The Canyons isn’t the worst movie I’ve seen this year. It’s not even the worst movie I’ve seen this summer. It has a pronounced lean-and-hungry look (it was shot in three weeks on a budget of $200,000, much of it
The fact that somebody would spend $185 million to whomp up a big monsters-versus-robots movie of the sort that the old Toho mutant-lizard factory would have tossed off for a few bucks and change 60 years ago is surely a
The Way, Way Back is a sunny wonder, a movie made for virtual pocket change (less than $5 million) that effortlessly out-classes such floundering box-office behemoths as The Lone Ranger and White House Down. The script, by actors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who
Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me has an appealing comic spirit, and it’s a considerable amount of fun, in parts. It concerns four talented but low-level illusionist-hustlers: one card master (Jesse Eisenberg), one mentalist (Woody Harrelson), one daring escape artist (Isla Fisher),
The most surprising thing about Iron Man 3–which is otherwise pretty much what you’d expect, in spades–is its unanticipated sense of finality. The movie plays out like the concluding installment of a standard trilogy, with the story winding down into tidy
Matthew McConaughey’s mid-career resurgence is a glorious thing, and it continues with Mud. Over the past decade, McConaughey has sometimes wasted his talent in dim rom-coms (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, Fool’s Gold) or just coasted
Upstream Color marked the debut of a freshly minted film-school graduate, it might be dismissed as pretentious nonsense. Or maybe not. In any case, Shane Carruth, the 40-year-old Texan who did assemble this strange picture, has never set foot in a
Sitting through Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder is like watching a stranger sorting through a packet of old photographs. To the photographer, the snapshots recall a story. To us they’re disconnected episodes in an unknown narrative. The people we see in them
Danny Boyle’s dreamland psycho-thriller Trance elevates plot-knotting mind games to a delirious new level. It would be wrong to say too much about the story’s ever-deepening complications, and difficult to do so in any case. Let’s just say this: James McAvoy plays Simon, an
The Place Beyond the Pines is a movie in three parts, tracking the lives of a doomed loser and a conflicted cop and contemplating the interlocked fates they pass on to their children. Fortunately–this being a film that runs two hours
When last seen on Hollywood soil, in the 2012 Red Dawn remake, evil North Korean invaders had touched down in Spokane, WA, where they were quickly butt-kicked by a bunch of teenagers. Having learned nothing from that experience, the Norks are now
Sam Raimi’s grand and magical new picture recalls the sense of wonder that movies could once awaken in us. Unlike such recent 3D fantasy riffs as Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Jack the Giant Slayer (which tanked last weekend), Raimi’s Oz the Great
In a big old house deep in the country, the Stoker family is weathering a storm of portents. Dad just died in a puzzling automotive mishap, and now, with mom wandering around with a never-empty glass of wine spot-welded to
As even one of the thugs in the tired, monotonous, and generally unnecessary A Good Day to Die Hard notes, this isn’t the ’80s anymore. And this fifth installment of the Die Hard franchise, which is now 25 years old, has none of the
Warm Bodies suggests what the Twilight films might have been if the Twilight films didn’t, you know, suck. This movie is also a tale of forbidden young interspecies love, but it’s self-aware and funny and really charming. Basically, it’s a reworking of Romeo and Juliet (there’s even
January slouches on with the release of “Gangster Squad,” a bloody revision of the old Warner Bros. crime films of the 1930s. The story begins in 1949 in Los Angeles, a city thick with vice and corruption, where snarling mob
“Amour” has already won the top prize at Cannes, and is now Austria’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars. Here, director Michael Haneke, a master of icy appraisal and the unflinching lockdown shot, closely contemplates an
Over the last 30-odd years, I have somehow managed to remain innocent of all things “Les Misérables.” From its germination in Paris through its conquest of London’s West End, its 16 years on Broadway (plus another two in revival), its
With “Django Unchained,” Quentin Tarantino finally comes of age as a filmmaker. Tarantino’s brilliance as a writer and craftsman have always been clear. But even his last picture, the Holocaust revenge fantasy “Inglourious Basterds,” was overwhelmed by his geeky obsession with vintage
Well, Peter Jackson is no George Lucas, I’m happy to report, and his new Middle-earth prequel is no “Phantom Menace.” But the movie is a disappointment, and not only because it fails to equal the grand achievement of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy
“Deadfall” has most of the elements of a good tricky noir: sex, love, doom, death. But the movie is dogged by intermittent listlessness, and it never quite comes together. About halfway in you can tell that the film itself is doomed.
The concept of organized crime as a dark mirror image of American capitalism was firmly established in “The Godfather” 40 years ago. But it seems to be a hot new idea for writer-director Andrew Dominik, who beats it to death throughout
Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is more than just a rip-roaring boy’s adventure. Much more, unfortunately. The movie is an adaptation of an award-winning 2001 novel by Canadian writer Yann Martel. The core of the story concerns a 17-year-old Indian
Just back from eight months in a mental institution, to which he’d been consigned after pounding a guy he caught nude-showering with his wife, ex-school teacher Pat Solitano has returned home to Philadelphia to discover … that he has no
With “Skyfall,” the transformation of James Bond from the steely womanizer of the old Ian Fleming spy novels and the early Sean Connery movies is complete. Reinvigorated six years ago in the wake of the first two “Bourne” films, with
“The Man with the Iron Fists” probably comes as close as possible to replicating one of the old-school Chinese kung-fu movies that director Robert Diggs loved as a kid. Diggs grew up to become the RZA, leader of the Wu-Tang
For a movie so jammed full of stuff–nearly three hours’ worth of it–“Cloud Atlas” feels oddly empty. Written and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run,” “The International”), the picture is both madly ambitious
It’s surprising that “Paranormal Activity 4” has turned out to be as scary as it is. Five years into this phenomenally profitable franchise, you might expect the picture to be an exhausted joke, wobbling around in “Abbott and Costello Meet
“Seven Psychopaths” is a movie so devilishly well-crafted that it’s nearly consumed by its own brilliance. The writer-director, Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges”), is a master of nasty laughs, and he keeps them coming … and coming. There’s barely
This movie really did creep me out, bless its scabby little head. “Sinister” is a deft assemblage of genre ready mades–haunted house, slasher, found-footage–bound together in an atmosphere of bleak portents that sometimes recalls “The Shining,” among other, admittedly better,
Time-travel movies almost always make your head hurt. Has there ever been a screenwriter who succeeded in battening down all of the genre’s rampant temporal improbabilities? By now, the most efficient way to finesse this in-built problem is simply to
“Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan is a digital refusenik. “I am constantly being asked to justify why I shoot film,” he says in the new documentary “Side by Side.” “But no one is asked to justify shooting digital.” Nolan may
The yowls of indignation that erupted around a screening of “Compliance” at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year–the agitated complaints of rank voyeurism–now seem a little overheated. The picture is unsettling, and sitting through it is sometimes uncomfortable. But
I suppose it could be said that “The Bourne Legacy” isn’t exactly the picture that fans of this billion-dollar franchise were expecting, except that I suspect it actually is. The movie is a predictable letdown. Paul Greengrass, who directed the last two
“Total Recall” is a two-hour-long chase scene that leaves you breathless. I wish I could say that’s a recommendation. Please note that I don’t. The picture is a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, which was likewise an inflation
“The Watch” is a state-of-the-craft Hollywood comedy product, assembled by pros (Seth Rogen is one of its three writers, director Akiva Schaffer is an “SNL” veteran) and stocked with certified funnymen (Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill). The plot is
Groping for shape and substance in the long shadow of ‘The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” is an unexpected disappointment. Nolan, a director of rare intelligence and logistical skill who’s completely at home in the blockbuster idiom,
“Easy Money” is a Swedish thriller thick with drug gangs, double crosses, and desperate men grappling for a way out through the bullet storms that beset them all around. Classic crime stuff, but in this case distinguished by the emotional connections
You’d think the discipline of genre would be a tonic for Oliver Stone, quelling his well-known artistic demons. You’d think. But don’t think that going into “Savages,” Ollie’s oddly off-the-beat new movie. It’s a bloody drug-war story, set in California
Here’s a cool idea for a movie: Teenage dweeb Peter Parker weathers the taunts and pokes of high-school bullies until one day he’s bitten by some kind of magical spider and starts shooting sticky webs out of his hands and
