Screen
Don’t bother keeping up
Since The X Files, David Duchovny’s air of undentable diffidence has been his strength (to those who find him dreamy) as well as his limitation (to the others). In the social satire The Joneses, Duchovny plays a salesman who, at a key point, when he truly deserves ...
Abridged and confusing
In a future where the government keeps a tight rein on the populace, the annual reminder of an earlier failed uprising is The Hunger Games, a televised battle to the death of teens chosen from each of 12 districts. When her young sister Prim (Willow Shields) is ...
Awful, not full of awe
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 ...
Like a Joss
This was going to be a rabid, frothing defense of the superhero genre, complete with impassioned pleas that appealed to cinematic intellectuals who are apt to dismiss such films. But Tom Hiddleston, who ironically plays the evil Loki in The Avengers, got there first...
Snapshots from the rum haze
Johnny Depp was a pal of the late Hunter S. Thompson, and the frustrating but thickly atmospheric film version of Thompson’s early novel The Rum Diary finds Depp and writer/director Bruce Robinson paying tribute to the author, freelance gonzo journalist, career ...
The sound of a true American voice
Ten years ago at the Sundance Film Festival, a new voice in American cinema was announced. The voice was not loud, but it was clear, and it belonged to the 29-year-old Ramin Bahrani...
‘The Messenger’ digs into a different side of the Army
America is an interesting country. Full of contradictions, hopes, failures and, every now and then, surprises. The nation is complex, to say the very least. Perhaps one of the clearest representations of these complexities is the war in Iraq...
No-town music
At its worst, cinema verite is aimless pretense masquerading as artistic intent. At its best, it is Detropia, a documentary that adds soul to statistics, going inside the implosion of a once-proud city using a sprawling, haunting approach. That isn’t to say that ...
‘Horrible’ pretty good
You can practically hear little coils of contempt tightening inside Jason Bateman every time he’s in a pickle on screen. In the new comedy Horrible Bosses, the Bateman specialty is the are-you-trying-to-tell-me response. At one point in the film, when confronted ...
Right story, wrong script
Red Tails squanders a great subject, reducing the real-life struggles and fierce heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen to rickety cliché. Some of the action is fun. But if something about that statement doesn’t sound right, well, there’s your chief problem with Red Tails. ...
