The main reason to see People Like Us, about a hotshot who does some growing up after returning home for his father’s funeral, is the performance of Elizabeth Banks as an down-on-her-luck single mother with a lot of baggage, valiantly trudging along until she…
Read More
There’s been a lot of talk about how Magic Mike, the “male stripper movie” based on producer-star Channing Tatum’s early experiences and directed by Steven Soderbergh, won’t play to heterosexual men—and how this may inevitably spell box-office trouble. And from the film’s marketing campaign,…
Read More
Director Timur Bekambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an awkward mash-up of historical fiction, satire and horror, couldn’t be less inspired. “History is made of legends, not men,” we learn in the opening sequences—not exactly apropos for a movie sure to be quickly forgotten. In…
Read More
A strangely affecting film that begins as a broad comedy before settling down into something sweeter, filmmaker Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend at the End of the World, about an unlikely friendship that forms as a meteor hurls toward Earth, has a surprising, beating…
Read More
What a wonderful picture Safety Not Guaranteed turns out to be—to describe it is to reduce it to its rudimentary plot points, but to see it, and witness the sensitivity and sweetness play out onscreen, is a thing of beauty. It’s a movie that…
Read More
Filmmaker Lynn Shelton’s new comic chamber piece, Your Sister’s Sister, has an uncanny ear for the dynamics between adult sisters and a firm grasp on the identity of a young man going through a period of crisis. As in her first feature, Hump Day,…
Read More
As critics we worry so much about plot structure, character development, contrivance, logic—that we sometimes forget that film is primarily a visual medium. When a great-looking film emerges, it’s often derided as style over substance. But it is undeniable that the new adventure, Snow…
Read More
Superbly mounted by director Ridley Scott, the ambitious sci-fi epic Prometheus poses the big questions—origin of the species, science vs. faith and the potential end of Earth—and it’s a hell of a way to spend two hours, inside a smart, visionary, big-budget ride that…
Read More
The Intouchables, about an unlikely friendship between a wealthy quadriplegic and a street-smart young man who becomes his caretaker and friend, won’t surprise anyone in its story of two closed-down souls whose lives take a turn when they are unexpectedly brought together. It’s a…
Read More
The pleasures of seeing a first-rate British cast in a nicely photographed movie about late life rebirth cannot be underestimated. Indeed, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a welcome antidote to the blockbuster summer movie season. As it turns out, audiences are going to…
Read More