Starring:
George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick
Review:
People I meet always ask if there is something wonderful to see
at the movies. Now I have an answer. See Up in the Air, a
transporting comedy from slump-resistant director Jason Reitman
(Thank You for Smoking, Juno) that jet-fuels the
Oscar race, rattles with romantic turbulence, rumbles with the
terror of living […]

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Starring:
Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell, Faizon Love, Jean Reno
Review:
A toddler pees at the start of the mirthless mess that is
Couples Retreat and poops just before the end credits
roll. How fitting. You too will want to speedily flush this comic
waste matter from your memory. Could Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau,
swingers forever in my comedy universe, […]

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Starring:
Paul Giamatti, David Strathairn
Review:
You’ll laugh till it hurts at Cold Souls, a comedy of
shocking gravity starring Paul Giamatti as a neurotic actor named
Paul Giamatti. He is rehearsing Uncle Vanya and feeling
the weight of Chekhov’s Russian sorrow. Then he sees an ad in
The New Yorker: Visit Dr. Flintstein (a serenely crazed
David Strathairn), and your […]

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Starring:
Sacha Baron Cohen
Review:
There is so much homo heat in Brüno that it could
turn Brad Pitt gay, maybe even Santa Claus. But I digress. After
bringing Borat to the screen in 2006 to mock the ignorant,
racist, misogynist, gun-loving, warmongering heart of America,
Sacha Baron Cohen returns with Brüno to mock the
shallow, consumerist, attention-craving, celeb-worshipping,
gay-fearing heart of […]

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Starring:
Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson
Review:
Not everything works in Woody Allen?s first New York–based
movie in five years (he?s gone European). Whatever Works
feels like something out of time and, worse, out of step. Hell,
Allen wrote the script back in the 1970s for Zero Mostel. The
grumpy old Jew at the center of this comedy […]

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Starring:
Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes
Review:
The elegant barbed wit of Noel Coward bubbling up in a time of
Wolverine grunts. I must be dreaming. But here it is, a 1920s-era
comedy of bad manners done by experts. Jessica Biel is funny and
touching as Larita, an American auto racer catching hell from the
snob Brit parents (Colin Firth and […]

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Starring:
Jennifer Aniston
Review:
It takes half an hour — forever in movie time — for
this relationship comedy to get going. But when it does, Jennifer
Aniston, as a corporate type who buys ghastly motel art, and Steve
Zahn, as the night manager at his parents’ Arizona motor inn, do
quiet wonders. Smarting from her split from a yogurt […]

Continue reading " Management "

Starring:
Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Dolores Heredia, Armando
Hernande…
Review:
Soccer provides the backdrop for this rowdy, ramshackle comedy
about two brothers — Gael García Bernal and Diego
Luna, reunited after the terrific Y Tu Mamá
También — who find themselves (cliché No.
1) opponents on the playing field. Beto (Luna) and Tato
(García Bernal) work on a banana plantation in […]

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Starring:
Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Lacey Chabert, Michael
Doug…
Review:
Look, I wouldn’t mind a comic desecreation of Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol, as long as the darned thing was funny.
Hell, Bill Murray hit that mark twenty years ago in
Scrooged. But Ghosts of Girlfriends Past never
comes as close as spitting distance to a laugh. Matthew
McConaughey, who hit a […]

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