Screen

In the bizarre world of Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, there’s a war brewing over “portion” control. It seems the truce between those who sip, leaving humans a little weaker but none the wiser, and those who gorge, gluttons who leave death, destruction and...

Two years ago may as well be 200 in this economy, a fact that gives the easygoing, entertaining court documentary The September Issue a certain poignancy. It's about the run-up to a late-boom-era capitalistic war, a triumph of advertising and frippery over rational ...

Dame Helen Mirren as a toughtalking Nevada brothel madam? We like to think our finest screen performers can play anyone. Mirren, whose career has encompassed the full spectrum of human behavior, from queens to gangster’s molls, is fully capable of tackling a ...

There’s a moment in Holy Motors when Monsieur Merde, a dirty leprechaun-looking man in a tattered green suit with scraggly red hair, approaches the fringes of a high-fashion photo shoot. The photographer is grunting, “Beauty, beauty!” with perverse glee at his model...

Preposterous, pseudointellectual, poorly constructed, clichéd, impenetrably masculine, goofy and possessed of an indecipherable ending, Interstellar is the mother of all misfires. It is a bloated juggernaut of stupidity, rolling its obese body stuffed with ...

"Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel" is a kids...

Repo Men was awful. Graphic, bloody and with a staggering body count, this is all that’s wrong with Hollywood action films, a glossy sheen on a completely vapid, empty story that works against itself in scene after scene. Then, the worst of all is the surprise ...

Stories about people overcoming obstacles are uplifting and inspirational and all that. A new film on people with disabilities aims higher: It’s designed to start a movement...

A nerve-racking noir from Australia, The Square is accompanied by a nine-minute curtain-raiser, a short film called “Spider,” from the same director, Nash Edgerton. The less you know about “Spider” the better. I’ll say this much: There may be no more effective sucker...

Low-brow. Just expect it from Gulliver’s Travels. When Gulliver ( Jack Black) first arrives at the kingdom of Lilliput and puts out a raging fire by dropping his shorts and urinating, I was astonished by the audience laughter. This is a film unabashedly aimed at teen...

The Lego Movie being somehow good ruined our ability to completely dismiss a film’s concept upon first hearing it. Who knows, maybe Minions would be infused with the same cleverness, the same all-ages wonder and fun? In the first 10 minutes, a pillshaped living ...

Grown Ups is a sure thing — a film you think you’ve seen before, and probably saw somewhere a second time, so why not another? Actors, particularly stage actors in longrunning plays, strive for “the illusion of the first time.” High-concept comedies like Grown Ups ...