The new Wes Anderson movie is certainly a richer pastiche than anything else you’ll see at the multiplex this season. And in its Andersonian manner, Moonrise Kingdom is a nourishing regressive pleasure, a sort of summer movie for grown-ups. Yes, the manner is mannered, but the intention is noble: to affirm the dignity of escapism […]
Odd that a movie about an arachnoid teenager coming of age and falling in love and doing battle with a lizard-man to save Manhattan should be so forgettable. What to blame but reboot-itis? Sam Raimi’s trilogy of just a few years ago was after all just a numbered series of spider-men, but this new movie […]
The eternal city hosts an aspiring cast that includes Alessandro Tiberi, Roberto Della Casa, and Penélope Cruz in Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love. (Sony Pictures Classics) For some of us, Woody Allen could film the phone book and we’d find pleasure in it: How nice all those listings might look in his signature white-on-black […]
Keira Knightley and Steve Carell have no future in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. (Focus Features) What do we know from movies about the apocalypse? Obviously not very much, or else they wouldn’t keep repeating it. This might suggest some existential panic, but a case could be made that variation on […]
(Paramount Pictures) Obviously pluralism is a high priority for Madagascar 3. Featuring the voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer, Andy Richter, Bryan Cranston, Jessica Chastain, and Martin Short, this is the one about the lion, the zebra, the hippo, and the giraffe, along […]
Michael Fassbender stars in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, an appendage to the sci-fi horror franchise Alien. (Twentieth Century Fox) In 1979, the crew of the space vessel Nostromo came upon a shipwreck, in whose cockpit sat the fossilized corpse of a giant man with his guts blown inside out. What was that all about, the […]
Like so much Christmas crap in the drugstore on the day after Halloween, the summer movie season comes on too early and too strong.
The tale of how Admiral General Aladeen became President Prime Minister Admiral General Aladeen is not one for the ages. As told by The Dictator,
An A-list of golden year actors including (from left) Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, and Bill Nighy round out the cast of the counter-blockbuster, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. (Fox Searchlight) Upon arrival at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, its first guests cannot conceal their disappointment. “You Photoshopped it!” one says, aghast at how shabby […]
Johnny Depp stars in Tim Burton’s over-the-top adaptation of the ’60s supernatural soap opera, “Dark Shadows.” (Photo by Warner Brothers) Even in our dimmest memories of the original “Dark Shadows” TV show, the reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins stands out. He wasn’t a major player at first, but he had a way of chomping at the […]