On the surface, Pineapple Express offers precisely what it advertises: a roll-’em-up, smoke-’em-up, blow-’em-up bromantic comedy from the freaks and geeks who have made Judd Apatow’s brand of stunted-man yuks a global franchise. Once more, Seth Rogen’s red-rimmed, half-shut eyes peek out from beneath his tousled Jewfro, which sits atop…

Dad, which was your favorite part of Space Chimps?” the four-year-old asked the day after a media sneak peek. “Dunno, Harry. Probably the part where Kilowatt lets the giant monster swallow her.” Kilowatt is an alien with a giant, glowing head perched atop a teensy-tiny body; blows high-pitched raspberries when…

Let’s be clear about one thing: Journey to the Center of the Earth is more a demo reel than a narrative feature. It’s a decent if overly familiar and yawningly obvious compendium of look-at-me moments intended to show off the latest and greatest in stereo 3-D filmmaking, in which the…

The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis as a dead man, was writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough, but its followup, Unbreakable, starring Bruce Willis as the walking dead reborn as a superhero, was the filmmaker’s masterpiece. It remains the most quietly influential of all recent superhero movies, the unacknowledged template for…

Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these does justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate — and,…

What a bunch of nonsense — effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. This is what happens when M. Night Shyamalan tries to play both John Carpenter (bloody) and Stanley Kubrick (cold-blooded) while writing and directing what the literalist will either dismiss or embrace as the horror-film…

In recent days, Universal has been running a TV spot for The Incredible Hulk that gives away what should come as no surprise to any fanboy worth his action figure collection: the appearance of Robert Downey Jr. as, natch, Tony Stark. From the delighted, deafening squeals of at least one…

Boorish tae kwon do instructor Fred Simmons (Danny McBride) is a strip-mall hero for whom demonstrating his cinder-block-breaking skills to parking-lot gawkers is “my fucking life.” Fred takes seriously—or at least talks seriously about—the tenets of his combat technique while being completely oblivious to what’s happening just outside his storefront…

Here’s your hat, Indy, but, really, what’s your hurry? Because 19 years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn’t, and 15 years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to recount his glory days blowing horns with Sidney Bechet, it’s almost unfathomable that this hoary…

First-time writer-director Helen Hunt stars as April Epner, a schoolteacher desperate to have a child before she turns 40 (Hunt herself turns 45 this year, but never mind that). Adapted by Hunt and two other writers from Elinor Lipman’s novel, it’s a not surprisingly confident debut; Hunt directs like she…

In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” slowly but surely domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right is too chickenshit to say boo before…

Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Waitaminute — you say Baby Mama is a movie and not a TV…

Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with the novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names such as Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly…

Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in recent TV history, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m with the Band,” Nick imagined himself an arena-size drummer…

Smart people got no reason to live — and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point still stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow — one of those Sundance premieres starring famous people slumming it in dingy Indieland — the smart people ain’t doing much…

Ben Mezrich’s 2002 best seller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions was a smart narrative about … well, you saw the subtitle, right? Mezrich more or less recounted a fantastic tale spun by an old acquaintance from Boston, an MIT…

The English media has spent the better part of a year back-and-forthing over the true-or-false plot points of the 1971-set Bank Job, a movie about the plan to steal nudie pics of Princess Margaret from the bank vault in which they were stashed. More important, and about bloody time, The…

No Country for Old Men (Paramount) “A horror comedy chase” is how a grinning Tommy Lee Jones describes No Country for Old Men in the making-of — meanwhile, his fellow actors add to the list such adjectives as “a very primitive ride,” “a rabbit chase through Texas,” and “a very…

Mataharis: Three women who work as private eyes at a Madrid detective agency find that their cases illuminate troubling aspects of their own lives. Ines (María Vázquez) goes undercover at a factory and winds up enmeshed in a power play between the company and union workers opposed to its outsourcing…

Semi-Pro is much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn’t nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had…

Into the Wild (Paramount) Sean Penn waited a good decade before adapting Jon Krakauer’s book about Chris McCandless, who graduated college in 1990, then disappeared into the American unknown, re-emerging as Alexander Supertramp before his final, tragic farewell in the Alaskan wilderness in ’92. Penn’s patience is evident in every…

Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner Bros.) Based on Darwyn Cooke’s comic-book miniseries — a masterpiece starring all of DC Comics’ major-leaguers at the dawn of their immortality during the Cold War — this animated adaptation plays stronger, faster, and further than any direct-to-DVD in recent memory. It’s a grown-up…