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For some movies, seeming funny is enough. The Hangover Part II only has to show up to succeed. At once pushy and lazy, the sequel follows the 2009 smash, which has become the most lucrative R-rated comedy in history. Isn’t that depressing? I find that depressing...

At one point in Meek’s Cutoff, set in 1845, the frontier settler played by the excellent, plain-spoken Michelle Williams fires two warning shots after an alarming encounter with a Native American. Hurriedly she loads the rifle with gunpowder and ammunition, while ...

We first met Johnny Depp’s memorable Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and it was a delightful film, a fun amusement park ride even more entertaining than the eponymous Disneyland ride upon which it was based...

The alcoholic son of an alcoholic, sales manager Nick Porter was born in a Raymond Carver short story called “Why Don’t You Dance?” published in the 1981 Carver collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The story, which takes place at a yard sale among...

There´s a reason Bridesmaids isn’t called The Bridesmaid. Kristen Wiig, the star and co-writer (along with Annie Mumolo) of director Paul Feig’s comedy, has a self-effacing streak running right alongside her deadly deadpan streak...

At this point in the Marvel Comics-derived superhero cycle, audiences can be forgiven for feeling a tad worn out, both for reasons of quality and quantity. My rear end’s thor just thinking about how many more we have coming. Yet sometimes a product exceeds ...

So few ensemble-driven African- American films make it to market — whether with familiar faces or unknowns — that the ones that do get out of the gate provoke a weird degree of scrutiny regarding what they have to say about the black experience. Who needs the ...

As adolescent male power fantasies go, Fast Five has an undeniable trashy charm...

As if by deliberate and vaguely sadistic design, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil leeches the fun clean out of the first Hoodwinked (2005). Six years between films is a long time, and here, when Kirk the Woodsman shows up and someone says something like “Hey! It’s Kirk ...

Like The Notebook, but with an elephant, the unexpectedly good film version of Water for Elephants elevates pure corn to a completely satisfying realm of romantic melodrama. This adaptation of the Sara Gruen bestseller, set in a storybook edition of Depression-era ...

Midway through one in a manic string of chase sequences in the animated Rio, the uptight macaw voiced by Jesse Eisenberg says, “I would love to go five minutes without almost getting killed.” This is the movie’s strategy: near-perpetual peril, dialogue that’s almost ...

In the first few minutes of Scream 4, the teenage girls home by themselves on a dark night are watching a DVD and discussing the merits and demerits of the Saw franchise, which one of the girls refers to as “torture porn,” and then brrrrrrrrrrrrp brrrrrrrrrrrrp goes ...