12/05/2008

Thriller’s plot runs wildly amuck
“The truth is, good and bad are not so absolute,” the narrator of Nobel Son tells us. And maybe he’s got a point, at least when it comes to this movie.

Run from The Punisher
After spending a couple of hours with the Marvel Comics revenge-minded anti-hero in Punisher: War Zone you may feel as though you’ve been pummeled.

Movie review: ‘Let the Right One In’ evokes curiosity if not fear
Halloween has passed, but vampires are still very big. Twilight, about a teenage vampire in love, opened to smash business a couple of weeks ago.

Movie review: ‘Cadillac Records’ is a fascinating musical history and much more
Before Elvis Presley shook up the nation with the driving rhythms of rock ’n’ roll in the mid 1950s, there was already Chuck Berry and his wacky duck walk, the mellow R&B sounds of Muddy Waters and the heartfelt singing of Etta James.

11/28/2008

Happy-Go-Lucky: Poppy’s sweetness never sours
Poppy is insufferably, unbearably upbeat. Always with a smile, laughing even when she’s in pain, she wears you down with her sweetness and light. If only she weren’t so maddeningly adorable.

Repressed family secrets laid bare by an inquisitive son
Claude Miller’s haunting new movie, based on a novel by Philippe Grimbert, is called A Secret. But the gist of this story of repression and family tragedy is that secrets are rarely singular. What is hidden from sight and excluded from discussion has a tendency to multiply and expand.

11/27/2008

Leave Transporter 3 in the dust
The director of the third Transporter movie has given himself the name “Olivier Megaton.” Too easy, you say? Very well. Make your own “bomb” joke.

11/26/2008

Good epic, mate
Even at two hours and 46 minutes, there’s a lot to cram into the colorful epic that is Australia.

Three Christmases too many
Four Christmases hurls towering Vince Vaughn at tiny Reese Witherspoon and a lot of Oscars at a lightweight holiday farce. This comedy about a happy couple made miserable by having to visit four divorced parents begins with a bang, but settles into sentiment so maudlin that even this cast can’t save it.

11/21/2008

For love-bitten teens
There’s a playfulness that seems just so right in Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight. The director of Thirteen gives the hit Stephenie Meyer teen vampire novel a little edge, a little sexual heat. But she makes it fun, too.

Synecdoche is a bewildering yet bewitching place to visit
Every man is the star of his own drama. Such is the insight gleaned by Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern and by Charlie Kaufman’s Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the glum and hypochondriacal theater director who is center stage in Synecdoche, New York.

Adorable Bolt has a lesson, and some adventures, too
At the start of Bolt, Disney’s high-energy, heartfelt comedy-adventure, we discover that the title character is a dog who has amazing super powers.

A child’s-eye view of the Holocaust
With The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, writer-director Mark Herman attempts to do on film what John Boyne did on the printed page in his 2006 novel: confront the horror of the Holocaust in a story aimed primarily at older children (the movie is being released under the Disney banner in the U.K.).

11/14/2008

Michael Janusonis: The old Bond is back
Following the worldwide success of the James Bond thriller Casino Royale two years ago and the acceptance that steely Daniel Craig found as the newest 007, he’s back in Quantum of Solace, a sort of sequel to the last film.

11/07/2008

It’s the typical premise for a family melodrama
Weddings are supposed to be joyous occasions … except in the movies where they’re often used to bring members of dysfunctional families together to dredge up old wounds and anger that has been hidden for years.

Escape to laughter
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is more an encore than a sequel. Did you or your kids like the commando penguins, Alex the “jazz hands” lion, Sacha Baron Cohen’s impersonation of Peter Sellers, the big-eyed mouse lemur, the cranky little old lady who yells “BAD kitty!” or the “Move It Move It” song?

Movie review: Oddball surprises of ‘Role Models’ might just make you laugh
Take a pair of hopelessly irredeemable pals for whom life has never quite lived up to expectations, get them assigned to 150 hours of community service as big brothers to a couple of irrepressible misfit boys and you have all there is to know about Role Models, a high-octane goofball comedy with a heaping portion of heart.

Cheap scares but no haunting in Molly Hartley
Weak movie comedies often boil down to a simple counting of laughs. For meek horror films, you track the “gotcha” count.

Movie Review: Sex and profanity a poor replacement for humor in ‘Soul Men’
In Soul Men, a pair of washed-up singing sensations who haven’t spoken to each other in 20 years set out on a cross-country trip to play at a farewell concert-funeral tribute at Harlem’s Apollo Theater for the lead singer of their old act who went solo 30 years earlier.

10/31/2008

Michael Janusonis: Jolie is perfect as the distraught mother in ‘Changeling’
A missing child. A police cover-up. City Hall corruption. A mad serial killer. A distraught mother who claims that the boy the police have returned to her as her missing son is someone else. These are the shocking and eerie events at the heart of Clint Eastwood’s riveting Changeling.

Michael Janusonis: ‘Zack and Miri make a Porno’ filthy, but funny
It’s bright.

Michael Janusonis: ‘Zack and Miri make a Porno’ filthy, but funny
It’s bright.

Michael Janusonis: Jolie is perfect as the distraught mother in ‘Changeling’
A missing child. A police cover-up. City Hall corruption. A mad serial killer. A distraught mother who claims that the boy the police have returned to her as her missing son is someone else. These are the shocking and eerie events at the heart of Clint Eastwood’s riveting Changeling.

RocknRolla too fast-paced for its own good
Like his earlier Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla is a multi-character high-speed cruise through the London underworld marked by audacious use of the camera and a fluid narrative style.

‘What Just Happened’ is backstabbingly brilliant
It’s not until the last few minutes of What Just Happened that the film’s title is posed as a question, not by the protagonist, but by his ex-wife. She doesn’t get a straight answer, as, presumably, she never has. Her former husband is a Hollywood producer.

Movie review by Michael Janusonis: There’s no Vietnam War in ‘Virtual JFK’
What if Adolf Hitler had been more encouraged in his painting? Would the fate of the 20th century have been very different?

10/26/2008

Movie review: ‘Saw V’: A bargain-basement thriller
Another All Hallow’s Eve, another Saw movie. They’re as dependable as pumpkins and as fresh as a jack-o’-lantern left out in the sun until Thanksgiving, but no matter. It wouldn’t be fall without a little more torture porn.

10/24/2008

Movie Review: ‘High School Musical 3’ follows predecessors’ success, step by step
After conquering the Disney Channel and winning the hearts of tween girls around the world, the Wildcats of East High School are on the brink of doing the same in movie theaters worldwide when High School Musical 3: Senior Year opens today.

Movie review: Grimy cop drama Pride and Glory exposes human nature
As we were leaving a screening of the cop thriller Pride and Glory, my friend Irene turned to me to ask, “What was the name of this? Pride and Gloom?”

International Horror Film Festival is in full swing
It’s still a week to go before trick-or-treaters will come knocking at your door, but the Rhode Island International Horror Film Festival is in full swing and determined to put you in the mood with creepy shorts and feature films, a book-reading event, a walking tour of author H.P. Lovecraft’s Providence haunts and the stage-screen performance of Malice Aforethought at the Columbus Theatre.

I Served the King is whimsical survival film
As the star of the Czech tragicomedy I Served the King of England, Ivan Barnev resembles a blond, eastern European Roberto Benigni. He’s less grating because he’s not overexposed, and has never made the insane mistake of annoying audiences worldwide by trying to play Pinocchio at 40-plus.

10/17/2008

Movie Review: Put this balanced, lighthearted drama in the ‘W.’ column
You don’t have to be a political junkie to like director Oliver Stone’s W., an entertaining behind-the-scenes look at how George W. Bush, a man who would have been happy playing professional baseball, rose to twice being elected president of the United States.

Movie review: Unexpected moments make ‘Sex Drive’ a hilarious hit
An 18-year-old guy sets out on a road trip from Chicago to Knoxville to lose his virginity in the raucous, raunchy and very funny Sex Drive.

Movie Review: Morning Light has a bright start, fades by the finish line
Eleven young, non-professional sailors, including several with Rhode Island ties, take the sail of their lives in the biennial Transpac race across the Pacific between California and Hawaii in the documentary Morning Light.

Movie Review: ‘Max Payne’ an exercise in sadism
To dismiss the new cop movie Max Payne as just the latest movie based on a violent shoot-’em-up video game is to give it too short shrift.

Movie review: ‘Secret Life of Bees’ is sticky sweet
The thing about honey is that it’s not just sweet, but awfully gooey.

Movie Review: Put this balanced, lighthearted drama in the ‘W.’ column
You don’t have to be a political junkie to like director Oliver Stone’s W., an entertaining behind-the-scenes look at how George W. Bush, a man who would have been happy playing professional baseball, rose to twice being elected president of the United States.

Frozen River: The first great film of the fall
It’s a face that shows not just the years, but the miles. And when Ray Eddy quietly weeps in the opening moments of Frozen River, the tears follow aged lines formed by worry, poverty and cigarettes.

10/10/2008

Movie review: Spy vs. spy in Middle East thriller ‘Body of Lies’
In the Middle East thriller Body of Lies, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA spy who wants to come in from the cold, or in this case the broiling desert heat.

Movie review: Teens to the rescue in sci-fi thriller ‘City of Ember’
Heads up, all you tweens out there in Let’s Go to the Moviesland. Today’s word is “dystopia,” as in the opposite of “utopia,” often used to describe works of science fiction that depict an Earth that has been polluted (Blade Runner), globally warmed (Waterworld), or Big Brother’d (1984) into slavery.

Movie review: True tale of courage amid rampant racism scores big
It’s fall. Time for another football movie, preferably one that has grit and heart as key ingredients as well as being inspirational to boot.

Movie Review: Knightley’s a woman of style and substance in ‘The Duchess’
Knowing the backstory to The Duchess, director Saul Dibb’s sumptuous look at the chaotic escapades surrounding romance among the royals in King George III’s late 18th-century England, gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “what goes around, comes around.”

Spaghetti Western spoof is too absurd to be fun
The good news about Sukiyaki Western Django is that Quentin Tarantino appears only in the prologue and a short bit toward the end. The bad news is that, even without his physical presence, we are never quite rid of him. Director Takashi Miike’s dish of sukiyaki spaghetti à la Sergio Corbucci is badly seasoned with scraps of reservoir dogs.

10/07/2008

Conservative comedy An American Carol is one long, sour note
One hundred and sixty-five years after Charles Dickens called for civic reform, compassion, humanity and charity to be watchwords in human life with A Christmas Carol, Hollywood’s most rabid conservatives have rallied to make An American Carol, a comedy that equates dissent with “treason,” that presents Bill O’Reilly as a model of political restraint and offers us Kelsey Grammer as the ghost of General George S. Patton.

10/03/2008

Movie review: ‘Flash of Genius’ is a story of invention, suspense and heartbreak
Who’d have guessed that a movie about windshield wipers could make for such gripping drama?

Movie Review: ‘Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist’ is a perfect mix
In the oddly titled Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Nick plays in a band and has been mending a broken heart for a month after Tris, his girlfriend, dumped him.

Movie review: In the end, ‘Appaloosa’ is just another horse opera
Midway through Ed Harris’s Appaloosa it became clear why Hollywood doesn’t turn out more westerns: There’s nothing much new to say in the genre.

Movie review: Disney says it in Spanglish with ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua’
For some reason, Yo quiero Taco Bell.

Movie review: ‘Flow’ documentary gets watered down by ideology
It’s tempting to glibly dismiss Flow: For Love of Water as this week’s entry in the Environmental Apocalypse agit-doc genre. Like An Inconvenient Truth, The Unforeseen, and other recent documentaries, it wants to terrify us into action, in this case over the privatization of and misuse of our planet’s water supply. Like many of those films, Flow preaches to the choir with a starry-eyed NPR eco-humanism that can set some people’s teeth on edge. For instance: Can we have a moratorium on quotes from wise Native American chieftains on how the earth belongs to all of us? Facts will do just fine, thanks.

Movie Review: Snarky Maher preaches too much in ‘Religulous’
Early on in the documentary Religulous, stand-up comedian/political commentator Bill Maher states his thesis — “Religion is detrimental to humanity” — and then spends the rest of the movie hopping around the world, trying to prove it.

Movie Review: Violence and degradation keep thrills out of sight in ‘Blindness’
The premise for the horror movie Blindness is a good one:

Movie review: ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’ isn’t annoying enough
The problem with How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is that the movie wants to be your friend and it doesn’t want to alienate you.

09/26/2008

Movie review: High-flying thrills in ‘Eagle Eye’
Two strangers are conscripted into a dangerous mission they know nothing about by a mysterious woman on the phone who seems to know their every move, sending them on a wild cross-country chase with the FBI hot on their trail in the explosive paranoid thriller Eagle Eye.

Movie Review: ‘Nights in Rodanthe’ the ultimate chick flick
There were sniffles and moist eyes and even wipe-away tears at the end of a screening of the love story Nights in Rodanthe.

Movie review: ‘Miracle at St. Anna’ is poor telling of an important story
It’s clear to see why Spike Lee chose to make the screen version of James McBride’s novel, Miracle at St. Anna.

Tale of quirky sex addict hard to choke down
In Choke, Sam Rockwell plays Victor Mancini, a young man who purposely chokes on food in restaurants, looking for well-off patrons to give him the Heimlich maneuver, in hopes that their saving his life will tie them to him forever. This is appropriate: Why shouldn’t a movie called Choke take off from a premise that’s hard to swallow?

War movie Lucky Ones is well-intentioned mess
Of all the movies about the current Iraq War, good or bad, passionate or indifferent, The Lucky Ones is the only one to embrace “daft.”

A compelling tale of love and Cuba
Personal Belongings, which will be screened tomorrow as part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival, is a surprise from Cuba.

Wacky road humor, Bolivian-style
If nothing else, Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellot’s wacky road comedy Who Killed the White Llama?, being shown tomorrow as part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival, proves that Bolivia is almost as maniacally screwed up as the United States. (I might not have made that equation as recently as last week, but the current nutty events on Wall Street and Washington seem to have us pulling ahead of the Bolivians.)

09/25/2008

Movie review: ‘Postcards from Leningrad’ lacks tension
Writer-director Mariana Rondon takes a surprisingly fanciful approach to her film Postcards from Leningrad, considering that the film is about Communist terrorist guerrillas on the run in 1960s Venezuela. Her film will be screened tomorrow as part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival.

09/24/2008

Latin American Film Festival: ‘Alice’s House’ offers advice, melodrama
The Providence Latin American Film Festival opens today with a 6 p.m. screening of Bolivian activist director Jorge Sanjines’ Ukamau at the Salomon Center on the Brown University campus, and an 8 p.m. showing of the film XXY at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Chace Center.

09/23/2008

My Best Friend’s Girl lacks charm
A couple of schools of thought come into play with the new Dane Cook comedy My Best Friend’s Girl. Start with “If at first you don’t succeed” and maybe work your way down to “The definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.”

09/19/2008

‘Ghost Town’ a comedy with spirit
A humorless New York City dentist is unnerved to discover that he can suddenly see ghosts who follow him everywhere he goes in the aptly named Ghost Town.

Racial tension divides neighbors on Lakeview Terrace
You’ve heard of Desperate Housewives. The new film Lakeview Terrace could easily have been titled Desperate Neighbors.

Monstrously dull script fails to bring any life to Igor
Once there was a land where the primary profession was “mad scientist” or “evil genius.” And the chief export was blackmail — threats of the terror their mad, evil genius scientists would unleash.

09/16/2008

Movie Review: Tyler Perry needs to get hold of rewrite
With his best cast ever, topped by Oscar winner Kathy Bates and the great Alfre Woodard, and his most cinematically polished production to date, Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys shows grand advances in the filmmaking education of playwright-turned-filmmaker Tyler Perry. It’s also his soapiest film yet, an overwrought melodrama of sibling rivalry, infidelity, family business power plays and terminal illness.

09/12/2008

Movie Review: ‘The Women’ presents a soft update on the original
The wit and droll put-downs fly in writer-director Diane English’s update of the 1939 film The Women.

Movie Review: De Niro, Pacino can’t fill the cracks in ‘Righteous Kill’s’ plot
Thoughts of seeing Robert De Niro and Al Pacino together on screen as a pair of seasoned New York City police detectives on the trail of a serial slayer in Righteous Kill must have sounded like box office magic.

Coens fire up a winner
After rocking the Academy Awards last winter with their No Country for Old Men, brother writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen gleefully shake things up with the rollicking, offbeat black comedy Burn After Reading.

Video reviews: ‘Baby Mama’ delivers laugh-out-loud moments
Pregnant with complex twists that give birth to surprising complications, the often laugh-out-loud-funny Baby Mama (Universal, $29.98) has more going for it than a one-joke idea of a 37-year-old woman who hires a surrogate mother to carry her baby to term.

Even proud Americans will tire of Proud American
You can be all for religious tolerance, up-by-the-bootstraps enterprise and love of country and still be turned off by Proud American.

09/06/2008

Movie Review: Cage’s hit man misses in ‘Bangkok Dangerous’
For an A-list actor with an Oscar, serious acting chops and an at least one-billion-dollar franchise behind him, Nicolas Cage certainly does do a lot of B-movies. Some, like Ghost Rider, you can understand. It’s a comic book. It’ll be a hit and raise the salary.

09/05/2008

Sympathy for the daredevil of the World Trade Center
This is a reprint of a review of the film Man on Wire which played the Newport International Film Festival in June and is now opening in regular release at the Avon Cinema in Providence.

Movie review: ‘Brick Lane’ chronicles one woman’s cultural revolution
At the center of Brick Lane, a modest new film directed by Sarah Gavron, is a woman for whom modesty is not just a defining character trait but also a moral principle. Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), who came to England from Bangladesh as a teenager for an arranged marriage, moves through her East London neighborhood as if determined to attract as little attention as possible.

09/03/2008

Babylon A.D. is lot of mayhem and babble
In Babylon A.D. Vin Diesel, the slowest moving action hero in movies, travels over land and under water from somewhere in the former Soviet Union to New York City in the company of a nun (Michelle Yeoh) and a young woman named Aurora (Melanie Thierry). Aurora is either some kind of biological weapon or some kind of messianic figure.

08/29/2008

Movie Review: Offbeat ‘Hamlet 2’ turns out to be hilarious
A failed drama teacher whose dreams are way bigger than his talent, a contemporary sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a rockin’ Jesus are the unlikely ingredients that hit high notes of hilarity in the offbeat Sundance Film Festival hit Hamlet 2.

Movie Review: Complex plot twists almost betray ‘Traitor’
There are enough plot twists in writer-director Jeffery Nachmanoff’s man-on-the-run thriller, Traitor, to fill at least two movies.

Movie review: “Elegy” a plodding, dismal retelling of an old, old story
Passion can make the brains of even the smartest people turn to mush.

Movie Review: Dread, paranoia make for ‘Transsiberian’ thrills
Is it just coincidence or is there a Ben Kingsley Festival going on this weekend in Providence?

08/22/2008

Movie Review: Positive messages abound in ‘The Longshots’
The Longshots is a certifiable crowd pleaser, an agreeable variation on the kid sports movie formula whose family-friendly messages outweigh its corny over familiarity.

Movie Review: ‘Death Race’ is nothing more than a straight ride on a dark road
Death Race is pretty much what you might expect from a movie set in the near future in a prison where the warden stages roar-to-the-death races by desperate prisoners in souped-up cars, watched by a bored public on the Internet, the last refuge for lonely, scarily desperate people.

Movie review: Adolescent angst in the heartland in ‘American Teen’
You won’t find any sexual encounters with Mom’s apple pie or a hole in the wall between the girls’ and boys’ shower rooms in American Teen.

Movie Review: One-of-a-kind legacy lights up the screen in ‘Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’
When self-styled Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson shot himself to death in 2005, he left behind a legacy of the kind of first-person, seat-of-the-pants writing that no one has been able to top.

Movie Review: Beauty and the geeks share victory with ‘The House Bunny’s’ comedic charm
The plot outline for The House Bunny must have made feminists everywhere gag:

08/20/2008

Movie Review: ‘The Rocker’ is offbeat, upbeat, well … full of beat
At one point late in the offbeat comedy The Rocker, drummer Robert Fishman declares, “It is never too late to rock!”

08/19/2008

Movie review: Take advantage of another opportunity to view the inspirational ‘Road Home’
There were so many films in this year’s Rhode Island International Film Festival — 289 to be exact — that only a few got a chance to be reviewed in these pages. Most played for one screening and, unless they were among the lucky few to be picked up for national theatrical or TV distribution, won’t be seen in these parts again.

08/16/2008

Mirrors reflects poorly on Sutherland
Kiefer, dog, what happened to you, man? You used to be cool. We expected you to take over as your generation’s movie tough guy.

08/15/2008

Outer space mayhem
Star Wars mastermind George Lucas clearly isn’t planning to be done with his cash-cow series any time soon. You may have thought at the end of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, in 2005, that the epic series had come to a close, what with Anakin Skywalker going over to the Dark Side as Darth Vader.

Movie Review: Sparks fly in Woody Allen’s ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’
Vicky Cristina Barcelona continues Woody Allen’s recent cinematic tour of Europe with another morality play, one that doesn’t fit his “romantic comedy” or “melodramatic thriller” mold. But Barcelona is likable, beautifully acted, scenic and sexy, ingredients that have been missing from his films since, oh, Everyone Says I Love You (1996).

Bottle Shock is light in flavor, with comedic overtones
The first thing you should know about the oddly titled Bottle Shock is that it’s about fathers and sons, the destruction of preconceived notions, and wine … lots and lots of wine.

Movie Review: ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ doesn’t quite lift off
Every movie studio out there wants a piece of that Pixar-DreamWorks computer-animation pie. Even start-ups like Summit Entertainment covet some of the millions that parents fork over to send their little darlings to this week’s child-safe/family friendly cartoon.

Movie review: ‘Henry Poole’ drowns in sap
Glumness specialist Luke Wilson plays the title sad sack in Henry Poole Is Here.