Screen
Don’t let millennials time travel
Project Almanac understands what people really want in a time-travel movie: long stretches of people soldering circuit boards and buying batteries. I mean, why waste time pondering temporal paradoxes when audiences just want to sit back and marvel at the thrill of ...
‘The Twilight Saga: New Moon’: Love at second bite
Filmmaker Chris Weitz said that he knew the Twilight phenomenon had gone off the rails when the female...
Instagrim: ‘Celeste and Jesse Forever’ is a hipster love tragedy
The degree to which you will enjoy Celeste and Jesse Forever solely depends on how ensorcelled you are by the luminous Rashida Jones. If you love her, this movie is a moderately effective slice-of-life rom-com-dram. If you think she’s just OK (or worse), you’re left ...
An animated yawn
Earlier this year Despicable Me proved it: A story about a hapless villain, humanized, is good for a few laughs and a half-billion dollars worldwide. That figure would very likely be A-OK with the makers of the new DreamWorks animated feature Megamind, also about a ...
‘When in Rome’ fails as romantic comedy
You'd think by now Hollywood would have romantic comedies down to a cell-phone ap any studio exec could access...
Not quite naughty, definitely not nice
It’s almost impressive to put together such a cornucopia of talent, such a veritable cavalcade of funny folks, and produce something this listless and...
Bourne to be bored
The Bourne trilogy includes three of the best action thrillers in cinema, with Jason Bourne portrayed by Matt Damon as an everyman who finds he’s been programmed by the CIA to be a deadly assassin. The third film ends with Bourne lured out of hiding by reporter Simon...
Hurts so good
Good science fiction makes you ask hard questions. Things like “What is the true core of human nature?” and “Do they really expect us...
Hell is your family
Toni Collette spends nearly the entirety of Hereditary playing an unopposed game of Twister using only her facial features. The film is understandably being...
8-bit-o’-honey
For a generation weaned on more Mario than Mother Goose, Wreck-It Ralph has been a long time coming. An 8-bit fairy tale with a burly bruiser in the role of the misunderstood princess, it skews a tad more prepubescent than Pixar but shares similar DNA. Writers ...
