Writer-director Rian Johnson fashions a universe in which time is a fluid thing—where everything takes place in a familiar today and an otherworldly yesterday, where the audience is at once agreeably comfortable and inexplicably unsettled. When his characters don’t look out of place in their derbies and dusters, they sound…
Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…
At the end of The Da Vinci Code, having traipsed around Paris and London for more than two hours to find out whether the Holy Grail was just an old cup or the womanly seed of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon, ace symbologist, headed back to Harvard,…
At 73, the Memphis-born actor, stuntman, former U.S. Marine and Golden Gloves boxer Red West has the stoic, leathery repose of a barfly on a John Ford or Howard Hawks saloon wall. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, reveals even less, but there’s an abyss of longing and…
The face of Mike Tyson stares out from the screen like a sentry—intent, sober, watchful. The camera sits close, the framing is tight, and as we lock eyes with the former heavyweight champ who could shatter an opponent’s confidence with little more than a glance, he seems to look past…
It’s difficult for this long-time Trekkie to review J.J. Abrams’ relaunching of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It’s difficult to dispassionately dole out compliments and complaints per the job description. Because, yes, the professional critic understands: This is Paramount Pictures’ latest effort to jump-start a profitable but long-stalled franchise, to do for…
Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com, with Matthew McConaughey, who, 18 years Efron’s senior and slightly butcher, has just a few more years of prettiness…
Is Anybody There? Director John Crowley’s lighter followup to the anguished Boy A features a standard teaming of reluctant oldster and troubled youngster—both residents of a down-at-heels family-run rest home. Besides the blokeish star playing retired magician Clarence (Michael Caine, who could twinkly-tearily confide with bobbing accent in his sleep),…
Lymelife There’s nothing new under the suburban sun (save for infectious ticks) in Derick Martini’s Lymelife, whose weighty allegorical title and fastidious 1970s accoutrements aim to do for beer-and-pretzels Long Island what Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm did for tony, key-party Connecticut. Dad (Alec Baldwin) is shtupping the secretary (Cynthia…
Made in U.S.A. Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. is not the celluloid holy grail, but it’s close enough. Four decades after its New York premiere in 1967, the least-seen, most quintessential movie of Godard’s great period lights up a screen at Dallas’ Angelika Film Center at 9:15 p.m. Friday as…
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Without fail, the dullest installment in any superhero movie franchise is the first film—the, yawn, origin story during which audiences anxiously awaiting The Big Bad Guy have to suffer through, yaaaawn, scenes of childhood traumas and other expository effluvia, by which point the closing credits are fast…
Writing about A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, the 2006 debut film by director Dito Montiel, I likened it to the sort of crude but fascinating object one might find in an exhibition of naif art. Adapted by Montiel—a former hardcore punk musician—from his autobiographical novel about his teenage delinquency…
The Soloist opens with newspapers thudding onto lawns, a quaint sight that makes the movie practically a period piece, even though the events that inspired it took place within the last four years. An old-fashioned tale for a newfangled world, the movie turns on a series of columns begun in…
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most clichéd genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting and visual beauty. Though, on paper, its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson—their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white middle-class Brooklyn…
Kevin Macdonald’s Washington thriller is a bellows designed to puff up the most beaten-down reporter’s chest. Compressed from the highly regarded BBC miniseries first telecast in 2003, State of Play is an effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer. There are more than a few…
This much is for sure about the makers of the new Zac Efron picture 17 Again: They know their audience. Scientifically engineered for maximum shriek-and-squeal value among Efron’s legion of distaff tween fans (and no small number of lonelyheart cougars and gay men), the movie opens on His Zackness’ sweaty,…
Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill makes mean-spirited tragedies that studios market as inane comedies because otherwise no one would pay a cent to see them. That’s more or less what happened to Hill’s The Foot Fist Way in 2008. Three viewings later, it’s more unclear than ever whether Danny…
Pundits agree: The 2008 election has finally and forever rung down the curtain on America’s longest-running psychodrama, namely the Boomerography, aka the ’60s. The long, strange trip is finally over. Still, a few stories remain to be told or retold. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 marks a particular 40th anniversary—not Richard…
Set a mere two decades ago, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland seems as if it could be taking place on a distant planet, less for the leg warmers and knee socks clinging to lower extremities than for the legions of pre-Internet Luddites who gather, like the apes at the start of 2001,…
With the molded-rubber face of Savalas, the basso profundo of Stallone and the name of an underdog gas alternative, Vin Diesel’s already-dubious ripped-tough-guy star has dimmed enough to warrant a return to the car-chase series that made him—and money. In the latest, notably slack Fast & Furious (number four), incidental…
At the end of 2008, DreamWorks Animation bossman Jeffrey Katzenberg embarked on a cross-country tour, toting 20 minutes’ worth of Monsters vs. Aliens. The reason for his trek? To convince critics that 3-D movies are no longer the snake-oil salesman’s hustle, but the future of filmmaking—if not the very savior…
If I were to spend this space mentioning every AFI Dallas International Film Festival title worth at least a look, there’d be room enough only for a queue of names. So plentiful are this year’s recommended offerings—a majority of the 70-plus features, not to mention even more shorts—that it’s tempting…
