Movie Reviews

For a movie based on a fairy tale, Snow White and the Huntsman is kind of grim -- or is that Grimm?

By making Driss and Philippe fully realized characters (the film is based on a true story) with histories and lots to learn about life and each other, The Intouchables manages to escape the trappings of the Magic Negro genre.

The temptation to make lots of marijuana-derived jokes would be a lot stronger if High School, an alleged stoner comedy, were actually funny.

Why, ten years after an underperforming sequel, is there a Men In Black 3? Are there burning questions about agents J (Smith) and K (Tommy Lee Jones) that were left unresolved? Is there an arch-nemesis still on the loose?

More than anything, Men in Black III demonstrates precisely why Will Smith has become one of the world's preeminent box office draws in the time since he first suited up for this series.

I will admit: I tend to have a bias against movies with the number "3" in the title. If there's ever a dead giveaway that all imagination has been sap...

There's a certain giddy airlessness to Anderson's films in general -- and to Moonrise Kingdom in particular. And yet that cinematic hypoxia creates its own kind of high, if you can adjust to the altitude.

The aliens have landed! Yes. Again. This time they've invaded off the coast of Hawaii, so it's just like Pearl Harbor, if the attack on Pearl Harbor had included such devastating weaponry as Giant Exploding Pegs and Hot-Rodding Robot Fireballs.

However, the most important movie to come out this year will not even be considered a Best Picture contender. God Bless America is cinema at its absolute, bloody best.

Based on a true story, The Intouchables is a movie that already has been tarred with the condescending brush of American critics who mischaracterize it as patronizing to the character of Driss.

Battleship succeeds in being big, dumb, and extremely loud, and after The Avengers, we should all be expecting a lot more.

Though billed as a Russian film noir, Elena skimps on the noir, and more's the pity. Instead, it's a disciplined, controlled and ultimately disappointing drama of family tension and murder.

Oh, let's just get it out there: This is a movie about the invention of the vibrator and women seizing the reins of their own pleasure.

Maiwenn Le Besco's Polisse is tough and compelling, a police drama with no real plot but, rather, a snapshot slice-of-life of a group of Paris cops coping with what may be the most demanding assignment on the force.

Sacha Baron Cohen casts a wide net. He seems to have something wildly nasty to say about everyone -- but he always seems to say it with a charming smile. He's an equal-opportunity offender.

Bobcat Goldthwait is mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore. At least, the two main characters of his dark comedy God Bless America won't.

Chaos, confusion and irritation best describe this forced gothic nightmare, based on the vampire soap opera from 1966.

A Bag of Hammers isn't out to change the world. But it does capture the sense of what happens when our world does change, in ways that bigger, more expensive films too seldom achieve.

An antidote to the current state of popular culture and media, God Bless America takes square aim at everything that is crass, craven and crappy on television, radio and everywhere else.

With so much at stake, the studio instinct would be to make The Avengers as big, stupid, and loud as possible. This is called "broadening the appeal," which is a polite term for dumbing a movie down.

The Avengers is veined with wit, even as it offers exactly the kind of action that fanboys and normal movie-goers alike want out of something like this.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is the kind of movie they seldom make anymore -- except in England. When they try to do it in America, you wind up with something like Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve -- or worse.

Sorry Jason Segel, but all of your charm -- and you do have a lot of it -- couldn't save you from the critics this week. Segel's latest rom-com "The F...