Kino

Starring:
Omar Benson Miller, Michael Ealy, Derek Luke, Laz Alonso
Review:
Critics are raining down hard on Spike Lee’s first war epic. And
it’s not like I don’t have objections. Miracle at St. Anna
is too long, lazily constructed, and crammed with too many
characters and subplots for any director to develop fully outside
of an HBO miniseries. But Lee […]

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Starring:
Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan
Review:
Questions: Did everyone involved in this botched thriller OD on
speed? Does jimmy-legs director D.J. Caruso think if he slowed down
the action we’d figure out how stupid the plot is? Did Shia LaBeouf
and Michelle Monaghan think there was any acting involved in
playing characters on the run from a computer intent on […]

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Starring:
Dakota Fanning, Piper Laurie, David Morse, Robin Wright-Penn,
Jil…
Review:
This ain’t the old Dakota Fanning rape movie they showed at
Sundance nearly two years ago to a rain of critical revulsion. This
is the re-edited Dakota Fanning rape movie that re-emerges as an
even riper piece of cheese. Fanning, then 12, plays Lewellen,
toughing it out in 1950s Alabama […]

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Starring:
Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson
Review:
The main problem with this treatise on racial politics
undercover as an exercise in suspense is that the director, Neil
LaBute, didn’t write the script. LaBute is an incendiary playwright
(Bash, The Mercy Seat, Fat Pig) who puts us in the company
of misogynist men who slowly reveal their base instincts.
Lakeview Terrace, written […]

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Starring:
Ricky Gervais, Tea Leoni
Review:
The fall movie season achieves comic liftoff thanks to Ricky
Gervais, a master of deadpan hilarity playing a dentist who sees
dead people. If you don’t know Gervais from the original Brit TV
version of The Office or HBO’s Extras, then you
are an idiot and deserve root-canal surgery without Novocain. Wait,
I’m starting to […]

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Starring:
Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, John Leguizamo, Donnie Wahlberg, 50
Ce…
Review:
Some people think Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would be a kick to
watch just reading a phone book. Well, bring on that phone book.
Righteous Kill, a.k.a. The Al and Bob Show, is a cop flick
with all the drama of Law and Order: AARP. […]

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Starring:
Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes
Review:
The trailer makes this costume drama look like a dude’s
nightmare, all hotness buried in yards of lace and crinoline. But
in telling the true (enough) 18th-century story of young Georgiana,
the handful who got stuck marrying the haughty, unfaithful Duke of
Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), the filmmakers plugged in a live wire.
That would be […]

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Starring:
Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, Eva Mendes
Review:
Updating a comedy classic is not a good idea. Case in point:
this misbegotten redo of Clare Booth Luce’s 1936 play (and 1939
movie) about pampered Manhattan women who gossip about men who are
never seen. Think Sex and the City without the sex.
Murphy Brown creator Diane English has […]

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Starring:
Aaron Eckhart, Summer Bishil
Review:
Yes, that Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of
American Beauty, the creator of HBO’s Six Feet
Under and now True Blood, a sizzling new series about
contemporary vampires getting by on synthetic red stuff. Ball,
bless him, goes for the real jugular. Towelhead, adapted
from Alicia Erian’s novel, is Ball’s debut as a feature director.
And […]

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Starring:
Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, Jeremy Irons
Review:
Ed Harris rides tall in the saddle as director, co-writer,
co-producer and star of this terrific Western, a potently acted
powerhouse that sticks in the mind and the heart. The source
material is a 2005 book by Robert B. Parker, best known for his
Spenser crime novels. Harris is best […]

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