Ethan Hawke vampire flick Daybreakers squanders its actors

Couples Retreat

A montage of news footage crisply introduces the not-too-distant future, where the world’s white-collar professionals live vicariously through plastic-smooth swimsuit-cut surrogate bodies, psychically remote-controlled by flesh-and-blood selves abandoned to storage and pallid vegetation. These superdurable avatars are free to live in (somewhat timidly imagined) consequence-free hedonism. No real victims means…

Ricky Gervais can get only so far with The Invention of Lying

Jennifer’s Body: A premeditated cult classic

A dapper (mostly) contemporary costume drama, The Time Traveler’s Wife is abundantly interior-decorated in vintage rococo. Eric Bana, to his credit, continues to wear the outfits picked out for him remarkably well. The hip-bougie upholstery even covers the band at the fairy-tale wedding, playing “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” It’s…

Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald’s parents didn’t just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate. From a 2004 Jodi Picoult bestseller, My Sister’s Keeper mashes Death Be Not Proud with Irreconcilable Differences. When Kate…

Eddie Murphy is a Denver investment consultant, Evan, with a workaholic schedule that leaves little space for 7-year-old daughter Olivia (Yara Shahidi). Adding to his pressures is the meteoric rise of a co-worker, shtick Native American “Whitefeather,” whose financial consultations come couched in pseudo-mysticism and PowerPoint razzle-dazzle (played by Thomas…

Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to Hell Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name (namely, the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling camera and viscous ickiness back and serving…

Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…

That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator. Such blanching is the reaction Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will be typical. Permissibility has…

Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex day-care as “Mo” Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts from which they’re reciting. Mo has abstained…

For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works, in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman very, very slowly approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind. Yustman…

Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation — though it has a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of CGI-toon juggernauts — but because it translates an introspective, true-to-life, “adult” comic story into moving pictures. With the aid of French comic-book artist Vincent Paronnaud,…

First: Just register the laziness of that title. All right. The Inspiring True Story behind Great Debaters is the 1930s championship streak of East Texas’s all-black Wiley College debate team, coached by poet and teacher Melvin B. Tolson. This bit of historicity is the excuse for an educational tour of…

Since promising Armageddon in the leadoff bars of Straight Outta Compton, star/producer Ice Cube has been one canny career man. In recent years he has pulled up stake in the foundering rap game and doesn’t seem to think twice about the cred damage that could come from pratfalling through PG…

For any high-fivin’ “Movies for Guys Who Like Movies” bros hoping for the Guy Ritchie of yore, Revolver disappoints. It’s no return to rock, but rather Ritchie’s soporific, proggy-conceptual Film of Ideas, with Vivaldi interludes, fussbudget set design, recurrent references to chess, and a hit man inexplicably got up as…

Can-do pep is the resonant key in this profile of six individuals, spread across three continents, working to provide relief in western Sudan. Featured are a sheik displaced by internecine warfare, International Criminal Court prosecutor Dr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a young L.A.-based activist, and … Don Cheadle. The film tarries briefly…