Midway through the amiable children’s movie Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium comes a speech that writer-director Zach Helm probably has been saving for use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it’s bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) — a 243-year-old “toy impresario” with shell-shocked…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs might be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The…
Kenneth Branagh’s ferociously arty, vacuous remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1972 screen version of Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 stage play pares the action down to a slim two-hander in which a famous English writer (Michael Caine) plays cat’s paw with his wife’s lover, a cocky arriviste played by that other Alfie,…
After Hair and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the Sixties be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes that nervous popularizer Julie Taymor, incongruously partnered with the happily vulgarian British writing duo of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, to run this transgressively utopian moment through the…
A smarmy score, some orgiastic farting from a herd of walruses, and a modicum of cutesy anthropomorphism from narrator Queen Latifah prove a small price to pay for this stunningly photographed narrative documentary about a year in the endangered life of Arctic ice floe. With 15 years of experience in…
I wanted to hate I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, truly I did. Two straight guys pretending to be gay (insert fiscal excuse here); been there, done that (insert all known variants on The Odd Couple here). Rampant homophobia hiding behind liberal pleas for tolerance — blech. And it’s…
A blitzed-looking man stumbling out of a screening of this dreadful excuse for unromantic comedy volunteered that the best part of the movie was when Robin Williams got socked in the jaw. Couldn’t agree more, but if you like your Williams spewing rat-a-tat gags and substituting stand-up for acting, you’ll…
The cash-cow flippered ones rise again, this time as yellow-tufted surfer dudes riding the waves of life off the coast of an island that looks like a cross between Hawaii and Venice Beach. If you have to see another penguin blockbuster, you could do worse than this loose-limbed charmer written…
Coming out of Shrek the Third, I asked the two smart preteen girls I had in tow what they had liked about the picture. Projectile vomiting and multiple farts, they said promptly, best Shrek ever. Ordinarily I’m not big on poop and flatulence, but in this instance I sympathized —…
Impossible though it is to watch Adrienne Shelly’s posthumously released comedy without thinking of the actress-writer-director’s gruesome murder last November (the indie stalwart was killed by a construction worker in her New York office), it’s unclear what kind of notice Waitress would have received had she not died such an…
Orchestrated by evildoers from hostile quarters of the global village, a nuclear holocaust looms over Los Angeles. This ought to ease traffic, but the FBI, headed by an extremely excitable Julianne Moore, is concerned enough to forcibly recruit the services of a two-bit Vegas magician and pre-Cog (a freshly buffed…
Sharply adapted from the William Joyce book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, this speedy animated film features Lewis (voiced by Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry), a bespectacled science geek and orphan who, though well cared for by a loving foster mom (velvety-voiced Angela Bassett), is too weird to get himself…
Close to Home With at least the virtue of novelty on its side, Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager’s debut outing as writer-directors may be the first feature to tackle the claustrophobic world of Israeli women soldiers who work out their mandatory military service patrolling the streets and buses of Jerusalem,…
Given what an awful stiff Somerset Maugham can be, it’s remarkable how many movies have been made of his uptight tales of civil servants sweating it out in British colonies (48 for the big screen alone). John Curran’s fresh take on Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil, from a crisp script…
Todd Field’s second excursion into middle-class unease, after his intelligent but overrated In the Bedroom, unfolds at a leisurely, insidious pace. It posits a suburb full of hypocrites busily persecuting their local child molester (a compellingly creepy Jackie Earle) so as not to face up to their own subterranean secrets…
The third collaboration between Britain’s Aardman studio and DreamWorks animation, this puckish charmer about a posh Kensington mouse flushed down the loo into London sewer country is to action-adventure what Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was to Hammer Horror. Aardman’s first foray into CGI might spell woe…
Those twentysomethings, poor dears, can never catch a break in the movies. First this maligned generation is told, in countless gritty indies and perky studio comedies, they’re rowing through life without oars. Now director Tony Goldwyn’s admirably understated handling of dispiritingly slender material suggests if you’re pushing 30, you’re likely…
Forget what a fun couple Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves were in Speed. In this slow and heavy kickoff to the summer romance season, they play the mopiest lovers to hit the big screen since Tony and Maria channeled Romeo and Juliet on the fire escapes of New York City…
