Peter and Vandy is touching and insightful, a film that understands what that first whoosh of emotion in a relationship feels like -- and how quickly love can change and vanish.
Marshall Fine | Posted 10.06.2009 | Entertainment
When is a sports movie not a sports movie? When it's Tom Hooper's terrific The Damned United, yet another feather in actor Michael Sheen's cap.
Marshall Fine | Posted 10.06.2009 | Entertainment
Trucker is a revelation in terms of the performance Michelle Monaghan gives. Give it a chance and you won't be sorry.
Marshall Fine | Posted 12.02.2009 | Entertainment
There are several big laughs in Zombieland. But, ultimately, director Ruben Fleischer has to honor the horror half of the horror-comedy equation. And that slows the movie down every time.
Marshall Fine | Posted 12.01.2009 | Entertainment
Gervais and his co-writer/director create one premise, then seem to shift to something else - and then to something else again. But the conceptual problems are less troubling than the essential shortage of laughs.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.30.2009 | Entertainment
Though it tells the story of the rise of basketball's already legendary LeBron James, it frames it as part of a larger story about friendship and teamwork.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.29.2009 | Entertainment
Calling Whip It competent is meant as faint praise -- and is barely true. The script might as well have been constructed from the screenwriting equivalent of Legos.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.23.2009 | Entertainment
Clive Owen has never played a character dealing with problems as normal as the ones confronting Joe Warr, the sportswriter at the center of this film, which is based on a true story.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.21.2009 | Entertainment
Blind Date is strong stuff indeed -- a well-written and insightful drama built around two beautifully modulated performances by Stanley Tucci and the always-marvelous Patricia Clarkson.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.18.2009 | Entertainment
Part Parisian travelogue, part Robert Altman film, Cedric Klapisch's Paris is engaging without really being memorable.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.17.2009 | Entertainment
Campion's film Bright Star is about the love of beauty -- particularly the ability of poetry to move the soul -- and about longing.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.16.2009 | Entertainment
Two problems: Cody's script is barely funny -- and what humor there is gets crushed by the heavy-handed direction of Karyn Kusama and the marginal acting skills of Megan Fox.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.15.2009 | Entertainment
Charlize Theron, an actress who knows how to reveal herself without making a big deal of it, delivers an emotionally naked performance. It's a showcase role, but not a showy one.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.10.2009 | Entertainment
The Other Man is a tease of a film, in which a husband discovers his wife's affair and makes a point of meeting his rival. However, it focuses on the hole instead of the doughnut.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.09.2009 | Entertainment
This film is so overheated -- even outlandish -- at times that you can't help but laugh at its histrionics.
Marshall Fine | Posted 11.08.2009 | Entertainment
9 is a computer-animated wonder, an apocalyptic action-thriller that's a little like The Terminator meets WALL-E
Marshall Fine | Posted 10.20.2009 | Entertainment
The story filmmaker Berlinger tells is about the deadly despoiling of the Ecuadorian rain forest by Texaco -- now owned by Chevron -- and Chevron's refusal to accept responsibility for it.
Marshall Fine | Posted 10.19.2009 | Entertainment
As workplace comedies go, Mike Judge's Extract is deceptive: never quite as funny as you wish, yet not without certain comedic pleasures.
Marshall Fine | Posted 09.28.2009 | Entertainment
It's Anna Wintour's world - the rest of us are just accessories.
Marshall Fine | Posted 09.27.2009 | Entertainment
Thanks to Patton Oswalt's soulful, sometimes dim, sometimes scabrous Paul, Big Fan plunges us into the world of the superfan in a unique way.
Marshall Fine | Posted 09.26.2009 | Entertainment
Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock is as unlikely and enjoyable a memento of that long-gone moment in the age of Aquarius as we're likely to find in this 40th anniversary year of the epochal rock festival.
Marshall Fine | Posted 09.24.2009 | Entertainment
Bobcat Goldthwait's writing is brutal and funny, full of awkward pauses and the kind of outrageously off-color banter that can make you gasp at its ruthlessness.
Marshall Fine | Posted 09.21.2009 | Entertainment
I can't decide whether it helps or hurts to go into My One and Only with the knowledge that the teenage character of George Devereaux will eventually grow up to become George Hamilton.
Marshall Fine | Posted 09.19.2009 | Entertainment
Rodriguez isn't happy unless his characters are stumbling face first into mud, falling into water or being pooped on by a pterodactyl.
Marshall Fine | Posted 09.18.2009 | Entertainment
His odyssey takes him to Amsterdam, drugs, sex and the other joys of a rock'n'roll youth in the early 1970s. In the process, he discovers a whole philosophy of life, love and art.
Marshall Fine | Posted 10.08.2009 | Entertainment