11/28/2009

Movie Review: Learn about nightmares in ‘William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe’
“William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” is a fascinating portrait of a larger-than-life lawyer

11/25/2009

‘Ninja Assassin’ simply isn’t sharp enough
In Japan, there’s a rich tradition of sword-and-splatter pictures. There, the blades are shiny and sharp, and if the fake blood isn’t staining the lens, you’re not trying hard enough. That’s the tradition Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” leaned on, and it’s the foundation of “Ninja Assassin,” a more run-of-the-mill Hollywood ninja movie with “Matrix” ties.

Movie Review: No new tricks for these ‘Old Dogs’
Trashing “Old Dogs” is a bit like kicking a puppy. But here goes.

Movie review: Dahl fantasy clever as a fox
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a proudly analog animated entertainment, making its handmade way into a marketplace glutted with digital goodies. Next to the three-dimensional, computer-generated creatures that swoop and soar off the screen these days, the furry talking animals on display here, with their matted pelts, jerky movements and porcelain eyes, might look a little quaint, like old-fashioned wind-up toys uneasily sharing the shelf with the latest video game platforms.

11/19/2009

Movie review: ‘Twilight’ sequel, ‘New Moon’ wanes
“This is the last time you’ll ever see me,” Edward Cullen says to Bella Swan. As if.

11/20/2009

Movie review: ‘The Blind Side’ tackles issues that go well beyond football
Don’t dismiss “The Blind Side” as just another inspirational sports movie.

Movie review: Uneasy darkness haunts lightness of ‘Education’
Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a 16-year-old growing up in the London suburb of Twickenham in 1961, is always the first in class to raise her hand with the answer. She is fluent in French and studying Latin; she plays the cello and is familiar with all the pre-Raphaelite artists (Rossetti and Burne-Jones are her favorites; Holman Hunt, not so much).

Movie review: Super animation is best part of landing on ‘Planet 51’
How might a kid — OK, a teenager — protect himself from that dreaded fate described in legions of sci-fi movies (including “The Fourth Kind”), the anal probe? If you weren’t thinking “champagne cork,” you were way off, according to the sci-fi kids cartoon “Planet 51.”

Movie Review: ‘Antichrist’ is torture to watch
Danish writer-director Lars Von Trier’s misogynist screed “Antichrist” may be the most unpleasant movie ever made.

A powerful and poignant juxtaposition of despair, hope
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” follows a teenager named Claireece “Precious” Jones struggling with incest, illiteracy, physical abuse, poverty and obesity in 1980s Harlem. The movie is harrowing and unforgiving — a two-hour pile-on that leaves poor Precious (not to mention the audience) with no room to breathe.

11/13/2009

Movie Review: ‘Pirate Radio’ has songs and sentiment
Richard Curtis makes romantic, sentimental and overlong comedies filled to the rafters with friends as cast-members. He’s a British Judd Apatow — indulgent, substituting sweetness for edge, charm for shock value.

Movie Review: See how the world ends in ‘2012’
Nothing like a dandy evening’s apocalypse to take the edge off recession, unemployment, Afghanistan and Glenn Beck. With “2012,” Roland (“Day After Tomorrow”) Emmerich serves up World’s End 4.0, with cataclysmic effects showcasing what volcanoes, tidal waves and earthquakes will do once that fabled Mayan calendar runs out on 12-21-12.

Movie Review: ‘House of the Devil’ offers up shivers over splat
Once upon a time in horror cinema, the victim — often female and preferably wearing a backlit diaphanous gown — would inch up the creaking stairs toward the inevitable.

Movie review: ‘The Yes Men’
It takes some nerve, not to mention diabolical intelligence and financial resources, to pull off the elaborate pranks devised by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (who are in real life Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos), the anti-globalization activists and satirical performance artists known as the Yes Men.

11/09/2009

Movie review: ‘The Box’ pushes the right buttons for horror fans
How do you pad out a six-page short story that strives to be nothing more than a clever little morality tale into a feature-length film? By throwing in lots and lots of stuff — practically everything but zombies. Check that: We’ve got two hours to fill here. Bring on the zombies, too!

11/06/2009

Movie Review: ‘Men Who Stare at Goats’ kooky, but clever
In wacky Iraq, Army uses soldiers with psychic abilities

Movie Review: Avoid a close encounter of “The Fourth Kind” at the ticket window
Avoid a close encounter of ‘The Fourth Kind’ at the ticket window

Movie Review: Jim Carrey perfect fit in ‘A Christmas Carol’
In these trying times we may all be in need of a little Christmas spirit. And right now there’s no better place to find it than in director Robert Zemeckis’s magnificent, sparkling new version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” a perennial holiday favorite since it was first published in 1843.

Movie Review: ‘Coco Before Chanel’ has a certain style
At the turn of the 20th century, French women of style were gilded peacocks festooned with jewels, gaudy things cinched so tightly at the waist that they could not breathe, teetering on claw feet.

Movie Review: Prison brute turns film star in ‘Bronson’
“Bronson” portrays a real-life British bruiser as a psychotic performance artist. It’s an assaultive work about an assaultive fellow, Michael Peterson, Britain’s most notorious prisoner.

10/29/2009

“This Is It” is a thrilling tribute to Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson lives!

10/30/2009

Movie review: ‘Beeswax’ a subtle, elegant exploration of modern relationships
The title of “Beeswax,” Andrew Bujalski’s third feature, evokes the sticky medium of social insects and also the idioms of childhood speech. “It’s none of your beeswax,” say the Queen Bees on the playground, and just what is or isn’t someone else’s business is one of the questions Bujalski and his characters explore.

10/23/2009

Movie Review: ‘Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant’ surprisingly toothless
With a list of oddly named characters — Rhamus Twobellies, Loaf Head, Gertha Teeth, Mr. Tiny, Mr. Tall, Monkey Girl and Evra the Snake Boy — the deliciously titled Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant holds more than its share of promise.

Movie Review: Astro Boy should fly at the box office
A sort of Japanese reworking of Pinocchio, Astro Boy became a beloved character in creator Osama Tezuka’s original manga (Japanese comics that are often serialized as magazines) beginning in 1952 and continuing through 1968, and then in an animated TV series that first ran from 1963 to 1966.

Dad gets an education in The Boys Are Back
The Boys Are Back, a sun-and-sorrow-drenched story of love, loss and “free range” fatherhood starring Clive Owen, takes you back to a time not so long ago when children hopped on bikes without helmets, jumped into lakes without water wings and onto trampolines without spotters, racing through childhood with reckless abandon.

Movie Review: A look at blacks and ‘good hair’
Like the titular follicles this documentary surveys, Good Hair is a bit all over the place.

Movie Review: ‘A Serious Man’ is a story about a dysfunctional family and its relationship with God
No one can accuse writing-directing-producing brothers Joel and Ethan Coen of making the same movie twice. The 2007 best picture Oscar winner No Country for Old Men, the social comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the all-out comedies The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy and Fargo, the crime thriller Miller’s Crossing and the indescribable Barton Fink are theirs.

Movie review: Bland ‘Amelia’ strays a bit off course
“No borders, just horizons,” enthuses aviator Amelia Earhart in the new biopic Amelia. “Who wants a life imprisoned in safety?”

10/19/2009

Moview Review: Plenty of punishing scenes in ‘Stepfather’
Finally, a horror thriller served up straight.

10/16/2009

Movie Review: ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ is too odd even for kids
In the aptly titled Where the Wild Things Are, a troubled and lonely little boy runs away from home, steals a sailboat and crashes on the rocky shore of an island where he meets a zoo full of galoomphing out-of-this world creatures who can’t decide at first whether to eat him or crown him their king.

In American Casino, the nation gambled, and lost
Despite the title, the incisive documentary American Casino is set on Wall Street rather than in Las Vegas. It examines the meltdown of the U.S. economy and the big bank bailout by the American taxpayers while shining a spotlight on how all this trickled down to push people out of their homes.

Movie review: ‘Law Abiding Citizen’ not your usual vigilante film
In the mystery thriller Law Abiding Citizen, a man begins killing off members of the justice system whom he feels were too lenient in prosecuting the two thugs who killed his wife and young daughter 10 years earlier.

Movie Review: Visiting ‘Paris’ is an affordable fantasy
Were you forced to cancel your trip to Paris this year? Then hurry, please, to Paris, Cedric Klapisch’s intoxicating portrait of a city that, despite (or, more likely, because of) being in a state of constant flux, retains timeless energy and allure.

A simple story of not-so-simple fan
The little man at the center of the spasmodically funny and bleak love story Big Fan doesn’t come with a halo slung over his head. His speeches are written in ballpoint with a heavy hand and delivered with bleats and bellows on the radio. (The words are so deeply inscribed on the page you could read them by touch.) He doesn’t come with a fanfare and, to judge by the square, squat cut of his jib, he’s an unlikely contender. He’s a regular guy or as close to regular as any 35-year-old can possibly be who sleeps under a poster of his favorite football star while tucked under a coverlet imprinted with the names of NFL teams.

Movie Review: Better hoops than movie-making
More Than a Game, a new documentary directed by Kristopher Belman, invites comparisons with Hoop Dreams, Steve James’ 1994 film about the lives of two young Chicago basketball players. That movie was an almost miraculous fusion of filmmaking art and real-life narrative full of twists and reversals. More Than a Game, which looks back on the achievements of a high school basketball team in Akron, Ohio, that happened to include the future NBA superstar LeBron James, is halfway there. The art is lacking, but the material is remarkable enough to make up for pedestrian filmmaking.

Movie Review: Low-budget horror is lots of fun
Some movies are a more shared experience than others, and that’s certainly the case with Paranormal Activity, a micro-budget horror flick about things that go bump in the you-know-what in a nice new home.

10/09/2009

Movie Review: ‘Couples Retreat’ is light and frothy
Four couples travel to a South Seas tropical paradise operated by a mystic guru who promises to mend fragile relationships in Couples Retreat. The only hitch: three of the couples don’t think their relationships need mending. They only came along for the sun, the snorkeling and the Jet Skiing. Boy, are they in for a surprise.

Movie Review: No electricity? No toilet paper? No problem in No Impact Man
Everyone seems to be “going green” these days. But no one more than Colin Beavan, who corralled his wife and young daughter into seeing what life would be like for a year in making no environmental impact on their little corner of New York City.

Movie Review: If you like British humor, you’ll enjoy ‘St. Trinian’s’
In the tradition of lowbrow, wacky British comedies comes St. Trinian’s, a reworking and update of the 1954 worldwide hit The Belles of St. Trinian’s, about a financially strapped girls’ school that’s filled with unruly students and a staff who are the dregs of education.

Movie Review: “Beautiful Losers” is too self-serving to care about
Beautiful Losers bids to immortalize the ethos and achievement of a group of artists affiliated with the Alleged Gallery in Manhattan.

Movie Review: “Thirst” is “Twilight” on bloody steroids
The juvenile heavy-petting of Twilight gives way to all-out Korean kink in Thirst, a macabre, darkly humorous and at times nauseating vampire tale from the director of Old Boy, Park Chan-Wook. Park gives us geysers of blood, gallons of gore and sound effects cranked up so that every squishy bite, slurp, gurgle and bodily function hits you in full Surround Sound.

10/02/2009

Movie Review: In ‘Zombieland,’ the undead are part of the fun
Hilarious, kooky and brimming with surprises, the zany-scary comedy-horror Zombieland puts a new spin on all those Night of the Living Dead movies. And just in time for Halloween.

Movie review: Moore’s ‘Capitalism’ not bankrupt of humor
Michael Moore has blasted the greed and shortsightedness of the automobile industry (Roger & Me), America’s infatuation with guns (Bowling for Columbine) and the Bush administration’s run-up to war in Iraq (Fahrenheit 9/11). Now Moore has aimed his arrows at our economic system in the witty, jaunty and often hilarious Capitalism: A Love Story.

Movie Review: ‘Whip It’ rocks, rolls and proves irresistible
Drew Barrymore makes an impressive, high-flying debut as a director in Whip It, a highly original coming-of-age comedy set in the world of women’s roller derby.

Movie review: ‘The Invention of Lying’ is, well, would I lie to you?
British funnyman Ricky Gervais imagines a parallel world where everyone only tells the truth. Then one day a man is pushed by circumstance to tell a lie and realms of undreamed-of power and wealth open up to him.

10/03/2009

‘La Mala’ is better suited for TV
The Providence Latin-American Film Festival closes out its 17th year with the soap opera La Mala, about a dysfunctional family in Puerto Rico.

10/02/2009

Movie review: Remembering Molly Goldberg
“The Oprah of her day” is one talking head’s description of the broadcasting pioneer Gertrude Berg in Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Aviva Kempner’s engrossing documentary portrait of a once-beloved radio and television star who died in 1966 and today is barely remembered. The film could be described as Exhibit A in a study of media celebrity and collective forgetfulness in the age of information overload.

Latin film fest shines light on Cuba
The spotlight in this year’s Providence Latin-American Film Festival is on features and shorts from Cuba. The island nation has a vibrant film industry and a huge output, considering its size. Many of its directors — and those from other Latin-American countries — have been trained at the International School (San Antonio de los Baños) and some of their recent films will be screened Saturday, followed by a Q&A discussion with some of the young Cuban filmmakers.

Move review: ‘Crude’ makes case against Chevron, but oozes with heavy-handedness
Documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger explores a long-running suit brought by the indigenous people of Ecuador’s rain forest against a major U.S. oil company in the provocative Crude, which is showing Saturday at the Providence Latin-American Film Festival.

Movie review: ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’: Finding meaning in terror
The Baader Meinhof Complex, a deeply unsettling account of a group of young German activists that morphed into a murderous gang of domestic terrorists, provides both a useful lesson in history and a haunting portrait of idealism hardened into the most extreme form of nihilism and violence.

10/01/2009

Movie Review: Amid turmoil and separation, 2 Cuban friends remain close
The documentary Dream Havana, showing Friday as part of the Providence Latin-American Film Festival, is a testament to the power of friendship that’s touchingly, beautifully presented on screen by filmmaker Gary Marks.

09/30/2009

Movie Review: An action-filled crime caper
While many of the films in this year’s Providence Latin-American Film Festival have a political slant, one of the opening films — Perro Come Perro from Colombia — is unapologetically a slam-bang action crime caper drama that would be at home in a list of Quentin Tarantino’s films. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tarantino remade it in English, or maybe the Coen Brothers could take a crack at it. Perro Come Perro has the kind of quirky situations, murderous characters, tension and on-the-run action that recalls both Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the Coen’s No Country for Old Men.

Movie Review: Michael Janusonis reviews sad slice-of-life drama
A slice-of-life coming-of-age drama, Mutum revolves around a sad little boy living on a farm in rural Brazil. Showing Thursday at the Providence Latin-American Film Festival, director Sandra Kogut’s film (the title is the name of a city) is a sad story of everyday happenings.

09/28/2009

‘Pandorum’ opens up a box of creepy sci-fi mystery
Pandorum plays like the best movie based on a video game to not actually have a video game to base it on, ever.

Movie review: ‘Surrogates’ shows there’s no substitute for the real thing
Surrogates is itself a surrogate, a kind of stand-in for many of the sci-fi movies of the recent past: In it, you’ll recognize the ideas of Blade Runner, Minority Report and even WALL•E.

09/25/2009

Movie review: ‘Bright Star’ moves at an old-fashioned pace
Bright Star is a slow-to-boil film about the slow-to-boil romance between Fanny Brawne and poet John Keats in the early 19th century.

Movie review: I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is satanically stupid
I have no idea if they serve beer in hell. But I have some notion of what might be playing at the Hades AMC 20. It’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, probably on a double bill with All About Steve.

09/26/2009

Movie review: ‘Fame’ forgets all the fun
Fame, the original “high school musical,” earns a sometimes toe-tapping remake that borrows scenes, situations and character “types” from its 1980 original.

09/25/2009

Movie Review: A glorious and generous autobiography captivates
In her wonderful 2000 movie, The Gleaners and I, the French director Agnès Varda takes a nonfiction ramble through the world of everyday treasure hunting, in urban markets where the poor pick through the leftover lettuce and in trash bins where throwaway people forage for thrown-away sustenance. Wielding a small digital video camera that now feels like an extension of her body, Varda made a case for gleaning as a philosophy of life, as a way of seeing and of being in a world in which remnants — food, yes, but also old toys and other such poignant castoffs — are cherished and used rather than carelessly discarded.

Delightful short cuts in film festival at Cable Car Cinema
Friday night at the Cable Car Cinema you can join thousands of other moviegoers around the world in deciding which of the 10 finalists in the 12th annual Manhattan Shorts Film Festival will be named best short film of 2009.

09/18/2009

Movie Review: It’s truth, lies and a wacky Matt Damon in ‘The Informant!’
What starts off as a rather dry, if sometimes offbeat, look at an attempt to weed out corporate corruption, director Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! eventually turns into an amusing puzzle within a puzzle that keeps springing surprises.

Movie Review: ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs’ is more than just a great title
What a good idea it would be if hamburgers and ears of corn and meatballs and ice cream could fall from the sky at the press of a button on a futuristic gizmo! World hunger would end. Everyone would be happy,

Movie Review: ‘Love Happens’ — but not always smoothly
Romance. Guilt. Tears. Self help. Confronting an unhappy past. Laying old wounds to rest. The romantic comedy-drama Love Happens is a movie worthy of a spot on Oprah. Or certainly Dr. Phil.

Movie Review: ‘My One and Only’ is charming road movie
In My One and Only, a good-natured screwball road film set in 1953, Renée Zellweger plays Ann Devereaux, a fading Southern belle who drags along her two teenage boys on a nationwide husband-hunting expedition. Crinkling her eyes, smiling coyly and perambulating with seductive flounces, Ann could be a cousin of Blanche DuBois. She belongs to a breed of aggressively glamorous women whose syrupy wiles modern feminism has rendered quaint, and Zellweger inhabits her fully.

Movie Review: ‘Jennifer’s Body’ not so hot
Anita knows that something is very wrong when her best friend, Jennifer, turns up at her house after a night of partying with a rock band, splattered with blood, barfing up black goo and raiding the refrigerator to chomp into a rotisserie chicken.

Movie Review: ‘September Issue’ keeps fashion in vogue
The empress of the realm at American Vogue — and most of the fashion world, as we’re told in documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler’s The September Issue — is British editor Anna Wintour, a grande dame whose opinions are as severe as her sharp blond pageboy.

Movie Review: ‘It Might Get Loud’ gets good
The conceit is simple enough. Round up three generations of famous rock guitarists, use home movies, visits to their old stomping grounds, and concert footage to tell their stories, then put them in a room together to see what happens.

09/11/2009

Movie Review: ‘Cold Souls’ an oddball, surreal comedy
One of the best things about Cold Souls, Sophie Barthes’ futuristic comedy about a man who puts his soul into storage, is how it depicts the experience of fame in New York. As Paul Giamatti, playing an actor named Paul Giamatti, makes his way down a Manhattan street or waits for an appointment in a lobby, the fact of his celebrity subtly registers on the people around him who are far too sophisticated to make a fuss, but still stop and say “Isn’t that … ?” to their companions.

Movie Review: Coppola tries too hard with ‘Tetro’
A door slams shut; a lock turns; a room goes dark.

Movie review: ‘The Way We Get By’ captures personal rewards of three airport greeters
Unfailingly modest and profoundly humane, The Way We Get By profiles three people over age 70 whose lives have been changed by a simple act of service: greeting troops at Bangor International Airport in Maine.

Movie Review: ‘9’ doesn’t equal the almost magical original
The animated sci-fi film 9 — not to be confused with the non-animated sci-fi District 9, or the non-animated non-sci-fi musical Nine — is a perfect example of a thin idea stuffed and stuffed with filler until it loses much of its charm. Shane Acker’s film is built on his 2005 short animation of the same title, an almost magical and mysterious little movie about animated rag dolls in a post-apocalyptic future struggling to “survive” the terrors of their ruined world.

09/08/2009

Violent Gamer was built on video game clichés
When did Gerard Butler hire Jason Statham’s agent? When did the star of 300, Friend of Guy (Ritchie, of RocknRolla), savior of Katherine Heigl (The Ugly Truth), need to do B-movies built on video-game cliches, conventions and stereotypes?

09/04/2009

Movie Review: Sandra Bullock earns our pity in All About Steve
At times like this, it’s good to think positive. That’s what Sandra Bullock’s socially inept crossword puzzle “constructor” does in All About Steve.

Lack of sympathetic characters taints Extract
Ten years ago, Mike Judge satirized the absurdities of the workplace experience from the perspective of put-upon employees with Office Space. It didn’t do much when it came out, but it went on to become a cult favorite on cable and home video, to the point where it changed the way you looked at the common stapler.

Movie Review: Lorna’s Silence speaks volumes about morality
Despite the lofty place they occupy in world cinema, filmmaking brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have never bothered turning their pensive, intimate camera on characters falling from great societal heights. No, their people-in-crisis are generally only two or three rungs from the bottom already, which makes the stakes not just desperate but dire.

08/31/2009

Movie review: ‘The Final Destination’ goes nowhere
“Is it safe to sit here?”

Movie review: ‘Halloween II’ a horrible letdown
Rob Zombie’s transition from scary heavy-metal maven to slash-and-splatter moviemaker is completed with Halloween II.

08/28/2009

Movie review: ‘Wah Do Dem’ an engaging first film
Two months ago filmmakers Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner, who have been friends since they were kindergartners on Providence’s East Side, won the $50,000 Target Filmmaker Award at the 15th Los Angeles Film Festival for their Jamaican-made feature debut, Wah Do Dem.

Movie review: ‘Taking Woodstock,’ a tale of peace, music and big money
Billed 40 years ago as “3 Days of Peace and Music,” Woodstock marked a major cultural upheaval that sparked changes in the way Americans looked at music, sexuality, drugs and authority figures.

Movie review: ‘Adam’ a romance of a different kind
By all rights, Adam is a romantic movie that shouldn’t work at all.

08/21/2009

Movie Review: ‘Inglourious Basterds’ a swaggering, violent epic
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds may be the most inventive, outrageous film of the year, a Hebrew revenge fantasy in which Jewish commandos bring World War II to an abrupt end by targeting the German high command.

Retro romantic comedy Post Grad is too old school
Alexis Bledel, the Gilmore Girl with the Traveling Pants, takes a baby-step into adulthood with a retro romantic comedy about looking for love and career fulfillment the minute you get out of college.

THE TENT: Life in the Round is an ovation to Warwick Musical Theatre
If you lived in Rhode Island at any point in the second half of the 20th century, The Tent was more than likely a part of your summertime life.

Movie Review: ‘Shorts’ too silly, too long
The kid-centric film Shorts revolves around a mysterious rainbow-colored Wishing Rock that arrives on Earth from some distant galaxy.

Movie Review: ‘Humpday’ has a sexy concept, but a limp execution
There’s a potentially hilarious idea in Humpday, an oddball buddy movie about a pair of old college friends who are reunited after a long time and decide, on a dare during a wild party, to enter a porno movie contest starring themselves.

Movie Review: Unmistaken Child documents a young Nepalese monk's journey
Unmistaken Child documents the four-year search of Tenzin Zopa, a gentle, baby-faced 28-year-old Nepalese monk, for the reincarnation of his Tibetan master, Geshe Lama Konchog, who died in 2001.

Movie Review: ‘X Games 3D’ is just a commercial
The X-Games, Disney subsidiary ESPN’s expo of free-style skateboarding, snowboarding, motocross and closed-course car road rallies, makes a dandy proving ground for 3D film. The depth of field, the skateboards flying into your face and dirt kicked off the screen is novel and actually helps you see all the way-cool stuff these stuntmen-by-another-name do as they “create new ways to fly.”

08/15/2009

Movie Review: Used-car film doesn’t have ‘The Goods’
Enduring the soul-sucking process of buying a used car is bad enough. Watching a movie about soulless used-car salesmen is even worse — especially when it’s a comedy that strains desperately for raunchy, politically incorrect laughs.

08/14/2009

Movie Review; ‘District 9’ is sci-fi with a conscience
The relentlessly fast-paced District 9 is a science-fiction fantasy that revolves around a group of human-sized insect aliens whose spaceship has been hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa, for two decades.

Movie Review: ‘Time Traveler’s Wife’ leaves substance behind
So let’s try to get this straight.

Movie Review: ‘In the Loop’ hits its target
When a low-ranking cabinet member in the British government makes an offhand, off-the-cuff remark during a radio interview about the unlikelihood of Britain being dragged into a Mideast war that the United States appears to be planning, it sets off a wild tizzy in the halls of power in London in the fast and funny satire In the Loop.

Animated Ponyo is beautiful but also nonsensical and boring
If you’re 5 years old, or under the influence of some sort of hallucinogenic drug, Ponyo is probably awesome. Clearly, these are the ideal scenarios in which to watch the latest animated fantasy from Japanese writer-director Hayao Miyazaki.

Movie Review: ‘Paper Heart’ in need of resuscitation
At the outset of Nick Jasenovec’s Paper Heart, the actress and comedian Charlyne Yi (playing a purportedly fictional version of herself) claims neither to need nor believe in romantic love.

‘Bandslam’ has overfamiliar theme, but a few charms as well
Bandslam, Summit Entertainment’s High School Musical/Camp Rock clone, is a movie about music and high school and guilt and fitting in. It’s surprisingly not awful for something this overfamiliar.

08/11/2009

Movie Review: Cool off with ‘Dead Snow’ and Nazi zombies
The Norwegian Nazi-zombie movie Dead Snow is quite the jolly mountain holiday, pitting a group of medical students against a battalion of undead, unpleasant and unstoppable German soldiers hell-bent on ruining a perfectly good Easter vacation.

08/08/2009

The complexities of love in modern Turkey
The Rhode Island International Film Festival closes out its six days of movies Sunday evening with a heartbreaker of a romantic drama from a very surprising place.

08/07/2009

Movie Review: ‘Julie & Julia’: 1 movie, 2 recipes for success
If you’ve salivated over the tempting French-inspired concoctions Julia Child once made in her TV kitchen, you’ll leave Julie & Julia hungry. Following a recent screening of the film I left craving some boeuf bourguignon which is one of the centerpiece dishes in director Nora Ephron’s witty, sweet and tasty film.

Movie Review: ‘G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’ just a video game
Toward the middle of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, as two boys fought passionately over a handful of stolen rice — long after scenes in which soldiers had been blasted to bits and a man had been outfitted with a red-hot iron mask, but before scenes in which a man’s head was exploded and another’s head crumbled to dust before our eyes — I turned to the man next to me and asked, “Is this picture rated NC-17?”

Movie Review: ‘Perfect Getaway’ an imperfect thriller
A romantic vacation hiking in the wilds of Hawaii is not in the cards for one couple in the somewhat engrossing thriller A Perfect Getaway.

Movie Review: ‘(500) Days of Summer’ a sweet and sour love story
In a year when there seems to have been only about 12 days of summer, one can take heart in a movie called (500) Days of Summer.

Movie Review: ‘Rock Prophecies’ puts focus on photographer
The Rolling Stones. ZZ Top. Led Zeppelin. Jeff Beck. Aerosmith. Jimi Hendrix. Def Leppard. Robert Plant. Carlos Santana. Stevie Ray Vaughan. The Sick Puppies. Slash.

08/06/2009

Movie Review: Anxieties of women ring true in ‘Not Dead Yet’
A trio of 50-ish women friends in Portland, Ore., fear that time is running out on their dreams and hatch a plan to make their own short film for a local festival, not realizing that the director they’ve hired has previously shot porno films and is giving their project an erotic slant in Not Dead Yet.

Movie Review: Feeling a little melancholy? ‘Another Harvest Moon’ is the film for you
Ernest Borgnine, who won the Academy Award as best actor for 1955’s Marty and has appeared in nearly 100 movies and two hit TV series, will be at the Columbus Theatre Friday night to receive the Rhode Island International Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

08/04/2009

Shatner fans in for rare treat
Although at the last minute William Shatner cancelled his Thursday stage appearance at the Columbus Theater due to "contractual obligations" for an upcoming movie, the show will go on… on screen at any rate.

You and the kids could do worse than ‘Aliens in the Attic’
Discarded Fox ideas for an ad campaign for the kiddie feature Aliens in the Attic.

A feel-good story of African war refugees
John Lavall’s awkwardly titled Home Across Lands, showing Wednesday as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival, is an inspirational, feel-good documentary about the plight of African war refugees and their eventual resettlement in Providence through the auspices of the International Institute of Rhode Island.

08/02/2009

An uncompromising look at the horrors of the Armenian genocide
The 13th Rhode Island International Film Festival officially begins its six-day run Tuesday night with a gala at the Providence Performing Arts Center, followed by a series of short films on the giant screen. But it will actually kick off Monday with a couple of special screenings: a 10 a.m. showing of Monsters Vs. Aliens 3-D at Providence Place Cinemas and a 6:30 p.m. screening at the Columbus Theater of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s 2007 historical epic The Lark Farm.

07/31/2009

Movie Review: ‘Funny People’ is half comedy, half drama
It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for audiences to expect that writer-director Judd Apatow, who took sexual comedy to daring new heights with The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, would keep them in stitches with his latest, Funny People.

Movie Review: ‘Hurt Locker’ filled with explosive tension
Director Kathryn Bigelow thrusts you into the middle of a combat zone, riding Humvees on the mean streets of Baghdad circa 2004 with a team of Army specialists as they try to defuse roadside bombs without getting blown to bits themselves in the gripping The Hurt Locker.

Movie Review: Inspiration on the menu in ‘Pressure Cooker’
Pressure Cooker belongs to the honorable if overpopulated genre of inspirational films (both documentaries and features) dedicated to the proposition that one committed, passionate teacher can make all the difference in the lives of disadvantaged students.

07/25/2009

No animal magnetism here
For parents despairing of ever tearing Cats and Dogs and Beverly Hills Chihuahua out of the family DVD player, Disney gives us G-Force, a comedy about talking pet-shop dropouts trained as government agents.

07/24/2009

Movie Review: ‘The Ugly Truth’ gets an R for raunchy, ridiculous
The Ugly Truth is a raunchy romantic comedy, with the emphasis on raunch. There are only a couple of sequences in this boy-meets-girl, boy-hates-girl, boy-wins-girl film that are laugh-out-loud funny, and they are pretty raw.

07/25/2009

Cheap, predictable horror is born in ‘Orphan’
The scares are cheap, the laughs mostly intentional and the ending is a real lulu in Orphan, the latest from the director of House of Wax.

07/24/2009

Movie Review: ‘Cheri’ is witty, wicked and wistful
In 1989, director Stephen Frears, writer Christopher Hampton and Michelle Pfeiffer joined forces for the sexy romp Dangerous Liaisons, a witty, wicked tale of sex and infidelity and sex and romance and sex among the upper crust in France on the eve of the French Revolution. Pfeiffer played a woman of pristine religious and wifely devotion who becomes the object of a bet to see if she can be pried from her marriage vows.

Movie Review: Enlighten Up! is a novice’s exploration of yoga
Inspired to make a documentary about yoga, filmmaker Kate Churchill came up with a shrewd idea for Enlighten Up! Rather than focus on her own experience with the discipline, which she has practiced to great physical and spiritual benefit for many years, she enlisted a yoga novice to devote himself to it and report on its effects.

Movie Review: ‘Seraphine’ an inspiring but sad portrait of an artist
Based on the iffy longtime relationship between French modern primitive painter Séraphine de Senlis and her sometimes mentor, art critic and dealer Wilhelm Uhde, Séraphine wavers between inspiration and melancholy. Séraphine swept the Cesar Awards (the French Academy Awards) with seven wins, including best picture and best actress for the magnetic performance of Yolande Moreau, a former mime, in the title role.

07/17/2009

Herb & Dorothy: A passion for art
If Ripley’s Believe It or Not! were still around, Herb and Dorothy Vogel surely would be in it for amassing a world-class art collection on the most ordinary of working-class salaries.

Movie Review: Eating will never be the same after viewing ‘Food, Inc.’
One of the scariest movies of the season has nothing to do with ghosts or vampires or monsters.

07/14/2009

‘Half-Blood’: A deeper, darker Harry Potter movie
Deeper, darker, more intense and definitely more soul-searching (literally) than the previous five Harry Potter films, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will delight fans of this mystical series, confound any novice who hasn’t read one of the books about the students at the Hogwarts wizardry school or seen one of the movies, and frustrate anyone who expects a neat, wrap-up ending.

07/10/2009

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy is not very funny
British satirist Sacha Baron Cohen took a character from his offbeat HBO series Da Ali G Show, and turned him into an international movie sensation in the anything-goes 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, sending a Kazakhstan TV reporter across the United States to explore its foibles and to stalk actress Pamela Anderson.

Movie review: Luis Tiant is ‘The Lost Son of Havana’
In 2007, former Boston Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant finally got permission to visit Cuba, his native country which he hadn’t seen since he got stranded in the United States during a 1961 baseball tour and decided to stay. Cuban ruler Fidel Castro told him and other athletes who were in the United States at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion that they could either come home and play in Cuba as amateurs or never come home again, thus turning Tiant’s three-month trip into 46 years of exile.

Movie review: We hate you, Beth Cooper
Oh, to have teenage kids just so I could forbid them to see I Love You, Beth Cooper.

Movie Review: Banjo virtuoso searches for origins in Africa
The gentle, upbeat documentary Throw Down Your Heart chronicles the African pilgrimage of the American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in search of the origins of his chosen instrument, which he sheepishly admits is “associated with a white Southern stereotype.”

‘Moon’ owes a lot to the classic ‘2001’
Moon is a low-budget, paranoid sci-fi thriller that gives up its paranoia and mystery far too early. It’s one of those indie films whose selling point is “look what they made with very little money.” Because what “they” — director Duncan Jones and the British production team — pulled off is an eye-poppingly real lunar base that, if nothing else, looks messy and lived-in.

07/03/2009

Movie Review: ‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ continues to be fun
By the time mammoths and saber-toothed tigers ruled the Earth 10,000 years ago, dinosaurs had been extinct for 65 million years or so.

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works works
If a lot of Woody Allen’s latest film Whatever Works seems more than a little like the “old Woody Allen” — befuddled by the day-to-day stuff of life; unlucky at love and carping about just about everything he comes across; feeling that ultimately there is no point to what we do — it is probably because Whatever Works was written about the time Allen completed the script for Annie Hall in the mid 1970s.

Movie Review: ‘$9.99’ features an eerie parallel universe
Israeli writer Etgar Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His very short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom.

07/01/2009

Movie Review: ‘Public Enemies’ surprisingly flat
There’s no lack of shoot-’em-up action in director Michael Mann’s Public Enemies: violent bank robberies, prison breaks, chases by car and on foot roar across the screen.

06/26/2009

Movie Review: ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ is not an easy film
A mother’s obsessive love for her cancer-stricken teenage daughter at the expense of her family sparks friction, sending her 11-year-old daughter to a lawyer to sue to get out from her mother’s control in My Sister’s Keeper.

Movie Review: A sad look at a family after a matriarch’s death
It may have a breezy, carefree title, but director Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours is actually a rumination on what happens to a family after a loved one’s death and the stuff that’s left behind.

Movie Review: Bravery fills secret dispatches in ‘Burma VJ’
Many of the images in Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country are shaky and blurred, captured with video cameras small enough to be quickly concealed in circumstances of danger and chaos. The lack of cinematic polish emphasizes the urgency of these pictures and the bravery of the anonymous camera operators — “VJ” stands for “video journalists” — who risked their safety, their freedom and their lives to record popular protests against the military government of Myanmar and the regime’s brutal response.

Movie Review: A quirky look at modern life
Director Sam Mendes, who explored the darker side of American life in his Academy Award-wining American Beauty and more recently in Revolutionary Road, takes an uncharacteristically sunny road in the very smart, very offbeat Away We Go.

Movie Review: ‘Transformers’ will make teen boys drool
From Armageddon to the Bad Boys movies to Pearl Harbor and the 2007 Transformers, director Michael Bay certainly knows how to rouse a crowd. In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen he does just that again in a movie that has been outfitted with all the components designed to make teenage boys drool — lots of noise, explosions, exhaustively fast-paced editing, amazing special effects, beautiful women as sex objects and even a whiff of drugs, albeit here employed playfully as a gag in which a middle-aged mother gets accidentally high.

06/19/2009

Movie review: ‘The Proposal’ an engaging comedy
The battle-of-the-sexes is one of the most familiar kinds of romantic comedies, from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, to Tracy and Hepburn locking horns, to Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner duking it in The War of the Roses.

Movie review: Low level of humor matches the title of ‘Year One’
One of the strangest “road” pictures to come along in a long time — perhaps eons — is Year One. Jack Black and Michael Cera play a couple of inept hunter-gatherer cavemen, Zed and Oh, respectively, who are banished from their tribe and wind up in biblical times with the likes of Cain, Abel and Abraham, eventually ending up in Sodom.

Movie Review: ‘Easy Virtue’ both jaunty and daunting
Easy Virtue, Stephan Elliott’s carbonated screen adaptation of an early Noel Coward play, is so intent on sustaining a facade of fizzy effervescence that it incorporates bouncy period-style versions of songs by Coward and Cole Porter as a peppy running soundtrack.

Movie review: ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ explores the simulation of intimacy
Steven Soderbergh shot The Girlfriend Experience over a few weeks last fall, with a relatively low budget, a portable high-definition video camera and a mostly nonprofessional cast. The film’s means are modest, but nonetheless The Girlfriend Experience has a sleek, tailored look appropriate to its setting, which is the moneyed precincts of Manhattan at the height — and most likely the end — of the recent gilded age. Every frame swims with signs of dearly bought, casually enjoyed luxury, as the camera makes its way from high-end boutiques to jewel-box hotels, exclusive restaurants and the cabin of a private plane.

06/13/2009

Movie Review: ‘Limits of Control’ is image and sound, not much more
The walking man in The Limits of Control, a minimalist exercise in the key of cool from Jim Jarmusch, wears through a lot of shoe leather during his feature-length tramp. One of cinema’s men with no names, credited only as the Lone Man, this peripatetic figure is played (and walked and walked) by Isaach De Bankole with a determined gait and inscrutable gaze that initially reveal almost as little as the elliptical storytelling. Like Jarmusch, the Lone Man doesn’t share his intentions until he reaches the end. By that point, though, if you’ve paid attention to the cues and opening credits, you will be steps ahead of both.

Movie Review: ‘Tokyo Sonata’ will resonate with American audiences
A genius of dread, known for his unnerving horror films and eerie thrillers, the wildly prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa tends to ply his trade with spooky silences, a lived-in feel for everyday, droning life and a sense of social unease.

06/12/2009

Movie Review: ‘The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3’ is a thrill a minute
Thirty-five years after the original screen version of John Godey’s book The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 thrilled audiences, fast-paced action director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Man on Fire) has upped the ante in some respects for his contemporary version of this subway hijacking story, though fortunately most of the thrills remain intact.

Movie Review: Eddie Murphy’s ‘Imagine That’ a solid family comedy
The words “Eddie Murphy family comedy” are enough to send shivers down the spine of any self-respecting film lover.

Movie Review: ‘The Brothers Bloom’ is on the con
Writer-director Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom is a sort of later-day vision of the Michael Caine-Steve Martin con man comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. At times it can be just as funny and quirky as that 1988 film (which itself was a remake of the 1964 film Bedtime Story), although in the end it offers more melancholy than larceny.

Movie review: ‘The Merry Gentleman’ offers romantic thrills in the Windy City
A suicidal hit man. A battered wife on the run, trying to make a new life for herself in a new town. A probing police detective with amorous intentions. A suicide by hanging. A Christmas tree. A Chicago where every day is gray.

Short Takes: Five Harry Potter films to be shown for free
Get ready all you junior wizards. Hogwarts and Dumbledore are calling.

Movie Review: Young dancers and singers vie for Broadway in ‘Every Little Step’
Watching Every Little Step, a new documentary by James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo, is a bit like walking through a hall of mirrors. Life imitates art, art reflects life, and after a while the distinctions threaten, quite pleasantly, to blur altogether.

Movie review: ‘Outrage’ documents the political hypocrisy about homosexuality in D.C.
Documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick is outraged at the many closeted homosexuals in government who have used their influential positions to support anti-gay legislation, and he takes aim at many of them in Outrage.

06/06/2009

Movie Review: Sailing film ‘Tabarly’ suits Newport fest well
The Newport International Film Festival ends its five-day run Sunday with the screening of a movie that, fittingly, begins in Newport and revolves around sailing.

06/05/2009

Movie review: Land of the Lost is lame
The 1974 TV series Land of the Lost, about a family that was sucked into a dimensional portal that dropped them into an alternate universe ruled by dinosaurs and cave people, was a Saturday morning children’s show that ran for three seasons. It later gained a sort of cult classic status despite (or maybe because of) its primitive clunky special effects and its naïve innocence. It was successful enough to have been revived with a different cast in 1991 and ran for two seasons.

Movie Review: What happens in Vegas … can vaguely be remembered in ‘The Hangover’
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas … especially if after a wild night of partying you can’t remember a thing about what happened the night before.

Movie review: The jokes are ancient in My Life in Ruins
The adorable Nia Vardalos makes an obvious choice for a movie she hopes will recapture a bit of her Big Fat Greek Wedding mojo from 2002.

Movie review: Newport International Film Festival’s haze decries frat-house drinking
Gordie Bailey was a freshman at the University of Colorado who died from binge drinking during a fraternity hazing only a month after arriving on campus in 2004. His untimely death spurred his parents to produce Peter Schuermann’s documentary, Haze, which is both a memorial to their son and a warning to the growing problem of heavy drinking on the nation’s college campuses.

Movie review: Newport International Film Festival’s 58 Harrison Lane gets an A for puffery
In 58 Harrison Lane Newport filmmaker Sprague Theobald explores the successes of The Woodhall School in Bethlehem, Conn., in turning boys with learning and social difficulties into confident young men.

Movie review: Paris 36 chokes on French clichés

Movie review: Italy’s Giulio Andreotti is a great man, perhaps, but is he a good one?
If you plan to see Il Divo — and you should — be prepared to hold on to your seat. Simultaneously exhilarating and confounding, dazzling and confusing, this is filmmaking of such verve and style that you likely won’t care that you can’t follow it completely.

06/04/2009

Movie Review: Immigrant struggle brightened by determination
Entre Nos is a story of the immigrant experience that’s a harrowing tale of struggle, sacrifice and resilience. It’s all the more real because co-director Paola Mendoza based the story on her own mother’s experiences after arriving in the United States from Colombia.

06/03/2009

Movie Review: Fast dreams
Newport International Film Festival’s screening of a documentary called Racing Dreams might conjure up thoughts of something to do with sailing.

06/02/2009

Movie Review: ‘Kisses’ a charming but grim coming-of-ager
The Newport International Film Festival opens its 12th season Wednesday with some 90 films being shown in five days.

05/29/2009

Movie Review: ‘Drag Me to Hell’ a scary mix of gags and grisliness
Equal parts scary, icky and wild outrageousness, Drag Me to Hell is a new kind of horror movie, one that makes you laugh at the same time you’re jumping out of your seat.

Movie Review: No downside to the wonderful ‘Up’
Filled with the spirit of adventure and a lot of heart, Up, the unlikely tale of an old man and a little boy who sail to South America in a house pulled aloft by thousands of helium balloons, is so far the best film of the year. And anything coming down the pipeline between now and December will be hard pressed to top it.

Movie Review: ‘Anvil! The Story of Anvil’ is a band’s melancholy struggle for fame
You can easily see from television talent contest programs such as American Idol that there are plenty of dreams of fame and fortune out there.

Movie Review: ‘The Garden’ digs deep into truths about community
The Garden focuses on one of the most fundamental functions of human existence: the process of working the earth to grow healthy fruits and vegetables.

05/22/2009

Movie review: ‘Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian’ looks too familiar
The Good News: Most of the ingredients that turned Night at the Museum into a colossal hit 2 1/2 years ago are back in the sequel, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

Movie review: ‘Lymelife’ a coming-of-age drama with a twist
A nearly perfect cast more than compensates for the over familiarity of elements of Lymelife, the umpteenth coming-of-age drama to roll out of Indiewood in recent years.

Movie review: ‘Lemon Tree’ a bittersweet war of wills and words
Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbass), the proud, handsome 45-year-old Palestinian woman at the center of Lemon Tree, an allegory of Israeli-Palestinian strife, has the misfortune of living in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Movie Review: ‘Tyson’ a knockout
Soft-spoken, contemplative, weepy, the subject of James Toback’s documentary Tyson — Mike Tyson, former heavyweight champion of the world — is not the ferocious, ear-biting, head-butting convicted rapist (“falsely accused,” he insists) that the media have painted him to be.

Movie review: ‘Terminator Salvation’ has high-octane action
Six years after Resistance leader John Connor survived the last onslaught of the robotic killing machines that were sent from the future to kill him before he could destroy them in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, he’s back in Terminator Salvation to prove there’s still a lot of life — and room for mega-colossal special effects — in a series that refuses to die.

05/15/2009

Movie Review: ‘Management’ a kooky stalker comedy
There’s something more than a little creepy about Mike (Steve Zahn), the night manager at his parents’ Arizona motel … something a little Anthony Perkins-in-Psycho creepy.

Movie Review: ‘Angels & Demons’ offers spirited suspense
Angels & Demons, about an ancient secret society that is trying to disrupt the Vatican, is based on the book that Dan Brown wrote before he struck gold with The Da Vinci Code.

Movie Review: Winning documentary captures nail-biting action at Harvard Stadium
Forget Wolverine and his mutant friends.

05/08/2009

Movie review: ‘Next Day Air’ a cocaine caper comedy with soul
Drugs can kill. That’s the message delivered by the caper comedy Next Day Air when mayhem breaks out after a package delivery man, high on marijuana, leaves a big box loaded with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine at the wrong door in a Philadelphia apartment building.

Movie review: ‘Sugar’ falls short of hitting a homer
Sugar is a simple baseball melodrama about The Dominican Dream. And that dream is to master America’s game and win a trip to the States and a shot at the Major Leagues.

Movie review: ‘The Education of Charlie Banks’ gets a passing grade
The coming-of-age drama The Education of Charlie Banks has taken a long, circuitous route on its way to the Avon movie screen.

Movie Review: ‘Valentino: The Last Emperor’ a portrait of a fashion legend
Short, majestically coiffed, with hooded eyes, an orange-tinted tan and the peevish impatience of an absolute monarch: that is Valentino Garavani, the Italian couturier known simply as Valentino, as he appears in Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary portrait, Valentino: The Last Emperor.

Movie review: ‘Star Trek’ faithful and fantastic
Rest easy, Trekkers.

05/01/2009

Movie Review: ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ offers slash and splash
Filled with fiery explosions and rampaging violence, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a prequel that sets up the story of the previous two films. Yet it’s a far cry from the sensitivity of those films, which revolved around a top-secret school where the mutants of the world could find refuge from a public that was frightened of their strange powers.

Movie Review: ‘Ghosts of Girlfriends Past’ is Dickens of a tale
There really are ghosts in the romantic-fantasy-drama Ghosts of Girlfriends Past in which a womanizing cad revisits his checkered love life.

Movie Review: ‘Shall We Kiss?’ — Will they or won’t they?
Dangerous liaisons with good intentions: the matchmaking games in Emmanuel Mouret’s romantic comedy Shall We Kiss? may backfire, but nobody is seriously hurt.

Movie Review: ‘Guest of Cindy Sherman’ a quirky art-world documentary
Guest of Cindy Sherman, a documentary by Paul Hasegawa-Overacker (aka Paul H-O), offers an intimate look at the personal life of Sherman, the photographer.

Movie review: Caine brings magic to ‘Is Anybody there?’
Occasionally wistful, often melancholy but always charming, Is Anybody There? is a coming-of-age comedy about old age.

The action is war, the message is peace
Battle for Terra is a 3-D oddity that’s a war movie grafted onto an anti-war message. Naive but ambitious, it comes across as a Battlestar Galactica vetted by pacifists, Clone Wars neutered for Saturday morning kids’ TV.

04/27/2009

Movie Review: You won’t be impressed with ‘Obsessed’
Obsessed is a thriller built around the married woman’s worst fear — the office blonde after her husband. Make the married woman black and you take that to another level — the black woman’s fear of that skinny white blonde chasing her man.

04/24/2009

Movie review: Didn’t we get enough depravity in the ’80s? The Informers doesn’t think so
Thanks to Brett Easton Ellis, nobody can ever tell you “You had to be there” when talking about the ’80s. Ellis lets us re-live those halcyon days of cheap coke, Miami Vice fashions and the rise of AIDS. Occasionally, some fool gets the idea that his literary wretched excess would make for a good film.

Movie review: Yeah, you can beat ‘Fighting’
Randy Crawford’s 1970s cover of “Street Life” blasts from the soundtrack, and Fighting director Dito Montiel fills the screen with precisely that — a grungy, hustling Midnight Cowboy New York. Montiel plays a visual game of three-card monte on us for this silly, weakly acted and yet sometimes entertaining variation on the “Big Fight” movie formula.

Based on real-life events, ‘The Soloist’ portrays remarkable duo
Playing the Good Samaritan doesn’t always lead to the kind of happy Hollywood ending screenwriters might yearn for, at least when the script is based on real-life events.

earth — see the big picture
If you like the TV series Planet Earth and the Discovery Channel nature programs, you’ll love earth, Disney’s big-screen documentary that travels from the North Pole to the South Pole to the African desert to the Himalayas to check out the lives of animals that make their homes there.

Movie review: Beauty, violence and humanity on the border in ‘Sin Nombre’
As direct as a bullet to the brain, Sin Nombre follows two Latino adolescents on a perilous journey to the United States.

Movie review: So many mobsters, so little time in Gomorrah
The producers of the crime drama Gomorrah were so nervous about upsetting local mobsters while shooting their film in Naples last year that they called it something else.

04/21/2009

Movie Review: ‘Crank: High Voltage’ is really amped up
If Jason Statham is the greatest B-movie action star of our day (and he is), then the Crank movies are his showcase. These gonzo, amoral, politically incorrect rides put the ripped, bald and mean Statham through his paces like nothing else in his action repertoire.

04/17/2009

Movie review: ‘State of Play’ is a riveting, state-of-the-art D.C. thriller
As dense as a Watergate-era newspaper and as immediate as a blog, State of Play is an absolutely riveting state-of-the-art “big conspiracy” thriller. It’s an often brilliant collision of political scandal, murder, a privatizing military and the rapidly evolving journalism that may (or may not) remain democracy’s watchdog once newspapers, “instant history,” are rendered history by a culture that has abandoned them.

Movie review: You’ve seen ‘17 Again,’ again and again
17 Again is one of those movies that requires you to suspend all disbelief and assume that someone who looks like Zac Efron could, in 20 years, turn into someone who looks like Matthew Perry.

04/10/2009

Familiar, folksy fun
Hannah Montana: The Movie just shouldn’t be analyzed from an adult perspective — which, frankly, is irrelevant.

Movie Review: ‘Observe and Report’ is dark, sinister, profane — and it’s a comedy!
All malls may be created equal, with the same array of Gaps, Body Shops and JC Penneys from Bangor to Boca. But all mall cop movies aren’t. Seth Rogen’s Observe and Report is Paul Blart: Mall Cop Strikes Back, a dark comedy with “issues.”

Movie Review: ‘Fados’ a celebration of song and dance
If you want a sense of the glorious emotional excesses that permeate fado, the soul music of Portugal, you need only listen to the legendary fadista Amália Rodrigues, who tremulously immortalized singing whores, weeping guitars, ashes and fire, pain and sin. “All this exists,” she sang. “All this is pain. All this is fado.”

04/07/2009

Movie review: ‘Examined Life’ documents brilliant minds of the left
Examined Life is a lofty title — it comes from Plato, we’re reminded — for a modest, intermittently engaging film which opens Monday, April 6, at the Cable Car Cinema. Astra Taylor, whose previous documentary feature, Zizek!, is the second-best film ever made about the Slovenian superstar theorist Slavoj Zizek, here expands her frame of reference to include seven other prominent contemporary thinkers.

04/03/2009

Movie review: ‘Adventureland’ a surprisingly genuine romantic-comedy romp
Greg Mottola, who directed Superbad, last year’s raunchy coming-of-age movie, puts the emphasis on heart over raunch in his semiautobiographical coming-of-age romantic comedy-drama Adventureland.

Movie review: ‘Fast & Furious’ sequel has a full tank of stunts and a plot running on fumes
Fast cars, dangerous roads and high-octane spills are the familiar ingredients in Fast & Furious, the fourth installment in the series which began with The Fast and the Furious in 2001.

Movie Review: ‘The Other Side of the Tracks’ is dull
Sex, ghosts and teenage tragedy seems a potent combination for a movie. But in the Connecticut-made The Other Side of the Tracks, the slow pacing and melancholy tone of the film undoes much of the good will generated by a solid cast and its romantic-macabre ending.

Movie review: ‘The Curse of Micah Rood’ is short and spooky
According to the movies, there’s lots of creepy stuff going on just across the Rhode Island border.

Movie review: ‘Ranchero’ is a small story about innocence
Ranchero, which kicks off the film part of the Southeast New England Film, Music & Arts Festival Friday at 7 at the Cable Car Cinema, is one of those very well made, low-budget film festival entries that looks like it would be more at home on something like the Lifetime cable channel than in a movie theater.

Movie review: Documenting the naked truth in ‘Courthouse Girls of Farmland’
I’m not sure anyone could possibly resist a movie called Courthouse Girls of Farmland. Happily, it turns out there’s no better feel-good movie to be found this weekend.

04/01/2009

With puck and pluck: Documentary tells the story of the Rhode Island Reds hockey team
Hockey fans today can cheer on the Providence Bruins at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center. But between 1926 and 1977 it was the Rhode Island Reds that ruled the rink for a little over a half-century.

03/31/2009

Movie Review: ‘12 rounds’ has a likable hero but a lousy villain
Renny Harlin, who hasn’t had a hit since he divorced Geena Davis, was the right guy to lift World Wrestling Entertainment’s infant film division to something closer to legitimacy. If anybody could shoot and cut an action film to hide wrassler John Cena’s lack of Actors Studio training, it’s the director who made Stallone look like a mountain climber in Cliffhanger and Willis look like he was really worried those planes were going to crash in Die Hard 2.

03/27/2009

Movie Review: ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’ has good gotcha moments
Never play hide-and-seek in a haunted house. Isn’t that one of those motherisms handed down at the same time as “Look both ways before crossing the street” and “Don’t swim after eating”?

Movie Review: ‘Monsters vs. Aliens’ a monstrous mishmash
Hopes that Monsters vs. Aliens would join that happy list of out-of-this-world animated films — Monsters, Inc.; WALL•E — are quickly dashed as this flat-footed venture unfolds on screen.

Movie Review: ‘Sunshine Cleaning’ sparkles in an offbeat way
The story of a pair of down-and-out sisters who try to improve their lot by establishing a company that cleans up the bloody messes left behind by the violently departed sounds like it might at best be either a one-joke idea or, well, icky.

03/20/2009

Movie Review: In ‘Duplicity,’ you’ll love being double-crossed
Wait a minute!

Movie Review: Phoenix rises to the occasion in ‘Two Lovers’
Two Lovers turned into a must-see movie for anyone who saw scraggly bearded Joaquin Phoenix’s bizarre interview on David Letterman’s show a few weeks ago in which he said that he was giving up acting to concentrate on his music, an interview that’s still attracting viewers on Web sites and stirring discussion of whether Phoenix was “on something” or merely putting on an act to attract attention.

Movie Review: ‘I Love You, Man’ has something for both guys and gals
It’s not clear whether the romantic comedy I Love You, Man should be labeled a chick flick or a guy flick.

Movie Review: ‘Knowing’ tries too hard to make sense
“I KNOW HOW THIS SOUNDS!”

Movie Review: ‘Wendy and Lucy’ a low-key gem
Wendy and Lucy is a sweet girl-and-her-dog film about friendship, loyalty, compassion, selflessness and self-sacrifice.

03/13/2009

Movie Review: ‘Last House’ is horror disturbingly well done
An escaped convict and his accomplices kidnap two teenage girls, commit atrocities and then make the mistake of turning up at the home of one of the girls, where her parents eventually exact bloody revenge in the grisly The Last House on the Left.

Movie Review: ‘Miss March’ misses the mark
What a mess Miss March is. And I’m not just talking about the repeated involuntary bowel-evacuation moments.

Movie Review: Audiences win in the ‘Race to Witch Mountain’
In 1975 when an orphaned brother and sister who had unexplained paranormal powers went searching for a way back home in Escape to Witch Mountain, it wasn’t until the end of the movie that we knew for sure that they were from another planet. Oooh!

03/06/2009

Movie Review: Graphic novel comes to life in ‘The Watchmen’
When you’re making a movie based on a popular book there are two things you always try to do:

03/07/2009

Movie Review: Outlandish is the word for ‘Outlander’
You can think about Outlander 16 different ways, and still arrive at the same conclusion: It just doesn’t work.

03/06/2009

Movie Review: Aspiring teachers should see ‘The Class’
The Class, the Oscar-nominated French film about a Paris middle school, should be required viewing for anybody considering a career in teaching.

03/03/2009

Movie Review: ‘Street Fighter’ remains a waste of time
Anyone who remembers the godawful 1994 Jean Claude Van Damme/Raul Julia film based on the ancient video game Street Fighter will be shocked at how much better the new film built around the game’s characters is.

02/27/2009

Movie Review: Never got over Star Wars? Then you’ll love Fanboys
Fanboys makes for what is possibly the oddest road trip movie ever. Four post-teen buddies who have submerged their lives into the characters from the Star Wars movies head from Ohio to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in northern California in hopes of breaking inside to steal a copy of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace before it opens in theaters.

Movie Review: Animated ‘Waltz With Bashir’ explores war’s horrors
Writer-director Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir is the first animated film to be up for a best foreign language Academy Award and it’s easy to see why even though the film lost to the Japanese film Departures at Sunday’s Academy Awards presentation in Hollywood.

02/24/2009

‘Madea Goes to Jail’: ‘Comedy factory’ Tyler Perry panders in his latest farce
Is that Oscar nominee Viola Davis playing a straight-talking prison preacher in Tyler Perry’s latest, Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail?

02/20/2009

Movie Review: ‘Fired Up’ full of good cheers
A high school’s two top jocks decide to ditch football camp for cheerleader camp in hopes of broadening their dating chances from among the 300 girls who will be there in the teen comedy Fired Up.

02/13/2009

Movie review: Touching tales of Zambarano Hospital in ‘On the Lake’
David Bettencourt, who scored a smashing success two years ago with You Must Be This Tall: The Story of Rocky Point Park, has followed it up with On the Lake: Life and Love in a Distant Place, a look back at the Zambarano Hospital on Wallum Lake in Pascoag. The story is told through the eyes of its patients and their families with the help of archival photos and movie footage, weaving a historic tale about the treatment of tuberculosis patients, the TB epidemic that was the scourge of early 20th-century America and the crisis of the disease in developing countries around the world even today.

Movie Review: In ‘Under the Sea 3D,’ you’ll reach out to touch the fishes
There are fish that look like leaves. Sharks that resemble spotted leopards. Fish that look like rocks. Fish that look like bright yellow sponges. Sharks that look like shag rugs. Sea snakes that look like coral necklaces. Eels that look like waving fields of grass.

Movie Review: Slasher fans lucky with ‘Friday the 13th’ remake
Although Friday the 13th started out as a little low-budget drive-in filler in 1980, its shocking mix of sex and grisly violence quickly turned it into an enormous hit — the first slasher movie. Its success spawned seven more chapters in the series and has influenced countless other teen-in-peril horror movies to this day.

Movie review: Clive Owen vs. the bad-guy bankers in ‘The International’
German director Tom Tykwer wasn’t kidding when he named his new international thriller The International.

Movie Review: ‘Shopaholic’ more silly than stylish
The character of Rebecca Bloomwood, as written by author Sophie Kinsella in her Confessions of a Shopaholic series, has plenty of foibles. Sure, she can’t pass up a sale. But that doesn’t stop the character from being intelligent. Bored, maybe, but not dumb.

Movie Review: In ‘I’ve Loved You So Long,’ a woman’s secrets are slowly revealed
Her name is Juliette. And since she’s played by Kristin Scott Thomas, there’s something regal in her bearing, a Paris catwalk in her cheekbones, her brows, the chic haircut.

02/06/2009

‘Coraline’ film review: Beware of the people with button eyes
Director Henry Selick, the magic man behind the stop-motion animation of The Nightmare Before Christmas, attempts to replicate the success of that funny-macabre cult hit in Coraline.

Movie Review: ‘Pink Panther 2’ twice the fun
When an international thief known as “The Tornado” blows across the planet to sweep up some of the world’s treasures, including the Shroud of Turin, the Japanese emperor’s sword and the fabulous Pink Panther diamond, whom do you call?

Movie Review: It’s not you, it’s this movie
The complexity of modern romance is sliced, diced and mashed together in the awkwardly titled He’s Just Not That Into You. The film revolves around several people in their 20s and 30s who haven’t yet figured out the complexities of love nor how to forge a lasting romantic bond.

Movie Review: Dakota Fanning pushes the limits in ‘Push’
Dakota Fanning plays her first-ever drunk scene in Push, a new comic-book-inspired thriller about mind-readers and mind-benders, people with telekinetic powers given to them by the government in some demented effort to create walking, talking human weapons.

01/30/2009

Movie Review: Accept invitation to ‘The Uninvited’
When sisters Anna and Alex try to gather enough evidence to frame their father’s fiancée for their mother’s death it’s an opportunity to let the horror movie clichés fly in The Uninvited.

Movie Review: Hard times make ‘New in Town’ a timely romantic comedy
Renée Zellweger plays a high-powered, fast-track executive who is sent from sunny Miami to snowbound Minnesota to shore up a failing food processing company … or else … in New in Town, an amiable romantic comedy that should cheer audiences right through Valentine’s Day.

Movie Review: ‘Taken’ has one thrilling moment after another
A divorced father and former master spy faces his worst nightmare in Taken when his 17-year-old daughter is kidnapped by white slavers during a Paris vacation.

01/29/2009

Movie review: ‘Underworld: Rise of the Lycans’ has awful performances, strong atmosphere
What do you do when you’re a monster movie franchise and your two stars have defected, as well as the director who gave your series its distinctive visual lustre?

01/23/2009

Movie Review: Rourke is lord of the ring in ‘The Wrestler’
Like the character he plays in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke has resuscitated his on-the-ropes career with his touching, emotional performance in this film.

Movie Review: ‘Inkheart’ sacrifices coherence for wackiness
Flying monkeys. A minotaur. A giant fire monster. A precocious weasel. The young hero of the Arabian Nights tale. Academy Award-winner Helen Mirren riding a unicorn. The tornado from The Wizard of Oz. And Toto, too.

01/16/2009

Movie Review: ‘Mall Cop’ would have been a decent TV sitcom
The funniest thing about Kevin James’ new comedy, Paul Blart, Mall Cop, is its offbeat title.

‘Revolutionary Road’ examines the emptiness of the American Dream
Director Sam Mendes again takes aim at the emptiness of the fabled American Dream finding the suburban fantasy filled not with promise, but with unfulfilled passions in the dramatically riveting Revolutionary Road.

Movie Review: Holocaust story ‘Defiance’ is action-packed, moving, even hopeful
Out of the despair of the Holocaust comes Defiance, a remarkable tale of inspiration and determination that paints the Jews who were slated for death by the Nazis not as victims, but heroes.

Movie Review: Notorious was B.I.G. — biopic, not so much
Christopher Wallace was 24 years old when he was shot and killed at a stoplight in Los Angeles. His 1997 death came two weeks before the release of his second album, Life After Death, which would make him the most popular rapper in the world.

Movie Review: Scary fun is back with ‘My Bloody Valentine 3D’
The late 1970s and early ’80s was the golden age for modern horror films. The idea behind movies like Chopping Mall or The House on Sorority Row was to entertain the audience with over-the-top acts of violence. But in recent years that philosophy has been replaced by a desire to titillate moviegoers with acts of torture.

Movie Review: ‘Repo! The Genetic Opera’ is about as awful as it gets
From the recent past (last year, in fact) comes a film set in “the not too distant future” (the year 2057 to be exact) that one might have wished would never have made it to the present. But at midnight tonight and tomorrow, the Avon Cinema will give a second life to director Darren Lynn Bousman’s unbelievably awful Repo! The Genetic Opera, a film that seemed to have died a quick death in theaters across the country late last year.

Movie Review: Sweet romantic comedy ‘Last Chance Harvey’ has the ring of truth
New Yorker Harvey Shine, a TV commercial jingle composer who’s afraid he’s about to lose his job, heads to London for his daughter’s wedding and finds a new beginning for himself in the sweet romantic comedy Last Chance Harvey.

Movie Review: ‘Louise Bourgeois’ portrays one-of-a-kind artist
From an art historical perspective, the work of Louise Bourgeois effects a startling synthesis of traditions.

Hotel for Dogs is a turndown
Kids will watch most anything with a dog in it — witness the success of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Marley & Me, or the never-ending Beethoven franchise. But studios usually have the good sense to send the runts of the dog-movie litter direct to video. Disney’s Snow Buddies and the new Beethoven’s Big Break come to mind.

01/10/2009

Movie Review: ‘Frost/Nixon’ a powerful film
If you think a two-hour movie about a couple of middle-aged men sitting around talking would be deadly dull, Ron Howard will prove how wrong you are in his riveting Frost/Nixon.

01/09/2009

Movie Review: ‘Bride Wars’ is not so engaging
Bride Wars could have been your typical cartoonish, early-winter wedding comedy. Although it certainly has moments like that, it’s not as wacky as most of its ilk. Guess the bad news is that it’s not much of a comedy either.

Movie Review: ‘Not Easily Broken’ is a romantic soap opera that rings true
A traffic accident threatens to throw an already wobbly marriage onto the rocks in the romantic drama Not Easily Broken.

Movie Review: ‘Ballast’ is a bleak but well-made indie
Ballast begins with a suicide, which is quickly followed by a suicide attempt. These acts are by two brothers, and Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Sr.), the surviving one, hardly says a word for the longest time. What gets him to start speaking is his 12-year-old nephew, James (JimMyron Ross), coming around with a gun.

Movie Review: Clint Eastwood’s acting drives Gran Torino
Charles Bronson did it.

Movie Review: ‘Unborn’ offers up more laughs than scares
The Kabbalah. Hot college students. An abandoned mental institution. Gary Oldman. Jogging. Twins. Nazi scientists. A suicidal mother. A lost blue mitten.

12/25/2008

Movie Review: In ‘Benjamin Button’, a backward life moves forward slowly
The bittersweet romantic fantasy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one of the most curious movies of the year, revolving as it does around a man who ages in reverse — born as a wizened man in his mid 80s and growing progressively younger as the years pass.

Movie Review: Marley is a dog, and so is the movie
Dog lovers made newspaper columnist John Grogan’s book Marley & Me, about a mischievous but loveable yellow Lab, an international bestseller.

12/26/2008

Movie Review: ‘The Reader’ is a melancholy look at doomed love
They say you never forget your first love. That’s the theme of the romantic drama The Reader, which demonstrates that not only do you not forget your first love, but that that love is everlasting.

12/25/2008

Movie Review: ‘Valkyrie’ plot is thick with tension and tedium
During the more than a decade that he was the leader of Nazi Germany, there were 15 attempts on the life of Adolf Hitler.

12/26/2008

‘The Spirit’ a fine mix of adventure, mystery and nuttiness
Now here’s something different in superhero movies: In The Spirit, the Batman-like superhero is dead … but doesn’t realize it.

Movie review: Performances make ‘Doubt’ a sure bet
Acting on not much more than a hunch, a stiff-backed nun decides that the parish priest has made inappropriate advances to one of the boys in her school and pushes to get Father Flynn removed in Doubt. A movie of great dramatic fireworks, Doubt is as far from The Bells of St. Mary’s as one can get.

Movie Review: ‘Bedtime Stories’ will put you to sleep
If you look closely at Bedtime Stories it is almost possible to see how the cast and crew were making up the movie as it went along. There’s certainly no evidence of a script. It’s just a series of nonsensical events that at times are anchored by reality and at other times are pure fantasy.

12/19/2008

MOVIE REVIEW: Sean Penn makes gay activist Harvey Milk human, engaging in ‘Milk’
At 40, Harvey Milk was a mild-mannered, closeted gay man working for a big New York insurance company, fearful that he would be fired if his employers discovered that he was leading a double life.

Movie Review: ‘Despereaux’ lectures rather than delights
The Tale of Despereaux talks a good game.

Movie review: ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ hits jackpot
In the rollicking, surprisingly violent Slumdog Millionaire, a young man from the slums of Mumbai hopes to win the 20-million rupee prize on India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? so he can win the hand of the woman he has longed for ever since they were children.

Movie Review: ‘Yes Man’ needs more of the ‘real’ Jim Carrey
Jim Carrey plays a hilarious scene with a fly near the start of Yes Man. But that’s about as funny as it gets in this silly and slight comedy about a man who finds redemption when he learns to get out of his funk and meets a woman who opens up new vistas for him.

MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Seven Pounds’ will hang heavy in Will Smith’s filmography
Give Will Smith credit for trying to take his career in new directions.

Movie review: ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ hits jackpot
In the rollicking, surprisingly violent Slumdog Millionaire, a young man from the slums of Mumbai hopes to win the 20-million rupee prize on India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? so he can win the hand of the woman he has longed for ever since they were children.

12/12/2008

Movie Review: ‘Nothing Like the Holidays’ adds Latin rhythm to familiar family plot
The often-told tale of a family that gathers for a happy Christmas reunion, only to have secrets revealed and souls bared, is a movie staple this time of year. Look no farther than Four Christmases which has been number one at the box office for the past two weekends.

Movie review: ‘Day the Earth Stood Still’ remake not as good as original
In 1951 the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still played off the fears created by the expanding Cold War. It was a cautionary tale in which an alien being, Klaatu, landed in Washington, D.C., in a flying saucer to warn earthlings that they had better change their warlike ways or face their doom.

Movie review: ‘Delgo’ is star-studded, animated dud
Delgo is yet more proof that not everyone with access to the tools and talent pool to make an animated film should be allowed to. It’s a focus-group film, from its all-star voice cast (Jennifer Love Hewitt, Burt Reynolds) to its mash-up of a plot and “cuddly” critters acting it out.

Movie review: ‘Patti Smith’ is impressionistic look at punk rocker
You may not learn everything you want to know in Patti Smith: Dream of Life, an impressionistic portrait of that punk godhead, but you learn just about everything you need.

Movie review: ‘Christmas Tale’ is exhilarating family drama
Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale doesn’t exactly lay out the tinsel and holly from the outset. Quickly, we learn the history of the Vuillard family — childhood illness, a child conceived in hopes of finding a compatible bone marrow donor, childhood death, childhood guilt, sibling rivalry, sibling hatred, sibling banishment.

12/05/2008

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.

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.

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.

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.

08/13/2008

Movie Review: ‘Tropic Thunder’ a roaring laugh
The freewheeling comedy Tropic Thunder, about a crew making a war movie in Vietnam and unwittingly getting caught up in a real life-or-death adventure, starts off like a house afire.

08/09/2008

Clever, funny films in 48 hours
Nearly 600 amateur filmmakers spent 48 hours on the weekend of July 18 to 20 all over the state making 52 short films as part of the third annual 48 Hour Film Project.

08/08/2008

R.I. International Film Festival: ‘Satellites and Meteorites’ goes ’round and ’round
In writer-director Rick Larkin’s offbeat romantic fantasy Satellites and Meteorites a man and woman lie in comas in an Irish hospital, linked only by an auto accident yet drawn together in their dreams to each other.

Crazy as ever, Winters hasn’t lost it in ‘Certifiably Jonathan’
Wacky comedian Jonathan Winters, who kept America in stitches for more than a generation from the 1950s to the ’80s, is the funny heart of Certifiably Jonathan, writer-director Jim Pasternak’s weirdly offbeat mockumentary which is showing tomorrow and Sunday at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

Humor goes up in smoke
The recent news that Richard Marin and Thomas Chong are going to reunite as Cheech and Chong, again doing their high-on-marijuana act that kept audiences in the 1970s doubled over with drug-induced laughter, shouldn’t come as a surprise to the producers of Pineapple Express.

Movie Review: ‘Louisa May Alcott’ is a tale of success
Despite her international fame for having written the classic Little Women, Louisa May Alcott tells us right up front at the start of the engrossing documentary Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women that she only wrote pap for young readers because it paid well.

08/07/2008

R.I. International Film Festival: ’50s horror films lovingly recalled in ‘Spine Tingler’
Baby Boomers who went to the movies in the 1950s will surely remember the films produced by William Castle, a huckstering showman who prided himself on being in a direct line from P.T. Barnum.

R.I. International Film Festival: ‘Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio with the Red Tennis Shoes’
You may know Garrison Keillor’s voice from his many appearances over the years on National Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, a folksy mix of light humor, Will Rogers’ style common sense and the kind of music you don’t hear almost anywhere anymore.

R.I. International Film Festival: Heartthrob can’t lift sad lead role in ‘How to Be’
According to staff members at the 12th Rhode Island International Film Festival, the greatest interest in any film at this year’s festival has been generated by the British film How to Be, which will play tomorrow.

08/06/2008

The Sisterhood is funny, touching, sentimental
People who fell in love with the four teenage girls who overcame everyday crises in the 2005 hit The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants will be heartened to know that although the gals are now between their freshman and sophomore years at college, this sequel is every bit as solid and delightful as the original.

Rhode Island International Film Festival: Nashville guitarist was ‘Crazy’ — but biopic is on the level
While watching director Rick Bieber’s Crazy, I started to wonder why a movie this good has not yet been picked up for release by a major studio.

Rhode Island International Film Festival: Horse story is a classic — and it’s all true
Writer-director John Corey’s documentary Lost in the Fog, which will be screened tomorrow afternoon as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival, is a Seabiscuit story for the 21st century.

08/01/2008

Movie review: When a presidential election relies on one man, Costner rocks the ‘Vote’
With its “and a little child shall lead them” theme revolving around a father whose single vote can decide the U.S. presidency, Swing Vote is certainly the most timely family-oriented comedy to come along in this presidential election year. And probably the only one.

Brideshead Revisited is revisited again, but briefly
Brideshead Revisited is an unimpeachable yet ultimately unmoving adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel about social ambition, religious conflict and doomed love.

Movie review: Tell everyone about this film noir thriller
In the shortcut language of a movie pitch, Guillaume Canet’s delicious contemporary thriller Tell No One is Vertigo meets The Fugitive by way of The Big Sleep. That is meant as high praise.

Movie review: Predictable battles unravel ‘The Mummy’
Apparently having exhausted the audience’s taste for Egyptology, the producers of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor have set their film in China just after World War II.

07/26/2008

Movie review: Politics and music mix uneasily in ‘CSNY: Déjà vu’
Remember when Country Joe McDonald sang his anti-Vietnam anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-

07/25/2008

Movie review: ‘The Rape of Europa’ is a fascinating look at the fate of great art during and after World War II
When people think about World War II, wondering what it meant for the fate of museum-quality art is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet as the documentary The Rape of Europa demonstrates, this is a surprisingly vast and involving topic.

Movie Review: ‘The Wackness’ delivers a sweet summer of love
It’s the summer of Forrest Gump and O.J.’s Bronco ride, of Biggie Smalls and big shiny bling. And in Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, 1994 in New York City is also the summer when forlorn Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), just graduated from high school and heading for his safety school in the fall, pushes an ice cream cart stocked with weed around town, dealing dope and tumbling into love with his psychiatrist’s step-daughter … his pot-smoking, “I could get you a hooker if you want” psychiatrist, that is.

Movie Review: ‘Step Brothers’ a pathetic exercise in low-ball humor
Somewhere there’s an audience of 12-year-old boys waiting for Step Brothers. Yet, unless they’re able to corral an unwitting parent or guardian, they won’t be able to get into this bag of R-rated lowball humor where the F-bombs fly and the gags very often revolve around the male sex organ.

Movie Review: Duchovny and Anderson return to ‘The X-Files’ to find faith and forgiveness
The latest big-screen version of The X-Files TV series, The X-Files: I Want to Believe would make a pretty solid TV thriller, although it’s not quite The X-Files that fans of the old series fell in love with.

07/18/2008

Movie Review: ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ is a fascinating South Pole adventure
If you’ve ever wanted to visit the South Pole, and who hasn’t (just kidding!), you can take an armchair tour without subjecting yourself to the 20-below temperatures in German director Werner Herzog’s fascinating Encounters at the End of the World.

Movie Review: ‘Space Chimps’ monkey business is right in kids’ orbit
If you’re old enough to read this review, you aren’t the target audience for Space Chimps, a movie about chimpanzees sent in search of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Chimps, from the British animation studio that gave us Valiant, is one more of those cartoons that parents at least won’t mind sitting through while little Miss or Mister 8-and-under gets his or her chuckles at the cute talking primates.

Movie Review: Daffy musical ‘Mamma Mia!’ seems forced on the big screen
Mama mia! The international stage sensation Mamma Mia! trips over its platform shoes on the way to the movie screen.

Movie review: ‘Up the Yangtze’ documents the currents of change in China
Imagine the Grand Canyon turned into a lake. That image is summoned by Yung Chang, the Chinese-Canadian director and occasional narrator of Up the Yangtze, an astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle.

Movie Review: Memories bitter, then sweet in ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’
Blake Morrison’s autobiographical book about the distance between fathers and sons has been turned into a sensitive, sentimental and melancholy film that will touch any male who has had difficulty bridging that particular generation gap.

07/17/2008

Movie review by Michael Janusonis: Stars shine in ‘The Dark Knight’
Following the rousing international success of director Christopher Nolan’s new, darker take on the Batman legend three years ago in Batman Begins, he’s back with much of the holdover cast from the first film for the slightly less somber The Dark Knight.

07/11/2008

Nonstop action is pure fun in updated Journey
Director Eric Brevig’s updated version of the Jules Verne classic Journey to the Center of the Earth is an old-fashioned, rip-roaring, seat-of-the-pants action film that harkens back to the days of the Saturday matinee movies of the 1950s.

Eddie Murphy muddles through lowbrow Meet Dave
Meet Dave. Or don’t. Eddie Murphy doesn’t particularly seem to care one way or the other.

Red is back and even better in ‘Hellboy II’
Thanks to the wild screen success of Hellboy four years ago, Red is back to save mankind anew in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a fantasy-adventure that’s filled with galloping action, bizarre creatures and — surprise! — romance.

Movie review: The curiously gentle ‘Edge of Heaven’ bristles with violence
There are six principal characters in The Edge of Heaven: two mothers, two daughters, a father and a son, all arranged in more or less symmetrical pairs. In the course of this extraordinary film by the German writer-director Fatih Akin (which won the best screenplay award in Cannes last year) children are lost, lost parents are never found, and generational and geographical distances grow wider.

07/04/2008

Movie review: Ambition and passion create a sudsy storm in ‘Before the Rains’
The clash of cultures in British-ruled India is the background for the steamy melodrama that unfolds in Before the Rains, opening today at the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport.

Movie Review: Fantastic imagery is half the point of The Fall
The Fall, a wacky fairy tale for grown-ups, is as stunning in its beauty as it is in its lack of logic.

Movie review: The Children of Huang Shi quickly turns sappy
The first 20 minutes of The Children of Huang Shi are breathtakingly, explosively thrilling.

07/02/2008

Movie Review: Unfunny ‘Hancock’ wears out its welcome
Will Smith’s Hancock is a summer popcorn movie that’s a ton of poppycock revolving around a boozy, unlikely superhero who tries to redeem himself with the advice of a kindly public relations man

Movie review: Abigail Breslin outshines script in “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl”
Although it’s set in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression, there’s something remarkably up-to-date about Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. It’s based on one of the dolls and books in a popular series that’s geared to girls 3 to 12, mixing historical fact and inspirational fiction.

06/27/2008

Movie review: ‘Wanted’ is a bloody good fantasy thriller
Near the start of the high-octane fantasy-thriller Wanted, a bullet rips through the back of a man’s head and comes out his forehead, followed by bloody splatters. It’s here that you know Russian-born director Timur Bekmambetov will take no prisoners in Wanted, a no-holds-barred stew of violence and mayhem.

Movie review: Undeniable charm brings good things to life in ‘WALL•E’
A dead planet and a love-starved robot are the unusual ingredients that make WALL•E spin. And spin it does, with romance, sentiment, adventure and some very funny moments.

06/20/2008

Movie review: Lame ‘Get Smart’ remake is too clever by half
Steve Carell tries to fill the shoe-phone shoes of Don Adams in Get Smart, a lame, not-so-funny update of the 1960s TV series.

Movie review: Not much to love about Myers’ ‘Guru’
The biggest audience Mike Myers is likely to stir for his unfunny The Love Guru is the Hindus who have been peppering movie critics for months with e-mails demanding that they get an advance preview of the film. They feared it would blaspheme their faith.

Movie review: Epic imagery is a strong backdrop for the tale of Khan
When a film called Mongol takes as its storyline the formative years of Genghis Khan, a conqueror who eventually controlled a fifth of the Earth, you know what you’ll be getting. But with this film you’ll be getting that and more.

06/13/2008

Less than incredible
The Incredible Hulk, the story of a mild-mannered scientist whose unwitting exposure to gamma radiation turns him green and huge when he gets angry? The comic book turned hit TV show turned movie? Didn’t we see that a few years ago?

World premiere at Columbus
One-time porn star Marilyn Chambers caused a stir when she arrived back in her native state last August to shoot the film Solitaire, in which she plays what appears to be the only cop on the beat in Pawtucket in this low-budget local production.

Priceless lacks the innocence of Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Priceless is a romantic comedy from France that’s loosely based on the film made of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Not much Happening under all the good creepiness
In The Happening, Mother Nature decides that humanity is a dangerous virus — and gets to work eliminating the threat.

06/06/2008

Jolly panda-monium
Fast, outlandish and wonderfully zany, Kung Fu Panda is a wacky trip to a Chinese Wonderland where a clumsy, chubby panda with martial arts dreams gets to live out his fantasy and become the masterful Dragon Warrior.

Many layers of intrigue in French whodunit
A famous author is haunted by a ghost in director Claude Lelouch’s twisty melodrama Roman de Gare.

Unfortunately, Zohan is just a mess
Politics has always been a very iffy proposition for American comedies. But Adam Sandler takes a crack at it in You Don’t Mess With the Zohan in which the neverending Arab-Israeli conflict serves as the film’s very touchy background.

06/05/2008

La Corona (The Crown) is a prison documentary unlike any other
The women-behind-bars movie has been a staple of B-moviemakers for half a century. But La Corona (The Crown) is a documentary that gives a whole new look to the genre. The 40-minute film from Colombia will have its first screening at 2:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Jane Pickens Theater, on a double bill with the hour-long documentary The Big Question as part of the 11th Newport International Film Festival.

Ambitious family drama moves too slowly for too long
Self-sacrifice is at the center of the family drama August Evening, which will have its first showing at the 11th Newport International Film Festival at 9:15 p.m. tomorrow at the Opera House.

A thrilling and intimate portrait of Navy pilots
If you’ve ever dreamed of flying for the Navy, filmmaker Peyton Wilson’s film gives an up-close and very personal look at how to go about it. Her documentary Speed and Angels, which has its first showing the 11th Newport International Film Festival at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Jane Pickens Theater, is probably the best recruiting tool the Navy has had in years.

06/04/2008

Documentary depicts the power of love
The documentary Life. Support. Music., which will have its first showing at 1 p.m. tomorrow at the 11th Newport International Film Festival, encompasses all the things of its title in its tale of the near death and long, painful rehabilitation of Jason Crigler, a well-respected New York City guitarist. Crigler was felled one night on stage by a brain hemorrhage at the age of 34.

Funny, sad tale is a must-see
If you can get to just one film at this year’s Newport International Film Festival, make it Wellness, which will have its first Newport International Film Festival screening at 2 p.m. tomorrow at the Opera House.

Murderer finds a new life is hard to come by
A 24-year-old man who has spent most of his young life in juvenile prisons for being the accomplice in the murder of a girl tries to create a new identity for himself in the provocative social drama Boy A, which will have its first showing at 1:15 p.m. tomorrow at the Opera House as part of the 11th Newport International Film Festival.

06/03/2008

How one man conquered the World Trade towers
On Aug. 7, 1974 a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit went where no man had gone before … and no one will be able to ever again … when he stepped out on a wire that had been strung 200 feet between the tops of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan..

05/30/2008

The Strangers delivers brutal terror and suspense
For his debut feature film, writer-director Bryan Bertino set out to do nothing more than scare the pants off an audience.

05/23/2008

Sundance sensation is just pint-sized
Amateurish and small, Son of Rambow was the inexplicable hit of the Sundance Film Festival.

Movie review: Helen Hunt’s directorial debut frames sudsy “Then She Found Me”
Helen Hunt has won a best actress Academy Award for As Good As It Gets and four best actress Emmy Awards for Mad About You, as well as being a lauded stage actress. Now she makes her feature film directing debut in the romantic tragic-comedy Then She Found Me, not only working behind the camera with the likes of showbiz powerhouse Bette Midler, but on screen herself as the film’s central character. Talk about chutzpah!

05/21/2008

Movie review: A red-hot adventure for aging archaeologist in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
After 19 years away from the big screen it’s full-speed ahead for Harrison Ford and his alter ego, Indiana Jones, in Steven Spielberg’s rip-roaring adventure yarn Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Surfing and social woes down under
A movie with the title Bra Boys conjures up all sorts of images, most of them not pretty.

05/16/2008

Narnia: Prince Caspian a royal disappointment
My moviegoing companion was glad she’d taken my advice and watched The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe before we went to see the second film made from C.S. Lewis’s series of Narnia books — The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

05/09/2008

Speed Racer doesn’t break any records
What should have been a fast 90-minute spin around the track, Speed Racer runs for two hours and 15 minutes … but seems like seven hours.

A screwy battle of the sexes
Ashton Kutcher’s Jack Fuller is a life-of-the-party guy who gets fired from his job by his boss, who also happens to be his father.

RISD’s best at sparkling film fest
Any longtime follower of the annual film-animation-video show at the Rhode Island School of Design will have noticed a gradual increase in the quality and depth of the works presented by the graduating seniors over the years. This year’s show, running May 14 to 17, is the best yet.

Mamet learns the jiu-jitsu of cinema
David Mamet finally makes a real movie with Redbelt.

05/02/2008

Movie Review: ‘Iron Man’ has soft touch with a superhero who comes to vibrant life at the hands of Robert Downey Jr.
The first of the summer blockbuster movies has arrived and in Iron Man the movies have found a thrilling new superhero.

A pleasant Made of Honor
A playboy waits 10 years before deciding to ask his best friend to marry him, only to discover she has just become engaged to someone else in the bubbly, if overly familiar Made of Honor.

They’re Young@Heart — and so is their music
They do punk.

Movie Review: Damaged souls drift through “My Blueberry Nights”
The road to romantic recovery is meandering, far-flung and thousands of miles long in My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar Wai’s first English-language film.

04/25/2008

Movie Review: Sadly, very little Deception at all
A generic thriller with a generic title, Deception is so predictable you could guess what happens next even if the trailer hadn’t already given away just about every important plot development.

Movie Review: Richard Jenkins, formerly of Trinity Rep, shines in regular-guy role in ‘The Visitor’
You may not know you know Richard Jenkins, but you know him. And most likely, you’re a fan.

Movie Review: With Fey and Poehler, ‘Baby Mama’ is full of fun
Pregnant with complex twists that give birth to surprising complications, the often hilarious Baby Mama breaches its high-concept idea of a 37-year-old woman who hires a surrogate mother to carry her baby to term.

Movie Review: ‘Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay’ is raunchy and occasionally hilarious
A lot has changed since Harold and Kumar last partied their way onto the big screen way back in ’04, White Castle burgers in hand and sex on their minds.

04/18/2008

Pleasantly enjoyable martial arts
There might have been some people who, while watching one of The Lord of the Rings movies, had a particular light bulb pop up over their heads. “Hey, you know what would really make this great?,” they thought. “Some kung-fu by a couple of aging Asian action stars!”

Movie review: Immerse yourself with Dolphins and Whales: Tribes of the Ocean 3D, the latest IMAX underwater adventure
You’ll find the occasional whale fin in your face or a piece of algae tossed by a dolphin just out of arm’s reach in Dolphins and Whales: Tribes of the Ocean 3D, the latest save-the-planet nature film at the Feinstein IMAX.

Movie Review: No barriers to suspense and love in heartwarming La Misma Luna
La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon) is an emotional and entertaining road picture about a little boy who crosses the Mexican border into the U.S. on a quest to find his mom. She works “without papers” and off the books in Los Angeles. It’s a warm drama that humanizes America’s current illegal immigration debate even as it sentimentally stacks the deck in favor of the undocumented.

One man’s attempt to find Osama has many surprises
With his disarming “redneck” grin and his even-tempered even-handedness, we could do a lot worse than have somebody like Morgan Spurlock lead the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Movie Review: No thrills during a wasted 88 Minutes
88 Minutes lasts 108 minutes. It can’t even get that much right.

Movie Review: Unfunny Stein makes monkey business of ‘academic freedom’ in Expelled
Droning funnyman Ben Stein monkeys around with evolution in the new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they’re losing the “intelligent design” debate because of academic “prejudice.”

Movie review: She loves him, she loves him not in the ribald comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Billed as “the world’s first romantic disaster comedy,” Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortably icky movie about a schlub who thinks his life is ruined when he’s dumped by his TV star girlfriend.

04/12/2008

This is one Prom Night you won’t be sorry to miss
There ought to be a rule, stashed in the Screen Actor’s Guild bylaws, that every actor cast as a villain in a slasher film has to watch Psycho and write a paper on Anthony Perkins.

A ‘serious’ writer’s despair in a frivolous world
Starting Out in the Evening is more proof that the lonely life of the writer is never the most promising of movie premises. There isn’t much dramatic about what every such movie, especially this one, boils down to — a writer sitting down at a typewriter, tapping the keys.

04/11/2008

Street Kings: Somebody call for backup
Keanu Reeves tries his best to channel Denzel and Clint in Street Kings, a wild and woolly if also slack and silly bad-cops-kill-other-bad-cops thriller. It’s Training Day with training wheels, as Reeves sheds his “dude”-ness for a little ultra-violence, playing a racist cop-executioner, a man who always gets his man. And then shoots his man.

Movie Review: Mismatched hearts beat in the right place
Meet Jack, an advertising copy writer who’s living the high life in New York — fancy clothes, car, condo, natty career — all the consumer perks that go along with being a hot-shot advertising copy writer. He seems shallow.

Nothing smart about this charmless movie
Despite quality ingredients, soufflés still fall flat.

Life’s a Drag — and these entertaining guys are loving it
While watching a preview of the upcoming IMAX film Dolphins and Whales: Tribes of the Ocean 3D, which unravels some of the mysteries and mystique about these familiar yet relatively unknown creatures, it occurred to me that Lara Sebastian’s intriguing documentary Life’s a Drag accomplishes pretty much the same thing in the way it unravels the mysteries and mystique of drag queens.

Amateur cast brings Beirut to life in beauty-shop classic
There have been a couple thousand American movies in which the gals let it all hang out down at the beauty shop.

04/05/2008

Movie Review: Intense, effective frights await upon a creepy hilltop in The Ruins
The Ruins is, with one major caveat, about as good an adaptation of Scott Smith’s best-selling novel as Hollywood was ever going to make. Smith’s book — about a group of college kids who stumble onto a hill in the Mexican jungle where a flesh-eating vine dwells — was the kind of relentless beach read that seemed tailor-made for the movies, at least until you realized you were dealing with a story about a talking plant that drinks blood.

04/04/2008

Movie Review: A slow game for Clooney
Leatherheads, which revolves around the early days of professional football in 1925, patterns itself after the wacky, classic romantic screwball comedies that were so snappily popular in the 1930s — The Front Page and Bringing Up Baby being its prototypes — or maybe the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies of the early ’60s.

Look is barely worth one
Inspired by what the filmmakers say are the 30 million surveillance cameras capturing our movements every day, writer-director Adam Rifkin (Detroit Rock City) finds some intriguing crevices to explore, with a cold, unblinking eye, in his latest, Look. Considering the premise’s potential, though, it’s disappointing that the film doesn’t delve beyond the prurient surface.

Director explores truth in The Counterfeiters
Stefan Ruzowitzky has an appealingly modest take on his sudden ascent to art-house respectability. He’s quick to point out that his previous film, Anatomy, was a horror feature crafted for “a young, popcorn-eating crowd.” Yet the Austrian writer/director of this year’s Oscar-winning foreign film, The Counterfeiters, feels that his experience with lowly genre fare served him well.

Movie Review: A colorful adventure on faraway Nim’s Island
The curiously titled Nim’s Island is a Saturday matinee kind of family film that’s crammed with enough adventures to keep even Indiana Jones busy.

04/02/2008

Indian stone walls lovingly filmed
If all you know about the Narragansett Indian tribe is the seemingly endless smoke shop raid flap and the West Warwick casino brouhaha, tune in to Channel 36 at 8 tonight for a whole other dimension when the local PBS station broadcasts Stories in Stone, about the intricate and elaborate stone fences the Narragansetts have been building across southeastern New England since the mid 1600s.

03/29/2008

Movie Review: With a fine cast, On Broadway beats its budget
On Broadway, whose title refers peripherally to the one in Boston and not the Great White Way, is a smartly made independent film about a family in crisis.

Movie Review: There is no hero in this super stupid spoof
Leslie Nielsen has been playing incontinent on the screen for so long it’s no wonder that, ahem, there’s no gas left in that tank. So it’s also no wonder that the 81-year-old funnyman passes (ahem) that cheese-slicing trademark on to Marion Ross, Richie Cunningham’s TV mom, for Superhero Movie, the latest winded (ahem AHEM) installment in the movie-spoof genre that wore out its welcome as far back as Scary Movie 2.

03/28/2008

Movie review: MIT students beat Vegas at its own game in the fact-based 21
A group of brainy Massachusetts Institute of Technology students heads for the Las Vegas blackjack tables, trying to stay one step ahead of casino security guards as they rack up monumental wins by counting cards in the hang-on-to-your-seat thriller 21.

Movie Review: A compelling examination of humanity in The Counterfeiters
“Know why the Jews are always persecuted?” Salomon Sorowitsch, a Jew known as the King of the Counterfeiters, tells a friend in 1936 Berlin. “Because they refuse to adapt. It’s not that hard.”

Movie review: Demi Moore and Michael Caine plot a gem heist in Flawless
A night janitor and a female manager who finds herself up against the glass ceiling at a huge London diamond exchange make for an unlikely pair of robbers in the breezy little caper comedy Flawless.

Movie Review: Difficult journey of a soul-searching soldier
A model soldier goes AWOL when he discovers that his plans to leave the U.S. Army have been canceled and he is being sent back to Iraq and goes on the run across country with the girlfriend of his best friend in the fast-paced and provocative Stop-Loss.

Movie Review: Hapless Fat Boy makes sweet run for victory
There’s often a touch of the touching in the comedies of Brit Everyman Simon Pegg. Shaun of the Dead had his moments of sentiment, in between dispatching zombies.

03/25/2008

Another feel-good Tyler Perry film
There’s nothing subtle about Tyler Perry and his black-centric movies. The farce is in-your-face, the melodrama has more soap than a Laundromat, and the messages — drugs are bad, school is good, single moms are the heroes of our time — come mounted on billboards.

03/24/2008

Horror film Shutter needs more shudders
The influence of the Japanese school of screen horror (called “J-horror”) on Hollywood has led to a string of subtler, less violent, yet still chilling ghost stories, many of which are remakes of Japanese originals, films such as The Grudge, The Ring and One Missed Call.

03/21/2008

Movie Review: Teens might cheer for underdogs while adults yawn at Drillbit
Young teens may be able to relate to Drillbit Taylor, about three high school freshman nerds who hire a homeless, unemployed former mercenary (or so he says) as a bodyguard to save them from a relentless bully.

Movie review: Skating around a grisly mystery in the latest from RISD grad Gus Van Sant
Youth and death meet again in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story told in the same lyrical-prosaic style that has characterized his latest films. Based on a young-adult novel by Blake Nelson, it’s a study in angst and guilt made visible by the dreamy camera work of Christopher Doyle and otherwise palpable by Van Sant’s charged, simple direction.

Movie Review: Academy-Award winning “Taxi to the Dark Side” explores military prison abuse
Most of us have seen the shocking pictures of the abuses inflicted by U.S. military MPs and interrogators on terrorist suspects being held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

03/18/2008

Sci-fi thriller has few chills and lots of steals
One of the unspoken rules for surviving the movie game is “Always sign up for your next film before the one you just finished comes out.” Call it Elizabeth Berkley’s Law. She didn’t have her future planned beyond Showgirls, then it came out and, well, she was pretty much history.

03/14/2008

Movie Review: Never Back Down sticks to a tried-and-true formula
Never Back Down is an ultra-sleek, mixed-martial-arts teen drama, an updated Karate Kid, a Fight Club for the viral-video generation. Even though it’s as predictable as a pro-wrestling match, what it lacks in originality it makes up for in the nervous energy of youth and testosterone.

Clash-of-cultures comedy turns to sentimental whimsy
An Egyptian police band arrives in Israel and mistakenly travels to the wrong town in The Band’s Visit, a setup for a movie that promises to be much funnier and more farcical than ever develops in writer-director Eran Kolirin’s script.

Movie Review: Horton Hears a Who presents all the sweet magic of Dr. Seuss’ whimsical world
Beloved by generations of children and their parents, Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who, about an elephant who never gives up in his commitment to save a teeny-tiny world that exists inside a speck of dust, makes the leap to the movies with all its whimsy, fun and hold-your-breath adventure intact.

Movie Review: Funny Games, disturbing violence
George and Anna and their little son, Georgie, live an existence of tasteful affluence rarely glimpsed outside of Ralph Lauren ads. They play “Name that Aria” with opera CDs as they tow their classic sailboat on the long drive to their gracious lakeside cabin. After they settle in, a bashful young man in preppie tennis whites comes to their door, introduces himself as Paul, a guest of their neighbors, and asks to scrounge a few eggs.

03/07/2008

It’s safe to bring the little ones along for this College Road Trip
The modest charms of Disney’s G-rated College Road Trip are best illustrated by what the filmmakers leave out more than what they choose to put in.

Acclaimed 4 Months dramatically riveting, but often rambling
The dour Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palme d’Or at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival, might be described as the flip side of Juno.

You won’t feel robbed by The Bank Job
The Bank Job is a solidly built and entertaining Brit B-movie about a heist that goes wrong. And right.

‘10,000 B.C.’ is a mammoth adventure
At heart, 10,000 B.C. is a prehistoric love story, about a young man trying to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend.

Miss Pettigrew, curiously, lacks life
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a fast-paced, daffy farce filled with outrageous situations and high hilarity.

02/29/2008

Playwright Eve Ensler will appear Sunday at an event to raise awareness of violence against women
The only movie that will be part of Until the Violence Stops: Providence — a nine-day series of theater programs, discussion groups and community events focusing on eliminating violence against women and girls — revolves around ...

Sex and greed, but little fire in The Other Boleyn Girl
Anyone who has a nodding acquaintance with British history knows Anne Boleyn.

Movie review: Will Ferrell plays a court jester in the basketball comedy Semi-Pro
Will Ferrell again tackles his patented, crowd-pleasing, larger-than-life child-man in Semi-Pro, this time playing the coach and star forward of a basketball team that’s on the skids.

Penelope charming film about the beauty within
Penelope is a generally charming romantic fantasy.

02/27/2008

Witless Protection fails to find any hilarity in imbecility
Making his previous film, Delta Farce, seem like Restoration comedy, Witless Protection brings back Dan Whitney as Larry the Cable Guy for what one can only hope is a last hurrah.

02/22/2008

In Bruges not very nice, but it’s nicely done
It’s hard to mix dark wit with real tragedy, but that’s what writer-director Martin McDonagh pulls off with In Bruges, a wonderfully realized examination of unintended and deadly consequences.

Movie Review: Surprises reign supreme in very chaotic Vantage Point
Despite the high-speed auto chase, the bombs going off, the bullets flying and the terrorists skulking about, Vantage Point can best be described as the Groundhog Day of thrillers.

Movie Review: No sympathy for moping teens in Charlie Bartlett
Oh, boo-hoo. Pity the misunderstood troubled teenagers of Charlie Bartlett, a comedy-drama-morality tale about an amoral young man who tries to be everyone’s friend by solving the deep-seated emotional problems of his fellow students through amateur psychiatric counseling and drugs that he prescribes from a stall in the boys’ restroom.

Movie Review: Be Kind Rewind is charming, silly and senseless
There’s a charming idea buried under landfills of whimsicality in Be Kind Rewind: That given a chance to remake their favorite movies the way they want and starring themselves, wouldn’t most people get a kick out of it?

02/15/2008

Magical web of fantasy
There are almost enough wild characters to fill two Harry Potter books in The Spiderwick Chronicles, the magical, adventure-filled movie based on the popular book series.

Jump into a world packed with action and adventure
Geared to teens looking for an action-packed adventure movie, Jumper certainly delivers in its tale of a young man who discovers to his huge surprise that he can teleport himself to wherever he wants in the world.

These filmmakers should have stepped up to a better plot
The late-summer 2006 sleeper Step Up, about a troubled young man from the wrong side of the tracks who finds redemption on the dance floor with his high-stepping moves and a girl who cares for him, was such a hit that it has been reworked by the Disney Studios into Step Up 2: The Streets.

02/14/2008

No question about it: Definitely, Maybe a charming romance
In the romantic mystery that’s at the heart of the whimsical Definitely, Maybe, an about-to-be-divorced father spins a twisty tale for his inquisitive 10-year-old daughter in which she tries to figure out which of the several women in his life story eventually turned out to be her mother.

02/08/2008

Movie Review: History’s touching impact on one girl
Clearly the Academy Awards nominating committee was looking for something well beyond the usual lightweight animation comedies when it included the French-made Persepolis instead of, say, Shrek the Third.

Cassandra’s Dream a boring nightmare
A psychological thriller in serious need of both psychology and thrills, Cassandra’s Dream is a wan, exceedingly minor drama by Woody Allen, who has started to recycle himself in London the way he had long been recycling his New York City pictures.

Martin Lawrence is back with another raucous comedy
Hollywood, which spent most of the last century ignoring the black family, seems determined to spend most of this one showing the same black family. Over and over.

Fool’s Gold a little dull
The film Fool’s Gold is aptly titled. Like the metal some people mistake for gold, it’s bright and shiny at first glance, but on closer inspection is not the real deal.

Movie Review: Vaughn’s Wild West shows the heart of comedy
Few movies begin as inauspiciously or end so satisfactorily as Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show, a documentary about a 30-cities-in-30-days cross-country tour by the popular movie actor and four up-and-coming comics.

Bleak, well-acted Candy is a difficult movie to sit through
Because of the renewed interest in actor Heath Ledger following his recent untimely death, the Avon is bringing in his Australian-made pre-Brokeback Mountain junkies-in-love social drama Candy this weekend.

02/06/2008

Gross, outrageous and really out there
Underachieving even by the standards of stoner comedies, Strange Wilderness is so inert that it doesn’t so much unreel on screen as loiter there, giggling at its own outrageousness.

The Eye is not a pretty picture
In The Eye, Jessica Alba plays a blind concert violinist who has her sight restored through corneal transplants.

02/01/2008

3-D concert puts Miley within reach
As an adult sitting through the 3-D Hannah Montana concert film, it’s impossible not to be overwhelmed — but not by the piercing screech of thousands of frantic 9-year-olds, the crisp digital imagery or the catchiness of the Disney star’s peppy tunes.

Movie review: Comedy is a casualty in Over Her Dead Body
A woman who is killed on her wedding day returns as a ghost to try to upset the new romance that’s starting to percolate between her fiancÉ and the psychic he consults to reach beyond the grave in the romantic comedy-fantasy Over Her Dead Body.

01/29/2008

Movie Review: Pass up chance to Meet the Spartans
It’s not quite a drinking game, but the best way — the last way — to get any fun out of that exhausted “movie genre spoof” is to count the number of films the latest Scary Movie/Epic Movie sends up. Then count the laughs. If the latter outnumbers the former, you’re golden.

01/25/2008

Movie Review: With uncommon talent, Linney and Hoffman bring humor to The Savages
A recent essayist on National Public Radio related how she and her five siblings took turns caring for their Alzheimer’s-stricken mother. The rotating home care was fraught with tensions for all the family members, many of whom had been raised with something less than an adoring maternal hand.

Life-affirming drama in the blink of an eye
A film about a man who is paralyzed from head to toe and can only communicate by blinking his left eye, his right eye having been sewn shut, does not sound as though it has the makings of a happy moviegoing experience.

Movie Review: With uncommon talent, Linney and Hoffman bring humor to The Savages
A recent essayist on National Public Radio related how she and her five siblings took turns caring for their Alzheimer’s-stricken mother. The rotating home care was fraught with tensions for all the family members, many of whom had been raised with something less than an adoring maternal hand.

Movie Review: Unsettling yet gripping chills in Untraceable are hard to shake off
Diane Lane plays a special unit FBI agent trying to track a psychopath who tortures people and animals to death in the most gruesome ways for the entertainment of Internet viewers in the kinky chiller Untraceable.

Movie review: Daughter of immigrants tries to dance her way to a better life in How She Move
The dancers are in frenzied, high-energy mode in the dance-athon movie How She Move.

Rambo’s back — as gung-ho and illogical as ever
It doesn’t seem possible that a gung-ho, all-American war machine like John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) could have spent the first part of the 21st century frittering away his time in the swamps of northern Thailand, wasting his predatory skills on cobras and fish.

01/23/2008

Ultimate new concert film brings you up close to U2
The ultimate world band, U2, is in the spotlight in the ultimate concert film, U23D, which puts IMAX movie audiences not only in the audience, but right on stage with Ireland’s best export since Guinness — lead singer Bono, guitarist The Edge, bass guitarist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr.

01/19/2008

Documentary paints complex picture
Though its title doesn’t clue you in, My Kid Could Paint That is a whodunit of a sort. The question, though, is not who shot the sheriff but who painted a series of pricey canvases?

01/18/2008

Don’t bank on big laughs from Mad Money
In the heist comedy Mad Money a trio of cleaning ladies loot a Federal Reserve Bank of millions in old bank notes headed for the shredder. They figure nobody will notice.

A creep show for the YouTube generation
Cloverfield arrives in theaters more marketing phenomenon than movie, a “Blair Witch Godzilla Project” built on an unknown cast, a “found video,” a little-seen monster and a lot of hype.

Movie Review: Heigl wears it well in 27 Dresses
The romantic comedy 27 Dresses, which is set in New York City but was filmed largely in Rhode Island early last summer, is a frothy delight that has many charms, even though Aline Brosh McKenna, who wrote the hilarious 2005 screen version of The Devil Wears Prada, offers only scant surprises in her script.

Movie review: Daniel Day-Lewis digs deep in oil-baron saga There Will Be Blood
Daniel Day-Lewis gives an Academy Award-worthy performance as an oil man so blinded by greed that there is no room for anything else in his life in There Will Be Blood.

01/15/2008

Name of the King seems to be playing dress-up
Like actors in an amateur stage play, the large, mostly all-star — or has-been-star — cast of In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale look, rather dazedly, to be playing dress-up.

01/11/2008

Movie Review: Inner demons won’t be held back in The Orphanage
The Orphanage doesn’t need special effects to haunt us — just one delicately disturbing idea: The most powerful ghosts are the ones we create ourselves.

Movie Review: Dying men go for the gusto in The Bucket List
Two men with six months to live make a list of all the places they’d like to go and things they’d like to do before they “kick bucket” in The Bucket List.

Movie review: Few saving graces in Ice Cube comedy First Sunday
In First Sunday, Ice Cube, who seems to crank out a couple of forgettable but very profitable pictures every year, takes out some box-office insurance by surrounding himself with fan-favorites Tracy Morgan (of 30 Rock) as his sidekick, and Katt Williams (the standup star of HBO’s Pimp Chronicles specials).

A fond look back for punks who grew up
When the Clash was labeled “The Only Band That Matters,” it may have been record company hype, but when I was a teenager, there was probably no band that mattered more to me. The idealism, the earnest anger, the democratic, sometimes clumsy way of mixing styles and sounds — I am almost as susceptible to it now as I was at 15.

Ahoy, young vegetables!
When you see a VeggieTales animated film of any length, there’s a lot you have to buy on sight — and we’re not just talking about talking rutabagas, asparagus and squash.

01/05/2008

One call you won’t mind missing
One Missed Call lays bare, in a single line, the difference between formula Hollywood horror and the quietly chilling Japanese horror films Hollywood is so fond of remaking.

01/04/2008

Calculations of the heart
Atonement marches in lock-step formation.

12/25/2007

Movie review: Juno delivers winning comedy, real emotions
One might guess that a movie about an unwed pregnant teenager would be riddled with pathos, anger and enough weeping to take up at least two Oprah shows.

This big-game flick plays on the field of civil rights
One of the great movie-going pleasures of 2007 can be found in a single scene in the earnest, uplifting historical drama, The Great Debaters. Denzel Washington, one of the premiere leading men of today, and Forest Whitaker, character actor extraordinaire, finally go toe-to-toe in a big movie moment.

A predictable tale about a boy and his pet Loch Ness monster
There have been movies about a boy and his dog, a boy and his horse, even a boy and his whale.

12/21/2007

Movie Review: Johnny Cash spoof just tries too hard
The cumbersomely titled Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is a broad spoof of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. When it was over, my moviegoing companion labeled it a cross between Walk the Line and the parody of Airplane!

Movie review: Tension vies with tedium in The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan
There are harrowing adventures in The Kite Runner as a young man goes back to rescue the son of his now-dead boyhood friend who is being held by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Movie Review: A rollicking search for the Book of Secrets leads to cinematic treasure
If you liked the first National Treasure movie three years ago — and who didn’t? — you’ll be positively giddy over the sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

Movie Review: Letters from the dead need more life
Letting go of the past is the central focus of the romantic drama P.S. I Love You, in which Hilary Swank plays a woman who is trying to come to terms with the death of her 35-year-old husband.

Depp makes it look as easy as pie
A group of movie critics were wondering, following a preview screening of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in Boston, how the studio marketing team would attract the vast young-adult audience to the screen version of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway hit musical.

12/14/2007

Will Smith fights off rabid hoardes in ‘I Am Legend’
For a long time, I Am Legend appears to be the ultimate survivor movie with Will Smith playing a scientist who believes he’s the last human on Earth. His only companion and sounding board is Samantha, a German shepherd with an extraordinarily expressive face.

Movie Review: Happiness eludes Margot at the Wedding
Weddings are supposed to be happy times. But when the principal members of the wedding are a dysfunctional family facing several personal crises, figure that the shoes and rice will be flung rather than tossed and the “something blue” will be the bride.

Love the Chipmunks? This movie is for you
There aren’t many stars who can say they’re as well-recognized and celebrated as they were when they first burst onto the scene nearly 40 years ago.

Worship the Chipmunks? Your prayers are answered
There aren’t many stars who can say they’re as well-recognized and celebrated as they were when they first burst onto the scene nearly 40 years ago.

Dark days at Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix
Fans of J.K. Rowling’s favorite wizard turned out in droves around the world, making Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner, $28.98) a $275-million hit despite the film’s (and its characters’) obvious growing pains.

12/12/2007

Perfect Holiday is treacly tripe
Jovial and junky as all get out, The Perfect Holiday is about what you’d expect from a holiday comedy daring to put “perfect” in its title.

12/07/2007

Romance & Cigarettes sizzles
There is more raw vitality pumping through Romance & Cigarettes, John Turturro’s passionate ode to the sensual pulse of life in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, than in a dozen perky high school musicals.

Movie Review: Compass loses direction
With its myriad talking animals, elaborate special effects, grand adventures in a parallel universe and a magical compass held by a 12-year-old girl, at first glance The Golden Compass seems to have all the ingredients of a fantasy-filled family film.

Horror’s human face
Despite impeccable intentions and a cast of compelling real-life characters, Darfur Now may more accurately be titled Darfur Then, as events in that much-abused region of Sudan have overtaken those depicted in even this of-the-moment documentary.

Capt. Jack Sparrow is coming to your home
It would help to have seen the first two Pirates of the Caribbean movies to fully pull together the intricate plot points and many characters in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Disney, $29.99).

11/30/2007

I’d be a crime to miss out on all this suspense
Director Sidney Lumet’s nerve-racking Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead appears to have a very funny premise.

11/23/2007

Movie Review: Bio-fantasy maintains the mystery of Dylan
I’m Not There isn’t a Bob Dylan biography. It’s a fantasia on the many guises of the folk-rock shaman, changeling, hustler and icon.

Movie Review: Violence plus a mediocre Hitman
Hitman, about a super assassin and the Interpol detective who has been on his trail for three years, is based on a best-selling video game.

Movie Review: Complicated and claustrophobic Sleuth
If you like your contempt for humanity served overcooked and oozing fatty blobs of preening, lazy self-regard, you could not improve on Harold Pinter’s rewrite of the 1970 Anthony Shaffer play Sleuth, which Kenneth Branagh has used to remake the 1972 Joseph L. Mankiewicz film of the same title. (Got that?) The result is that what was once insignificant is now insufferable, though, at 86 minutes, almost an hour shorter.

11/21/2007

No film for weak spirits
A bone-dry morbidness pervades No Country for Old Men, which just might be the Coen brothers’ singular mythic masterwork. It also might be a ludicrous exploitation of lone-wolf serial-killing clichÉs.

No film for weak spirits
A bone-dry morbidness pervades No Country for Old Men, which just might be the Coen brothers’ singular mythic masterwork. It also might be a ludicrous exploitation of lone-wolf serial-killing clichÉs.

Creepy, intelligent film comes out of The Mist
Be prepared to be scared, very scared of the terrifying things lurking in the heavy fog that envelopes a Maine village in The Mist, an unsettling movie based on a Stephen King novella.

Nothing new in This Christmas message
You can dream of a “white Christmas” or an African-American one, but if you’re making a holiday family-reunion comedy, you can’t have Christmas dinner without the corn.

Enchanted, magical moments
Maybe it was the rats busily scrubbing a toilet.

You’ll magically listen to August Rush
In literature they call it “magical realism,” that emotional blurring of the real with the surreal.

11/16/2007

Cholera an entertaining tale of undying love
They’ve gotten an entertaining movie out of Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. But it’s also one of those epic miscalculations that Hollywood makes, every so often, to let us know that, no, they haven’t necessarily read the book.

Heroic hash
Beowulf reinterprets the English language’s oldest narrative through the latest techniques of digital filmmaking. The results are sometimes spectacular, often empty spectacle.

Tedious Emporium doesn’t have the charm
The wonder of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium is that stars the caliber of Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman agreed to appear in this tedious fantasy about an eccentric 243-year-old toy shop owner who decides to die and bequeath the place to his insecure young assistant.

Bella’s incredible sweetness will make your teeth ache
It is not hard to see why Bella, a saccharine trifle directed by Alejandro Monteverde, won the People’s Choice Award at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. This is a movie that wears its bleeding heart on its sleeve and loves its characters to distraction. Nothing — not even significant plot glitches and inconsistencies — is allowed to get in the way of its bear-hugging embrace of sweetness and light.

11/09/2007

Slasher-porn P2 is about as suspenseful as a tortoise race
It’s a common phobia, fodder for many an urban legend:

Movie Review: Too bad Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is a bit of a bore
With a powerhouse cast like Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, one might expect more fireworks on screen than what is delivered in Lions for Lambs, a rather plodding rehash of the pros and cons — mostly cons — of America’s War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.

11/02/2007

Movie Review: Martian Child brings special love down to earth
An orphaned boy who believes he’s on a mission to Earth from Mars and spends his days inside a large cardboard box because his sensitive Martian eyes can’t take the bright sunlight found on our planet sounds as though it would either be very sci-fi or more than a little weird.

Movie Review: Epic effort by American Gangster
Designed as The Godfather for the 21st century, director Ridley Scott’s mobster epic American Gangster is not quite all that.

Bee Movie creates a buzz
Bee Movie is a wry, animated lark for a comic who turns out to have a pretty good voice for cartoons — Jerry Seinfeld. But it’s also an often-inspired smart comedy for kids, and a vintage Seinfeld laugh for adults.

Movie Review: The Alps needs a vertigo alert
If you have a yen to yodel, sample Swiss chocolate, wind a cuckoo clock or climb a mountain this weekend, you should get yourself over to the Feinstein IMAX at Providence Place where your passions for all things Switzerland will be more than satisfied by The Alps.

10/30/2007

Saw IV is just another ‘torture porn’ sequel
He has but one facial expression — iguana. And there is just one note in his voice — obscene phone caller before the age of caller-ID. But they’ve served Tobin Bell well through the lucrative clockwork-killing machine known as the Saw franchise.

10/27/2007

Movie Review: Lars and the Real Girl is a sentimental oddball
Despite the fact that one of the central figures in Lars and the Real Girl is a life-size, anatomically correct sex doll, director Craig Gillespie’s offbeat, almost-romantic comedy doesn’t wallow in sleaziness.

10/26/2007

Real Life really is funny
You’d be hard pressed to find a film as buoyantly funny and love affirming as the romantic comedy Dan in Real Life,which was shot on Rhode Island locations from Jamestown to Westerly to Providence late last fall.

Movie Review: Brotherly love and hilarious hijinks on The Darjeeling Limited
Three estranged brothers take a train ride across India in hopes of reconnecting with their shared past and with each other in the wonderfully loopy Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited.

41 is much more than a fond reminiscence
The oddly titled 41, a documentary feature about Nicholas O’Neill, the youngest victim of the Station nightclub fire in 2003, is really two movies of two very different calibers.

Secret passion rules in Lust, Caution
In some ways, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx, and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, adapted from a short story by Eileen Chang, aren’t so very different.

10/23/2007

Sports-movie parody just doesn’t score
Here’s what really kills me about The Comebacks. There isn’t a fatter, riper target for parody than the inspirational sports movie genre. From its mid-1970s-to-late-1980s heyday when both Rocky and Chariots of Fire won best picture Oscars, uplifting jock melodramas have been just asking to get head-slapped and smash-mouthed.

10/22/2007

Moive Review: Inspiration and indictment in Body of War
You’re meant to take the title of the documentary Body of War literally.

10/20/2007

Movie review: Del Toro’s performance boosts an earnest and sad tale
In the middle of the melodrama Things We Lost in the Fire, a man comes upon his weeping wife and daughter and wonders, “You’re not watching that Lifetime movie again?”

10/22/2007

Movie review: Monk gives Thai orphans a new life in Buddha’s Lost Children
The film Buddha’s Lost Children, about a Buddhist monk who takes in orphaned, abandoned and often malnourished children in the remote hills of Thailand, is an earnest and inspirational documentary.

10/19/2007

Youth and idealism add up to some Wild adventures
The lure of the open road and the wide open West has fueled the dreams of countless generations of Americans and countless American movies.

Movie Review: Gone Baby Gone is a cop thriller with twists and turns
Ben Affleck, who has had his ups and downs in selecting film roles as an actor, steps behind the camera to direct brother Casey Affleck in the Boston-based cop thriller Gone Baby Gone and comes up with a winner.

Movie review: Rendition takes your emotions hostage
Ham-fisted and high-minded, Rendition introduces us to a pregnant Chicago woman named Isabella El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon), who is anxiously awaiting the return of her Egyptian-born husband, Anwar (Omar Metwally), from a business trip in South Africa. But Anwar never gets off the plane.

Movie Review: Pretty good fright in 30 Days of Night
Vampires, those bloodsuckers who can only come out in the dark, wreak havoc on snowbound Barrow, Alaska, during the 30-day period when the sun never rises above the horizon in the Halloween-timed thriller 30 Days of Night.

10/16/2007

Tyler Perry’s beautiful people worth a look
Tyler Perry knows his audience.

10/12/2007

Movie Review: Michael Clayton a thrilling game of corporate survival
Let us return momentarily to the heyday of ’70s film, a hothouse of conspiracy and nefarious plots. The nasty shadow of Vietnam and Watergate flickered on the screen, where someone was always listening in (The Conversation) or killing off (The Parallax View) or covering up (All the President’s Men).

Movie review: We Own the Night is a Prodigal Son crime drama
The hard-edged police thriller We Own the Night is the Prodigal Son story, played out against the familiar theme of the two brothers — one good; one bad — whose lives have taken very different paths.

Movie Review: The Golden Age becomes her
Cate Blanchett reprises her star-making role of the first Queen Elizabeth as an older, more powerful but not always wiser, monarch in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Movie review: The Final Season is nostalgic look at small-town baseball
As corny as Iowa and as predictable as an intentional walk, The Final Season is another nostalgic celebration of baseball as the very embodiment of small-town Americana.

Movie Review: A misguided boy searches for acceptance in This Is England
Hopefully, a more promising title for This Is England would have been This Was England. The film, written and directed by Shane Meadows, looks back to the grim days of the rise of racism and the skinhead movement during Britain’s war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.

Movie review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford rewrites the history of the violent outlaw
Before a bullet shattered his skull in 1882, Jesse James cut a bloody swath through parts of the Midwest and the South, leaving a trail of corpses and favorable press notices in his wake. Bad man, poor man, bushwhacker, thief, James was as American as apple pie and the Confederate flag he wrapped himself in like an excuse.

Movie review: Across the Universe is a surreal ride through the ’60s with a Beatles soundtrack
From its first moments, when a solitary dreamer on a beach turns to the camera and sings, unaccompanied, the opening lines of the Beatles’ song “Girl,” Julie Taymor’s ’60s musical fantasia, Across the Universe, reveals its intention to use the Beatles’ catalog to tell two stories at once, one personal, the other generational.

10/05/2007

Movie Review: Wrapped up in romance with merry Jane Austen Book Club
Writer-director Robin Swicord breaks new ground with The Jane Austen Book Club by making the world’s first lit chick flick.

Movie Review: In hilarious Heartbreak, Farrelly brothers keep romance in remake
Bawdy, raunchy and naughtily hilarious, The Heartbreak Kid is the closest over-aged frat boys Bobby and Peter Farrelly have come to the zaniness of their 1998 mega-hit There’s Something About Mary.

Movie Review: Super Sea Monsters in jolting 3D
Travel back 82 million years to witness the life-or-death struggles taking place in the depths of the vast inland sea that once covered what is now Kansas in the thrilling IMAX film Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure.

Movie Review: Another boy hero arrives on the scene in exciting The Seeker: The Dark is Rising
Move over Daniel Radcliffe. There’s a new kid on the block ready to take on the forces of the Dark in hopes of saving the forces of the Light.

09/28/2007

Movie Review: A thriller in The Kingdom
The Kingdom, whose title makes it sound like it might be some sword-and-sorcery special effects extravaganza, is actually a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of four FBI agents who have five days to find a terrorist kingpin in Saudi Arabia despite roadblocks tossed their way by both the Saudis and the U.S. government.

Movie Review: In the Shadow of the Moon is a thrilling journey with the astronauts
You can take a trip to the moon this weekend with 10 of the Apollo astronauts who orbited our nearest heavenly body, some of whom even walked on its surface, in documentary filmmaker David Sington’s engaging In the Shadow of the Moon.

Movie Review: In Game Plan, the kids will love the corn
Dwayne Johnson, the wrestler-turned-movie-star who began his professional career as “The Rock,” tries to soften his screen image and expand his range beyond the violent action films of his past in The Game Plan, a family-oriented film in which he’s billed as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Movie Review: In Game Plan, the kids will love the corn
Dwayne Johnson, the wrestler-turned-movie-star who began his professional career as “The Rock,” tries to soften his screen image and expand his range beyond the violent action films of his past in The Game Plan, a family-oriented film in which he’s billed as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Movie Review: A Feast of Love in all the wrong places
Feast of Love might have been called Two Weddings and a Funeral had it been as witty and funny as the classic British farce Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Movie Review: King of California reigns with a relationship as good as gold
In the Los Angeles exurb of Santa Clarita there lived, not long ago, Charlie, a manic-depressive who kept meds in the kitchen, ancient treasure maps under his pillow and his teenage daughter on tenterhooks.

09/27/2007

Those I Left Behind is a bittersweet look at Cuban families
The bittersweet documentary Those I Left Behind, which is showing tomorrow as part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival, examines the roadblocks that have been set up that limit the visits between people who have fled Cuba for the United States and the families they left behind.

09/25/2007

Zombie saga is undead and still kicking
They won’t land an Oscar nomination come next winter. But the folks who did the makeup for Resident Evil: Extinction ought to get their due.

A look at the short life of a ‘green card soldier’
Swiss filmmaker Heidi Specongna traveled to Guatemala and Los Angeles to make a complete portrait of the first Latino killed during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in The Short Life of Jose Antonio Gutierrez, showing tomorrow as part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival.

Sex, sacrilege and suspense in Peru
The oddly titled Madeinusa, which will be screened at the Providence Latin American Film Festival tomorrow and Thursday, is an even odder film from Peru, even though at heart it’s the often-told story of a young woman who yearns to leave her isolated farming community behind for the bright lights of the big city, in this case Lima.

09/24/2007

From Cuba, where homosexuals fare poorly . . .
Documentary filmmaker Christian Liffers looks at the plight of homosexuals in Cuba in his provocative Dos Patrias Cuba y La Noche (Two Homelands, Cuba and the Night) showing tomorrow as part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival.

Providence Latin American Film Festival review: El Clown
From Puerto Rico comes what is perhaps the most whimsical offering in the Providence Latin American Film Festival, El Clown.

From Cuba, where homosexuals fair poorly . . .
Documentary filmmaker Christian Liffers looks at the plight of homosexuals in Cuba in his provocative Dos Patrias Cuba y La Noche (Two Homelands, Cuba and the Night) showing tomorrow as part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival.

. . . and folks look back fondly at Hershey’s company town
The bittersweet short documentary Model Town, which will be showing three times at the Providence Latin American Film Festival, is a nostalgic look back at what once was one of Cuba’s best places to live, but which is today a crumbling ruin.

09/22/2007

Movie review: Os 12 Trabalhos, part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival, explores the Herculean tasks of everyday life
From Brazil comes a surprising take on the fabled 12 Labors of Hercules in Os 12 Trabalhos (The 12 Labors), which is showing tomorrow and again Sept. 29 as part of the Providence Latin American Film Festival.

09/21/2007

A tense interplay between music and mayhem in El Violin
The 15th annual Providence Latin American Film Festival opens tomorrow with a smashing entry, Mexican director Francisco Vargas’s El Violin.

Movie Review: Good Luck Chuck is out of it
The bad comedy season continues with Good Luck Chuck. This one wants to be a sex farce with heart, like Knocked Up or Wedding Crashers.

Sydney White: The fairest teen comedy of all?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs go to college in the buoyant romantic comedy Sydney White, a movie that’s geared to preteens and young teens.

Movie Review: The Hunting Party finds thrill of the chase in Bosnia
Three reporters go looking for an on-the-run Serbian war criminal inside Bosnia following the end of the genocidal war there in The Hunting Party, a film that awkwardly mixes humor, action, danger and poignancy.

The Godfather, Russian-style
That Viggo Mortensen is one bad mother . . .

Movie Review: In the Valley of Elah weighed down by antiwar message
Although it sounds like a picturesque spot, no one is bringing a picnic lunch or having any fun In the Valley of Elah. The characters in this somber film have the look of individuals delivering a Very Important Message to the world. And although this film does have something crucial to convey, this is not the way to go about it.

09/14/2007

Movie review: The 11th Hour delivers a warmed-over warning about climate change
The urgent message of the documentary The 11th Hour is “save the planet!”

Movie review: Donkey Kong combatants do noble battle in The King of Kong
Seth Gordon’s documentary The King of Kong has all the ingredients of high Shakespearean drama — subterfuge, backstabbing, spies, treachery, tears, skullduggery, anguish.

Movie Review: Foster’s angel of death: Excellent acting makes The Brave One’s violence easier to watch
At first glance, it might seem easy to dismiss The Brave One offhandedly as a female Death Wish.

Movie Review: In Mr. Woodcock, gym-class nightmare come true is a darkly funny farce
The message of the offbeat comedy Mr. Woodcock is that you can go home again, but you’d better be prepared for the past, which is always lurking, waiting to pounce.

09/08/2007

Smart guys fail in ultra-dumb comedy
Hollywood loves a good “fish out of water” comedy. It’s always funny to introduce a character or characters removed from their comfort zone and hurled into a situation they can or, funnier still, cannot handle.

09/07/2007

Movie review: Rocky Point rides again in You Must Be This Tall: The Story of Rocky Point Park
Rocky Point Park, the fantasy playground that drew Rhode Islanders to Warwick Neck for more than 150 summers, may have met an unhappy end when the last remnants of the place were demolished early this summer.

Movie review: 3:10 to Yuma gallops back to 1957
The Western genre has been deconstructed, reconstructed, parodied and reinvented so many times, by directors as far-ranging as Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven), Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles) and Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), that it’s a bit of a shock to come across something like 3:10 to Yuma.

Gruesome, gory Hatchet will destroy your appetite
Writer-director Adam Green’s Hatchet is billed as “an affectionate, no-holds-barred tribute to 1970s and 1980s horror films.”

Movie Review: Live-in Maid offers an insightful look at Latin American culture
Among Latin Americans of any means at all, live-in domestic help is an every day part of middle-class life, neither remarkable nor grand. I mention this because it’s crucial in understanding Argentinean director Jorge Gaggero’s wonderful Live-in Maid, which won the special jury prize at Sundance in 2005.

Movie review: Shoot ’Em Up’s ultimate victim is the audience
Bullets fly and bodies fall in ballet precision in writer-director Michael Davis’ splatterfest, Shoot ’Em Up.

08/31/2007

Movie Review: Two Days in Paris is a good-humored look at romance
A New York couple’s romantic holiday in Italy and France, with two days in Paris to visit her family and old friends, turns out to be anything but romantic in Julie Delpy’s effervescent comedy-drama Two Days in Paris.

Movie Review: A bullet-riddled, bloody Death Sentence
More than bullets fly in Death Sentence, a film about a man who gets really mad when his bystander son is killed in a gang robbery. Limbs soar, too.

08/29/2007

Movie review: Balls of Fire is a one-joke Ping Pong movie
It must be difficult to spoof both sports films and kung-fu action and still be a one-joke movie. But they pull it off in Balls of Fury.

08/28/2007

Movie Review: Pleasant War could have been more
Remember when a martial-arts movie was a martial-arts movie, and stars like Bruce Lee and the young Jackie Chan did not need wires, digital effects or firearms to convey their prowess? Today, it seems, anyone seeking a pleasant summer afternoon of dramatic Asian-style fisticuffs must settle for the kind of urban-action/martial-arts hybrid that is War.

08/24/2007

Movie Review: In Mr Bean’s Holiday, Rowan Atkinson is charmingly ridiculous
Mr. Bean yanks his head out of that turkey and rediscovers his charm for Mr. Bean’s Holiday, a child-friendly and often adorably childish homage to his inspiration, the great French clown Jacques Tati.

Movie Review: Nanny Diaries needs more wit, less treacle
Before seeing The Nanny Diaries I’d have argued that the cute and the cutting edge are mutually exclusive.

Movie Review: Resurrecting the Champ looks at the dark side of journalistic ambition
Resurrecting the Champ is a writerly sports melodrama, a journalistic procedural on the order of Shattered Glass.

Moview Review: Thou shalt not find The Ten amusing
A good cast — including Liev Schreiber, Winona Ryder, Jessica Alba, Oliver Platt, Paul Rudd and Famke Janssen — gets stranded by a script that’s not as funny as everyone apparently thought it was in The Ten, an offbeat spin on the Ten Commandments.

Movie Review: Compelling moments turn to melodrama in uneven thriller Illegal Tender
It isn’t often that you see the hero’s hand shaking when he holds a gun in a movie. Most of the big-screen shooters we encounter — even the ones who supposedly have no firearms experience — have the steady grip of a confident marksman.

Movie Review: September Dawn is blatant propaganda against the Mormons
The Mountain Meadow Massacre was one of the Old West’s most disturbing incidents and should be rich material for a gripping film.

Movie review: Rocket Science never gets off the ground
Director Jeffrey Blitz won national acclaim in 2002 with Spellbound, a heart-thumping look at the National Spelling Bee, its over-achiever contestants and their egging-them-on parents.

08/21/2007

Movie review: The Last Legion came, saw and wimped out
The Last Legion, a sword-and-sandal spectacle from those epic-loving De Laurentiises, invokes a lot of better movies on its circuitous trip from the Roman Empire to the Arthurian legend, but it doesn’t do the one bit of borrowing that could have made this journey enjoyable.

08/17/2007

The Invasion will give you a mild case of the chills
The U.S. leaves Iraq. North Korea renounces nuclear weapons. Darfur is saved. Hunger, poverty, war and crime come to an end. It’s on TV and in all the papers.

Drama and danger make for an engaging Arctic Tale
In the wake of the wild success of March of the Penguins a couple of years ago, it’s not surprising that films about animals living in harsh, snow-white conditions would become a trend. The penguins themselves have already spawned two animated films — the Academy Award-winning Happy Feet and Surf’s Up.

Review: Teen comedy Superbad goes from bad to worse
The Farrelly Brothers have a lot to answer for.

No End in Sight to mistakes in Iraq
“We used to joke that there were 500 ways to do it wrong,” says Barbara Bodine, American diplomat and former coordinator for central Iraq, of how the U.S. could rebuild the Middle Eastern nation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. “And only two or three ways to do it right.”

Secrets and silliness attend Death at a Funeral
Once upon a time, Frank Oz was known as the man who gave Miss Piggy her iconic oomph.

Dark dangers emerge from imaginative world
In Paprika, a gorgeous riot of future- shock ideas and brightly animated imagery, the doors of perception never close.

08/10/2007

Passions and potions
Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro) commands a flying ship in Stardust.

With words and wit, Jane takes on a bittersweet world of love and money
Jane (Anne Hathaway) falls in love with the arrogant Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy, left) even though her family encourages her to marry Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox).

Too rushed to come up with a plot
Chris Tucker, left, and Jackie Chan have Parisian adventures in Rush Hour 3.

Reliving the really old days with The Man From Earth
In the intriguing The Man From Earth, the late screenwriter Jerome Bixby wonders what it would be like to have lived 14,000 years and still be going strong. The audience will be able to find out at 8:15 p.m. tomorrow when The Man From Earth is screened at the Columbus Theater as part of the 11th Rhode Island International Film Festival.

Engrossing portraits of the original moon-walkers
In several lunar landing missions that took place between July 20, 1969, and Dec. 14, 1972, 12 American men walked on the moon.

08/09/2007

The hard-to-pronounce Cthulhu is a strange, ominous hybrid
A scene from the film Cthulhu, directed by Daniel Gildark. The film is part of the 2007 R.I. International Film Festival.

View from the Bridge: A melancholy journey to Kosovo
Cinematographer Sarah Levy and director John Ealer observe preparations for the lifting of the crosses onto St. Dimitrije church in a scene from the film View From the Bridge: Stories from Kosovo, directed by John Ealer. The film is part of the 2007 Rhode Island International Film Festival.

08/08/2007

Last Stop for Paul is not as grave as it sounds
Marc Carter, left, and Neil Mandt discuss a scene in their film Last Stop For Paul.

Stay home from Day Camp
Paul Rae reaches a low point in an otherwise undistinguished career in Daddy Day Camp.

08/07/2007

Opening night features actresses as directors
Alfred Molina and Katherine Waterston in Bryce Howard’s Orchids.

Offbeat and romantic, comedy delights
The eleventh annual Rhode Island International Film Festival kicks off tonight with a splashy party at the Providence Performing Arts Center and several new short independent films on screen, including ones directed by actors Jennifer Aniston and Bryce Dallas Howard.

08/03/2007

High-flying theatrics cover up lame plot
Underdog, the Disney movie that was filmed in Providence last summer about a crime-fighting talking dog with superpowers, is a kid-friendly film that’s chock-full of action and slapstick adventures.

Sexy, superficial look at Lavoe’s life and loves
Marc Anthony (left), Bernard Hernandez, and Jennifer Lopez in El Cantante.

A spy classic, re-Bourne
Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) continues to search for his identity, with help from CIA field agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), in The Bourne Ultimatum.

All dolled up for harmless fun
The Bratz dolls come to life, complete with their “passion for fashion,” in Bratz: The Movie. From left: Logan Browning, Janel Parrish, Nathalia Ramos and Skyler Shaye.

Buddy picture with plenty of French twists from Patrice Leconte
Bruno (Dany Boon, left) teaches François (Daniel Auteuil) the art of making friends in My Best Friend.

Indie love story has a Hollywood ending
Parker Posey, foreground, plays a career woman who’s about to give up on romance, before a charming Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud) falls into her lap, in Broken English.

07/28/2007

Wicked irony is all Lindsay Lohan’s horrible film offers
Any lingering doubts that Lindsay Lohan’s judgment isn’t all it should be are answered with I Know Who Killed Me, forever hereafter known as the movie that came out the week her personal life may have hit bottom. It’s an unintentionally hilarious disaster, a movie seemingly built on wickedly ironic prescience.

No class, very little entertainment
What Tiger Woods giveth, Faizon Love taketh away.

07/27/2007

Funny yellow people
The residents of Springfield — including Marge and baby Maggie — look up in fear as a disaster threatening the town is contained by the Environmental Protection Agency. The trouble was started by Homer and his new pet pig.

Real-life survival tale in gritty Rescue Dawn
Christian Bale, left, and Steve Zahn, star in Rescue Dawn, the true-life story of one man’s escape from a POW camp in Laos during the Vietnam War.

Mafioso welcome new release of ’62 film
Italian comic actor Alberto Sordi plays Antonio Badalamenti in Mafioso.

No real sunshine in this science fiction
Cliff Curtis in the observation room of the Icarus II in Sunshine.

Dreams beyond reach through Golden Door
It’s hard to imagine what an original cinematic take on the 19th-century Italian-American immigrant experience might look like until the giant vegetables start showing up in Emanuele Crialese’s beautiful, spacey, trans-oceanic odyssey Golden Door, winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival.

07/24/2007

There’s no thrill in Captivity
Elisha Cuthbert stars as supermodel Jennifer in Captivity.

A riveting true tale of Crazy Love
Burt and Linda Pugach in Crazy Love.

A hypnotic retelling of D.H. Lawrence’s classic tale of love and lust
Marina Hands and Jean-Louis Coullog’h star in Lady Chatterley, which is in French with English subtitles.

Dopey dialogue earns Angel-A a B — but Paris looks great
Despite the seeming ubiquity of Luc Besson, it has been nearly eight years since a Besson-directed live-action film opened in the U.S. Busying himself with producing and/or writing a slew of high-octane (and highly profitable) action films such as the Taxi and Transporter series, he never has been far from the cinematic limelight following the extravagance of 1999’s medieval epic The Messenger — The Story of Joan of Arc.