Screen
Why, Steve and Tina, why?
In a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, Steve Carell recalls costar Tina Fey telling him: “I just want to go and do a movie and hang off the end of a car.” This, of course, is the problem with being associated with successful, classy, verbally driven ...
Death or psychosis
You have to let go of the living,” says the funeral director played by Liam Neeson to Anna, the dead schoolteacher in the red slip, played by Christina Ricci, in the new thriller After.Life. He sounds like the stage manager in a particularly grim production of Our ...
Bland, flavorless cheese
Sand dunes at sunset, summer lovin’ (had me a blast!), a third-act medical crisis and a clutch of letters designed to be read aloud in voice-over: Another month, another adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance. This month’s is called The Last Song, starring Miley ...
Wasting time and money
I wanted to enjoy Clash of the Titans. The previews highlighted some terrific special effects and Greek mythology is a fertile field of sweeping sagas, epic stories of men challenging the gods, and strange, amazing creatures. Two problems doomed this otherwise ...
Training in 3-D
How to Train Your Dragon, the latest film from Dreamworks Animation, tells the story of Hiccup ( Jay Baruchel), a young Viking and the only son of village chief, blacksmith and single dad Stoick The Vast (Gerard Butler). Hiccup is attracted to Astrid (America ...
Chloe falls flat
Chloe is a conundrum. Envisioned as a psychosexual thriller about a woman scorned, director Atom Egoyan’s latest puzzle is instead little more than a messy affair with mood lighting, sexy lingerie, heavy breathing and swelling, um, music. Everyone here is dripping ...
Repo this film
Repo Men was awful. Graphic, bloody and with a staggering body count, this is all that’s wrong with Hollywood action films, a glossy sheen on a completely vapid, empty story that works against itself in scene after scene. Then, the worst of all is the surprise ...
Running with it
A rich and surprisingly old-fashioned musical biopic, The Runaways has neither the bloat nor the blather of your average Hollywood treatment of stars on the rise. It’s pungent and quick on its feet, capturing the clubs, the shag-heavy interiors and the Farrahhaired...
Not in the Zone
Matt Damon stars in Green Zone as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who is increasingly frustrated by the pointless missions he’s sent on, finding empty warehouses where intel has pinpointed weapons of mass destruction. Leading the government conspiracy is Clark ...
Temporarily funny
I like Jay Baruchel. He’s the 21st-century Don Knotts, and even in a forgettable film like She’s Out of My League — its title alone secures it a place in film history alongside She’s All That and She’s Out of Control — Baruchel’s adenoidal, sidewinding line ...
Through the looking glass
Lewis Carroll’s immortal story Alice in Wonderland has been brought to the big screen many times, notably 1951’s animated Disney classic. That’s an intimidating challenge, especially for Tim Burton, who generally tackles new stories that can be crafted in his own ...
