With a Chéri on top

It figures: Blockbuster season finally yields a movie for adults, and it’s a vignette from a bygone era about the inconstancy of beauty and the dissolution of youth. You can go ahead and assume the irony is deliberate. But even if you try to reframe Chéri as something like a modish cable-network provocation (say, the […]

Capsule Reviews

Brüno (R, 88 minutes) Sacha Baron Cohen brings his flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion correspondent to the American masses. Larry Charles, who also made Cohen’s Borat, directs. Read C-VILLE’s full review here. Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6 Chéri (R, 100 minutes) Read C-VILLE’s full review here. Playing at Vinegar Hill Theatre G-Force (PG, 90 minutes) […]

Brüno whips it good

So there he was, getting whipped by the dominatrix at that redneck swingers party, and suddenly the whole cultural moment was weighing on me, as if this were some perverse sort of movie-comedy apotheosis. The film, like that dominatrix’s breasts, is unmistakably unreal but ominously inflated. It’s unsettling to think that the inflation itself has […]

Capsule Reviews

Angels and Demons (PG-13, 138 minutes) Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) returns to the big screen to pursue another secret society—just replace “Opus Dei” with “The Illuminati.” Can he prevent a deadly terrorist act from devastating the Vatican? Read C-VILLE’s full review here. Playing at Carmike Cinema 6 Away We Go (R, 97 minutes) A stellar […]

Johnny Depp fights the power

On the last night of his life, John Dillinger went to the movies. It was the summer of 1934, and Dillinger, the accomplished bank robber and evasion artist, had just enjoyed a prosperous several months as the raison d’etre for our nascent FBI: He was America’s Public Enemy Number One. The first, that is, and […]

Capsule Reviews

Angels and Demons (PG-13, 138 minutes) Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) returns to the big screen to pursue another secret society—just replace “Opus Dei” with “The Illuminati.” Can he prevent a deadly terrorist act from devastating the Vatican? Playing at Carmike Cinema 6 Away We Go (R, 97 minutes) A stellar cast of understated comics provide […]

Transformers: Robots too big to disguise

With that calamitous stateside civil war between shape-shifting space robots now a couple of years behind him, young Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is off to college. It means leaving behind his protective pet Camaro Bumblebee and his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), to whom Sam swears he’ll stay true, even though neither of them wants to […]

Brothers Bloom: Joyce, jest and ‘jinks

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2005 debut, Brick, dressed high-school melodrama in the garb of film noir, with conspicuously clever results. His new film, The Brothers Bloom, concerns itself with the mechanics of the heist movie, and the deep reserves of fraternal feeling contained therein. It too is clever and conspicuous—and impressively soulful, but only in spite […]

Capsule Reviews

ANGELS AND DEMONS (PG-13, 138 minutes) Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) returns to the big screen to pursue another secret society—just replace “Opus Dei” with “The Illuminati.” Can he prevent a deadly terrorist act from devastating the Vatican? Read C-VILLE’s full review here. Playing at Carmike Cinema 6 THE BROTHERS BLOOM (PG-13, 113 minutes) Adrian Brody […]

A raise for Management!

Writer-director Stephen Belber’s Management is not your average romantic comedy. Well, except that, as not-your-average romantic comedies go, it is sort of average. It is another of those quirky little character studies with more faith in good feeling than in logic, and just enough compassion to suggest that the difference between romance and a restraining […]