Mortdecai is creeping into theaters with the flushed shame of a debutante who expects to be pelted with tomatoes. It’s a pity. In 1965, Mortdecai would be the hit of the year. Director David Koepp whips through this pop-colored caper about crooked art dealer Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) — one…
Each year, screenwriters kill off enough off-screen children to fill a Chuck E. Cheese’s. A dead son or daughter gives a movie the illusion of depth plus an easy explanation for whatever the script ladles on the surviving parents. Binge-drinking? Nymphomania? Sudden bouts of breakdancing? Blame the wee coffin. In…
All you need to know about Taken 3 is that Liam Neeson survives an explosive car crash — twice. Director Olivier Megaton even rewinds the second blast to show us how his hero escaped. It still doesn’t make sense. But who cares? The Taken franchise is rooted in implausibilities, specifically…
Here are movie moments from 2014 I’ll never forget: Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s sad pop tart smacking her ass in Beyond the Lights, the sickroom choked with flowers in Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Oscar Isaac and Kirsten Dunst’s Greek island all-nighter in The Two Faces of January, and the entire soundtrack of…
“Politics really isn’t my specialty,” says Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) to a naval commander (Charles Dance) in an early job interview scene in Morten Tyldum’s choppy biopic The Imitation Game. Yet no less than Winston Churchill would credit Turing as the main cause of the Allies’ victory over the Nazis…
There’s something curiously airless about director Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, the story of real-life Olympian and WWII P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Early on, Louis (Jack O’Connell) and his fellow American soldiers are zipping through the golden skies, dogfighting with Japanese planes, and, though the B-24’s doors are open and the wind is…
In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) — an astoundingly talented marksman credited with over 160 confirmed kills in Iraq — runs into a fellow veteran at a mechanic’s shop between deployments. The soldier shows Kyle an artificial leg and thanks him for saving his life…
Sony assumed North Korea would hate the movie. The question was: What would it do? Pyongyang had just tested its atom bomb and threatened “preemptive nuclear attack.” And the Supreme Leader with his finger on the trigger was barely over 30, with less than two years of experience. But Kim…
The original Broadway production of Annie was a kiddie musical that wasn’t for kids. It was a period piece about the Great Depression — both a celebration of Warbucksian success and an elbow-jab to stingy rich folk — with a detour into a Hooverville and a key cameo from Franklin…
Flip open your Bibles to Numbers 12:3 to find the first inaccuracy in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth,” sayeth the Good Book of our hero, played by Christian Bale, an…
Garfield creator Jim Davis is well aware of the internet’s cat obsession. In fact, he’s got an upcoming strip about it. “But if I told you the joke, I’d have to kill you,” he deadpans, before cracking his paternal composure with a chuckle. (He did tell me, and I’ve chosen…
The du Pont family made its fortune selling gunpowder during the War of 1812, and soldiered on to invent everything ever worn by a cop: Kevlar, nylon, polyester, synthetic rubber. If you’ve cooked on Teflon pans, that money’s theirs, too. That means you’ve supported American patriotism, or at least heir…
Over the first two Hunger Games films, we’ve watched coal miner’s daughter Katniss Everdeen become the pawn, then the pest, of the Capitol, whose President Snow (Donald Sutherland) has enslaved the adults of the 12 poorer Districts and annually commanded that they together sacrifice 24 of their children to likely…
Imagine if nerdy Clark Kent didn’t have to remove his glasses and pocket protector to save the world. Then imagine him as fat and sweet as a marshmallow. Meet Big Hero 6’s Baymax, Disney’s new cuddly champion: a waddling, inflatable health care companion who can sense your pulse, diagnose disease,…
Alexandre Aja’s Horns is the rare YA-ish romance that doesn’t make like a guidance counselor and force the characters to shake hands and forgive. It’s a biblically tinged, eye-for-an-eye vengeance thriller about an emo boyfriend named Ig (Daniel Radcliffe) whose childhood sweetheart Merrin (Juno Temple) has been murdered underneath the…
Jake Gyllenhaal is used to exhaustion. During his research for the LAPD dramaEnd of Watch, he spent five months patrolling the streets with real-life police officers until 7 a.m. It was good preparation for his new movie Nightcrawler, a blistering portrait of a morally corrupt crime-scene videographer who works the…
A gloom hangs over writer-director David Ayer’s brutal war drama Fury that only the audience can see. It’s April 1945, and we know that in weeks the Nazis will surrender. The war is already over — Hitler just hasn’t admitted it. American Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) suspects as…
It was a mystery that reporter Gary Webb would have jumped on: a man who’d made powerful enemies allegedly committing suicide with two gunshots to the head. The tragedy is that Webb was the deceased. Michael Cuesta’s earnest, ire-inducing Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the…
The tragedy of Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is that it was released the year it was made. A snapshot of today’s cultural disconnection, in which Facebook, texting, World of Warcraft and streaming smut lure people away from dinner with their families, the film’s so current that its observations…
Every child who’s thrown a tantrum, packed a bag and plotted to run away has shivered with the same vengeful thought: I wish I could see how sad they’ll be when I’m gone. The Left Behind franchise implies that evangelicals haven’t grown up. This new film version, the latest in…
Simon Pegg has always been more like a cartoon than a real boy. He’s one part Charlie Brown to two parts Tintin, a round-faced runt who can channel both childlike depression and old-fashioned cowlicked pluck. In Pegg’s new film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, director Peter Chelsom simply allows…
The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film. If the German Expressionists were skilled at stop-motion animation, they’d have already made it. This is cartoon Caligari, a fable set on a…
