An American Carol (PG-13, 83 minutes) Director David Zucker of Airplane! fame and Scary Movie 3 infamy helms this tale of a Michael Moore-ish filmmaker (Kevin Farley) who crusades to abolish our July 4 holiday and is visited by spirits who try to persuade him that he’s an idiot. With Jon Voigt as George Washington […]
First, it must be understood that the Nick and Norah, proprietors of this infinite playlist, are of no discernible relation to Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Thin Man, which became a series of six boozily banter-intensive movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy in the ’30s and ’40s. This has be […]
Is it weird that so many fall movies are turning racial charges into high concepts? Gary Fleder’s The Express could be just another college-football drama, except it’s about the first black man to win the Heisman Trophy. Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna could be a standard-issue World War II movie, except it’s about black […]
One thing that may not have occurred to you about the Heimlich Maneuver is that, during a crisis, it is at the very least a reliable way of being held. That’s how Choke’s Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) sees it, anyway. And just because Victor is a fatherless, sex-addicted med school dropout who solicits bankable pity […]
You can take the movie’s title in a number of ways. As spy jargon, of course—an order to protect top secret information by ensuring that no eyes but your own ever will see it. Or as a spectacular critical rebuke, to a document so aggressively disposable that the disposal itself should be aggressive, punitive, scorching. […]
Babylon A.D. (PG-13, 90 minutes) It’s the dystopian future. Michelle Yeoh is a nun looking after a young woman who might have a deadly virus, and Vin Diesel is a mercenary looking after himself. Many explosions may change that. Playing at Carmike Cinema 6 Bangkok Dangerous (R, 110 minutes) Danny and Oxide Pang remake their […]
Admit it: Sometimes it’s hard to know what wave of feminism we’re in. So let’s take a break from trying to figure out whether John McCain’s choice of running mate makes him seem shrewdly progressive or just a degree less insultingly desperate than if he’d attended the RNC in blackface. Let’s step away, once more, […]
Assuming our intelligence can be trusted, the way Traitor came to pass is this: Steve Martin, while in the throes of Bringing Down the House, had an idea for an espionage thriller. (In retrospect, it’s easy to imagine how, during that particular production, his mind might have wandered.) It involved an undercover U.S. military operative […]
Doesn’t it seem like Rainn Wilson’s whole career is derivative? Be honest: It’s really only thanks to his turn as Dwight on “The Office,” a British show borrowed and overplayed by American TV, that you even know who he is. And what is that worth? Wilson finally having earned enough name recognition to score the […]
Tropic Thunder introduces its main characters through fake trailers for the entertainment properties that made them famous: Tugg Speedman (director, co-producer and co-writer Ben Stiller) has been muscling his way through a lobotomized franchise of apocalyptic action flicks; Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an Australian Oscar-magnet method actor much adored for disappearing into his […]