Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Mia Wasikowska
Review:
Sexual panic is the last thing you’d expect to prod Alice to get
her ass down a rabbit hole. But, hell, this is Tim Burton’s
Alice in Wonderland, not your third-grade teacher’s
version. Scholars of British author Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) will
no doubt shriek, “Off with Burton’s head!” for the liberties he
takes in this 3-D mix of live action and animation. In the script
that Linda Woolverton (The Lion King, Beauty and the
Beast) has woven, often forcibly, from Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, things
have changed — dramatically.
For starters, Alice is no longer seven years old. As played with
feminist fire by Mia Wasikowska (so good as the suicidal,
erotically confused gymnast in HBO’s In Treatment), Alice,
now 19, is her own woman. No way is she…
Rating: 2 Stars
Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle
Review:
Simultaneously full of itself and full of shit, Brooklyn’s
Finest is a cop movie so shallow, dumb, derivative and
infuriating that it feels like a parody of bad cop movies. From the
glaringly obnoxious opening scene of a parked car with its turn
signal blinking, blinking, blinking, to the spray of clichés
that blast the audience without mercy, this movie is the cinematic
equivalent of waterboarding. We’re meant to weep at the tragedy of
three cops out of Brooklyn’s hardscrabble 65th Precinct. Should Sal
(Ethan Hawke) go on the take to support his wife and kids? Will
Eddie (Richard Gere) make it to retirement? Can undercover cop
Tango (Don Cheadle) come in from the cold before getting infected
by hanging with scum? (Wesley Snipes, returning to movies for what?
This!) Blood is splattered,…
Rating: 0 Stars
Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup
Review:
Oscar-nominated as Best Foreign Language Film from France, A
Prophet is a prison film like The Godfather is a
gangster film. Meaning this knockout punch of a thriller surpasses
its trappings to speak in a universal language about the ways power
corrupts the human condition. Newcomer Tahar Rahim is astounding as
Malik, 19, an illiterate Arab who begins serving six years by
bootlicking César (Niels Arestrup), an imprisoned Corsican
crime boss. César tests Mailk by forcing him to kill a
fellow Muslim prisoner. Arestrup is altogether remarkable as a Dr.
Frankenstein outmaneuvered by the monster he helps to create.
Director Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped)
scores a triumph of the highest order with the defiant poetry of
his vision. A Prophet is a new crime…
Rating: 4 Stars
Bruce Willis, Tracy Morgan, Seann William Scott
Review:
Kevin Smith has taken so much stupid heat for being “too fat to
fly” that it would be sweet to report that Cop Out is a
return to form for the writer-director of Clerks,
Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike
Back. But Smith didn’t even write this hit-and-miss gag
machine. (
Peter Travers reviews Cop Out in his weekly video podcast,
“At the Movies With Peter Travers.”) The credit goes to the
Cullen brothers, Robb and Mark. Smith directs, that’s it, and
oversees a fun rapport between Bruce Willis and comedy MVP Tracy
Morgan as NYPD partners trying to track down an invaluable baseball
card before getting killed by Mexicans and annoyed to death by a
stoner burglar (Seann William Scott). An early scene of Morgan
scaring a perp with tough dialogue from movies reminded me of
primo…
Rating: 2 Stars
Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Catrall
Review:
In the craptacular month of February, when Hollywood typically
drowns us in all-star drool like
Valentine?s Day, it?s indecent luck having two films
in play directed by indisputable masters. First Scorsese?s
Shutter Island, and now Roman Polanski?s The Ghost
Writer. The Polish director, currently under house arrest in
Switzerland awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. for having
unlawful sex with a minor in 1977, is in deep doo-doo. But not, in
this critic?s view, as a filmmaker. The Ghost Writer,
based on the Robert Harris bestseller, shows Polanski in brilliant
command of a political thriller that ties you up in knots of
tension while zinging politics and showbiz like two sides of the
same toxic coin.
Polanski, who won a 2002 Oscar for the Holocaust-themed The
Pianist,…
Rating: 3 Stars
Leonardo DiCaprio, Michelle Williams, Mark Ruffalo
Review:
Martin Scorsese makes movies as if his life depends on it, never
skimping on ferocity and feeling. From Mean Streets to
The Departed, Scorsese?s crime films turn the genre on its
empty head, shaking out the clichés to uncover the violence
of the mind. His latest, Shutter Island, sizzles with so
much nerve-frying suspense that it?s hot to the touch. The time is
1954. The place is Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane,
located off Boston Harbor on a remote island that?s locked as tight
as Alcatraz. A Category 5 hurricane is brewing as U.S. Marshal
Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner, Chuck Aule (Mark
Ruffalo), ferry in to capture Rachel Solando, a killer of her own
children who?s escaped from her cell. The Gothic terror kicks in
when the storm literally breaks down…
Rating: 3 Stars
Anthony Hopkins, Benicio Del Toro
Review:
No fun either. And no real scares, which is more unforgivable. All
the attention to technical detail (Rick Baker’s makeup is aces)
results in some graphic and gory transformation scenes as Benicio
Del Toro gets bitten by a werewolf (no, not Taylor Lautner) while
walking under a full moon and grows more hair than he did in
Che. But the pacing is decidedly drag-ass. The 1941 film
version with the great Lon Chaney, Jr. keeps things moving over a
zippy 70 minutes. Rent it and see, you can thank me later. This
remake drags its ass over 105 minutes. And for what? Things take a
turn for the pompous when we learn that Del Toro’s Lawrence Talbot
has returned home to Victorian England to play Hamlet — of
all things — on the stage. The Wolfman isn’t
Shakespeare, and it damn well…
Rating: 1 Stars
Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick
De…
Review:
Just because Sunday is February 14th, don’t let Cupid suck you
into crass commercialism disguised as a romantic comedy.
Valentine’s Day is a date movie from hell. How did
director Garry Marshall persuade a big name cast to stuff
themselves into this box of rancid heart-shaped chocolates? I can
hear him now on his cell to his Pretty Woman star Julia
Roberts: “Look, kid, it’s easy money. You don’t have to work more
than a day or two. There are so many big names in this thing the
audience will forget if you suck in it.”
Some of us won’t. What? You think these overpaid actors did it
for their art. Or, my favorite feeble excuse for selling out, “I
want to make people feel good in a feel bad world.” Ah, people!
There’s nothing wrong with lifting spirits, except Valentine’s
Day has…
Rating: 1 Stars
Review:
The title dares to evoke From Russia With Love, one of
the best Bond movies ever. From Paris With Love isn’t
among the best of anything, but it definitely corners the market on
the worst. Staring John Travolta with shaved head and badass
attitude left over from The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, this
clanking bore of a movie teams Travolta’s gun-crazy CIA agent with
Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ tight-assed desk jockey who wants in on the
special ops action.
Peter Travers reviews From Paris with Love in his weekly
video podcast, “At the Movies With Peter Travers.”
Director Pierre Morel tries to duplicate the B-movie tension he
instilled in last year’s Taken with Liam Neeson going
medieval on the nether regions of bad guys hellbent on selling his
daughter into white slavery….
Rating: 1 Stars
Review:
This shameless tearjerker is Hollywood’s alternative assault on
Super Bowl weekend. Translation: While guys grunt and stuff their
faces in front of large-screen TVs, women will line up to luxuriate
in a bubblebath made from essence of Nicholas Sparks. You know who
Sparks is, the guy who writes bestselling weepies that become
appalling movies, such as The Notebook, Message in a
Bottle and Nights in Rodanthe. The newest Sparks is
Dear John, about soldier John (Channing Tatum), on leave
from Special Forces to visit his hermit, coin-collecting dad
(Richard Jenkins) in South Carolina.
Peter Travers reviews Dear John in his weekly video
podcast, “At the Movies With Peter Travers.”
Of course John meets a girl, she’s Savannah and played by the
lovely Amanda Seyfried. To…
Rating: 1 Stars