Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin
Review:
Is there life after Twilight? Kristen Stewart makes a
decent case in The Runaways. Now Rob Pattinson, her vamp
lover, trades fantasy for reality in Remember Me. (
Peter Travers reviews Remember Me in his weekly video
podcast, “At the Movies With Peter Travers.”) As Tyler, a New
York college boy, the brooding RPatz doesn?t bite. But his movie
does. It?s crudely written by Will Fetters and directed by Allen
Coulter of The Sopranos (WTF?) as a love story between
Tyler and Ally (Lost?s Emilie de Ravin), both with daddy
issues. His (Pierce Brosnan) rules Wall Street, hers (Chris Cooper)
is a cop. It?s all weepy drool until the twist ending, which turns
it shockingly offensive.
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Rating: 1 Stars
Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve
Review:
Who can relate to a nerd who dreams of rubbing his pencil dick
on the private parts of a blonde hot enough to rate a hard 10? My
guess is that audience is pathetically large, which should chart
She’s Out of My League high as a date-movie must for the
loser in all of us. OK, you’ve seen it before. Lots. Maybe when it
was called 10 or Can’t Buy Me Love or Can’t
Hardly Wait or Knocked Up or Superbad or
anything with Michael Cera. Stop me before I name-check again.
She’s Out of My League is a rowdy blast because the spiky
young cast treats the played-out script like virgin territory.
That’s acting!
Peter Travers reviews She’s Out of My League in his weekly
video podcast, “At the Movies With Peter Travers.”
Jay Baruchel, the skinny Canadian actor who scored in…
Rating: 2 Stars
Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear
Review:
How do you make an Iraq War movie that audiences will actually
pay to see? (Don’t holler The Hurt Locker, since all its
Oscar medals never melted into box-office gold.) Matt Damon and
director Paul Greengrass deliver their answer in Green
Zone, taking a nonfiction book, Imperial Life in the
Emerald City, by former Washington Post Baghdad
bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and turning it into a
Bourne movie. Who better? Damon starred as the amnesiac
CIA operative in all three Bourne films, and Greengrass
directed the last two. Expect hand-held cameras tracking Damon as
he runs, fights and chases Bush-era bad guys.
Peter Travers reviews Green Zone in his weekly video
podcast, “At the Movies With Peter Travers.”
Nothing wrong with an ace action thriller. But the book,…
Rating: 2 Stars
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