelligent guy, but the sophistication he exhibits here elevates him to Steven Zaillian-status in my mind. And just like Zaillian's classy, underrated A Civil Action, Syriana isn't getting nearly the kudos it deserves. Merging the informed immediacy of a documentary with the fit and finish of big-budget cinema is a rare achievement. Syriana is a study in cool, compassionate filmmaking. (Also: will someone please nominate Jeffrey Wright for an Oscar already?) Grade: A-