Studiocanal
MOVIE REVIEW
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2014)
When looking back of a century’s worth of escapades in a work of art, the temptation is irresistible to put your hero at the center of the action. But a lot of that depends on who your hero is. When you have a lovable, good-hearted dunce like Forrest Gump at the center, you have an international smash hit and the inability to look at a box of chocolates in the same way ever again. But when you have a murdering pyromaniac at the center of your comedy, then unfortunately much, much more than a spoonful of sugar is needed to send that medicine down.
Continue reading “The Strayed Story” »
Roadside Attractions
MOVIE REVIEW
The Skeleton Twins (2014)
Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig‘s comic rapport is the foundation of “The Skeleton Twins,” a bittersweet comedy which lets the two of them bounce off each other for an amiable 90 minutes without actually breaking a sweat — or any new ground, for that matter.
Continue reading “A Dread & Two Noughts” »
Eduardo Moreno/Open Road Films
MOVIE REVIEW
The Green Inferno (2014)
Eli Roth’s latest think piece on international relations is a gleefully nasty culture clash between youthful Western arrogance and a simple tribal lifestyle, somewhere down a crazy river. In “The Green Inferno” a group of handsome white-bread students — naive dim bulbs to a man and led by an out-and-out creep — set about protesting against rain-forest deforestation in the Amazon, and end up on the receiving end of a cannibal holocaust. At first it’s all high-fives and banter and chaining themselves to bulldozers; but then later there’s running and screaming and explosive diarrhea.
Continue reading “Amazon Prime” »
Kerry Brown/Roadside Attractions
MOVIE REVIEW
A Most Wanted Man (2014)
Anton Corbijn and John le Carré apparently got on like a house on fire producing “A Most Wanted Man,” but make an odd-couple pairing. The best le Carré adaptations — assuming you buy that films can capture the author’s Olympian monotony of civil-service espionage in the first place — rely on the innate thrill of a great actor in a bad suit retrieving a folder from a cabinet and returning to the desk. Mr. Corbijn likes to film the rites of tradesmen doing their thing, although for the most part seems keener on the poses they strike while doing so than the dirt under their fingernails. Between them, these two not-quite opposing instincts build a reasonable facsimile of the author’s tale, and then pretty much admire each other to a standstill.
Continue reading “Spies Like Them” »
Radius-TWC
MOVIE REVIEW
Snowpiercer (2014)
Anyone coming to “Snowpiercer” as a fan of Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s graphic novels may be in for an attack of sugar rush. Bong Joon-ho‘s film — less an adaptation than a parallel-universe tribute act — strips out the dour Holocaust-haunted imagery and discursive chat of the original in favor of broad sci-fi pastiche, night-vision axe fights and Tilda Swinton‘s comedy teeth.
The result loses something in translation, but gains a few thousand watts in the caboose. Question much (or any) of the logic behind the last of humankind riding a vast train around an uninhabitable ice-bound Earth, and it crumbles in your hands. Instead the film would prefer you to grasp its grand parable, restated at regular intervals: that political revolution requires the seizing of the proverbial engine car from the gilded layabouts in first class, something Curtis (Chris Evans) and his fellow peasants from the slum carriages at the back of the train set about doing.
Continue reading “Fully Steamed Ahead” »
Anthony Nunez/Open Road Films
MOVIE REVIEW
The Fluffy Movie (2014)
A concert film documenting comedian Gabriel Iglesias’s two-night stand in San Jose, Calif., last year, “The Fluffy Movie” demonstrates just why the oversize top banana has cultivated quite the sizable following worldwide.
Continue reading “No Fluff, Just Laughs” »
Jan Thijs/Sydney Film Festival 2014
MOVIE REVIEW
The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet (2014)
Exactly what a film director is supposed to do with 3-D remains an open question, but "The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet" presents Jean-Pierre Jeunet with an open goal. The charts, diagrams, schematics and unlikely doodads of Reif Larsen's illuminated source novel are freed from their planar life and sent spinning in all directions, direct from the imagination of young Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet — a rare example of the technology perhaps adding something to the inner life of the character. Limiting the 3-D to just those flights of fancy might have made the point more effectively; instead it gets diluted by the usual cavalcade of pollen, protrusions and projectiles threatening to bean you between the eyes.
Continue reading “A Very Long Adolescence” »
Andrew Schwartz/Screen Gems
MOVIE REVIEW
Deliver Us From Evil (2014)
“Inspired by the actual accounts of an N.Y.P.D. sergeant,” “Deliver Us From Evil” draws from the book “Beware the Night” by Ralph Sarchie, here played by Eric Bana. Three Iraq war veterans — driven by horrific impulses apparently unrelated to post-traumatic stress disorder — perpetrate some bizarre crimes in the Bronx.
Continue reading “Infernal Affairs” »
Matt Kennedy/Screen Gems
MOVIE REVIEW
Think Like A Man Too (2014)
Steve Harvey’s 2009 book “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man” served as the dating gospel for characters in its movie adaptation, “Think Like a Man.” While the original cast and crew reunite for the sequel, “Think Like a Man Too,” they no longer seem to practice what Mr. Harvey preached. Oddly, the film is even more by-the-book — just not Mr. Harvey’s — than its predecessor.
Continue reading “Dating Game Over” »
Keith Bernstein/Warner Brothers Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Jersey Boys (2014)
Based on Des McAnuff’s Tony-winning musical about Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, the big-screen adaptation of “Jersey Boys” under the direction of Clint Eastwood seems like the antithesis of Rob Marshall movie musicals. With the meteoric rise, rock-bottom fall and all the fourth-wall breaking, the book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice keeps hinting at its potential as the next “Casino” or “Boogie Nights.” But Mr. Eastwood seems oblivious to these thematic cues, and instead directs it in his typical B-movie low key as seen in “Million Dollar Baby.”
Continue reading “A Fistful of Doo-wops” »