Surprisingly moving for a film assembled from such familiar scenes, Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins mushes together queasy/quirky indie family drama with the beats of a romantic comedy. You know the outline just from eyeballing the poster: Kristen Wiig’s Maggie and Bill Hader’s Milo find their way toward loving each…
They’ve done it at last: made a Liam Neeson-stomps-some-ass flick where, as the credits roll, there’s more stuff to be glad you saw than Neeson himself. Based on one of those Lawrence Block novels that’s pretty smart but also too invested in the mechanics of rape and torture, the movie’s…
The sex scene almost makes it worth sitting through Atlas Shrugged III, the last and least of the cheapjack adaptations of Ayn Rand’s brick-thick celebration of taking your ball and going home. About an hour in, after she’s toured and left the hidden Colorado enclave of the captains of industry…
Since it’s the kind of slow-building movie whose very premise is something of a spoiler, a pretty delicious one, let’s get the consumer-guide jazz out of the way first. Hilary Brougher’s YA-ish horror satire/romance/whatzit Innocence, adapted from Jane Mendelsohn’s novel, boasts a wicked setup, some strong performances, several gloriously bloody…
Even the most inspiration-averse will have eyes as moist as blowholes by the end credits of Dolphin Tale 2, a good-hearted kids’ drama whose earnestness and surprising moral complexity put other sunny-weepy sea-mammal flicks to shame. After the story wraps up, the filmmakers work a trick that’s become common in…
Here’s what an R rating gets you these days: a few splattery headshots, some glimpses of cable TV-style background nudity, a couple kids and families popped by assassins, a brace of fucks, in dialogue, and one un-bracing fuck, in bed, mostly clothed. During its longueurs, this engagingly grim spy-versus-spymasters time-passer…
Weep at another whiff of an Elmore Leonard adaptation, one that nails down neither the peppery laughs nor the street-crime desperation that are key to the writer’s work. Instead, the comedy is too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a story…
According to inspirational sports movies, winning demands you train hard, play with heart, be a team, and not care about winning. So it goes in the sturdy, crowd-pleasing When the Game Stands Tall, a profile in saintliness puffed up from a true story: the Northern California Catholic school whose football…
Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge, and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is not to have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
Philip Seymour Hoffman is an island of rumpled calm in Anton Corbijn’s urgent A Most Wanted Man, a glum-out-of-principle espionage story based on a John Le Carré novel. The role demands that Hoffman be quiet, steady, and occasionally frustrated and that he hold secrets — often from us, which is…
Surely, at some point, they thought of casting Michael Cera. Richard Ayoade’s often marvelous The Double, an existential jest set in a bureaucratic dystopia so familiar and lightly comic that it may as well be Kafka Fantasy Camp, stars Jessie Eisenberg, the Oscar winner and future Lex Luthor, as a…
Uncomfortable-silence auteur Joe Swanberg has made a career of testing how much falseness you can strip out and still have a movie. What if people on-screen talked like people off it, and they spent as much time looking at phones and laptops as you do, and if their moments of…
It turns out the cars and planes of Cars and Planes can kiss. Deep into Planes: Fire & Rescue, a time-killing kid flick whose title is an exact summary of its plot, the filmmakers introduce us to two creaky old Winnebagos, a husband and wife in their sunset years, revisiting…
How has there not already been a Nicolas Cage movie called Rage? That title could fit many of the Drive Angry star’s late-career time-wasters. Here it works best as an imperative rather than an announcement of theme: You may feel some anger if you pay to watch this. Or you…
Here are some of the triumphant moments of recent history that make it into the climactic montage in America, the latest “America’s perfect!”/”America’s doomed!” pant load from felonious troll Dinesh D’Souza: Jackie Robinson rounding home. Elvis Presley swinging his hips. Ronald Reagan and the Berlin Wall. Boxed copies of Windows…
It’s a relief, after the wretched Identity Thief, to see movies whose makers love Melissa McCarthy as much as audiences do. Identity Thief’s comic centerpiece was predicated on the idea that McCarthy having sex is a hilarious gross-out, like she’s the pie Jason Biggs once had to diddle. Half an…
Mark Ruffalo’s great gift, besides those scruffy good looks and that prickish, hungover charisma, is capturing the essence of the guy who’s spinning toward a crash but trying to angle himself back. His greatest performance, in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, one of the best films of the…
If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys onstage is like soldiering through some extreme-eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene overscored, overrehearsed, and overbearing. And it’s often…
As a movie, Agnieszka Holland’s four-hour Cold War drama Burning Bush makes for first-rate television. That’s no swipe. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that, no matter how sophisticated cable serial storytelling has gotten or how episodic the latest superhero flicks, movies remain something different. Burning Bush trembles with hushed urgency, with…
There’s still one kind of dread that today’s genre filmmakers can reliably stir up: that fear that everything we’ve been watching onscreen is going to be upended by some last-minute twist, that all the clues and portents we’ve puzzled over will be swept away in favor of some revelation so…
