Costume dramas are not my thing. That goes double when they’re staged with an epic sweep — true tests of patience and bladder resolve. So there’s something admirable about directors tackling oft-adapted material with a decidedly different approach, which could account for two such pictures making many a critic’s 2012 best list: Joe Wright’s Anna […]
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The Inbetweeners Movie
Freshly graduated from high school and donning custom-made “Pussay Patrol” T-shirts, the four venture to the coastal Crete town of Malia for two weeks of constant drinking and, with luck, shagging. As uninspired as that setup is, it allows England to prove it can make teen comedies as unfunny as we Americans. As one expects, […]
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Sleep Tight
His only joy in life is waking up next to the beautiful, young Clara (Marta Etura, The Impossible). Too bad she’s not conscious of such a relationship — and quite literally. He abuses his access to apartments by hiding under her bed and waiting for her to fall asleep, whereupon he dons a surgical mask, […]
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Looper
In Looper, writer/director Rian Johnson crams in so many, it initially looks as if this sci-fi actioner might collapse under the weight of them all. Dystopian society, time travel, telekinesis, gangland killings — there are a lot of ground rules to keep track of here, much of them conveyed through the wobbly device of a […]
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Resident Evil: Retribution
After an exposition-filled prologue in which our heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich, Dirty Girl), faces the audience to relay the events of the first four flicks, Retribution goes straight into a shameless rip-off of the much-lauded beginning of 2004’s Dawn of the Dead. This is far from the film’s only act of cribbing; look for direct […]
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This Is 40
Opening Friday, This Is 40 tickles the travails of being rich, white and smug. Maybe a grown-up comedy isn’t in the cards for Apatow, whose best works (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) celebrate arrested adolescence. His latest is a generally messy affair: often uproariously funny, but uneven, overlong, largely improvisational, packed with F-bombs and hobbled […]
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Django Unchained
The result is a brutal, bloody epic that hits theaters on Christmas Day. Happy birthday, Jesus! Paying homage to the Italian Django franchise birthed in 1966, Tarantino delivers what could serve as the origin story of the bounty hunter, if not for his Civil War-era setting and race-reversal casting. Jamie Foxx (Horrible Bosses) is enormously […]
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The Frozen
Mike knows Emma isn’t thrilled about the trip. What he doesn’t know is that she’s just found out she’s pregnant. That’s an issue they can deal with later, however; more pressing is that their snowmobile crashes, leaving them injured and no cell signal to call for help. Plus, it appears they are being followed. It’s […]
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Girls: The Complete First Season
The result, Girls, generated instant millennial buzz — not all of it positive — and Emmy love. It may deal with the lives of four unmarried, 20-something women in New York City, but it’s no Sex and the City, and thank the stars above for that. One of its characters, the shy virgin played by […]
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Lawless
Reteaming with his unlikely Proposition screenwriter, Bad Seeds rocker Nick Cave, Hillcoat again delivers a quasi-Western with this true tale of the Prohibition-era’s bootlegging Bondurant brothers in Virginia, played by Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises), Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) and Shia LaBeouf (the Transformers trilogy). When Lawless begins, the Bondurant boys rule Franklin […]