Water for Elephants (review)

As cornball goes, there’s nothing cornier than running away to join the circus. And that’s why Water for Elephants works so beautifully: It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than an old-fashioned melodrama yarn-spun for as much emotion and tragedy and romance as possible.

Hanna (review)

Joe Wright makes sure his story looks great — and sounds great, with its aurally spectacular Chemical Brothers score — but it’s an empty experience, a Frankenstein story with no heft, indeed with little apparent awareness of the classic tale it is evolved from.

Rubber (review)

A tire develops sentience. And independent mobility. Be afraid. Because it can also kill you with its mind. Yes, it has a mind. And it enjoys killing you with its mind. Be also amused, in a deeply weird, weirdly deep sort of way…

Your Highness (review)

It’s one thing to say that Hollywood scoops up indie filmmakers, chews them up, and spits out McG and Brett Ratner clones, which absolutely happens. But that’s on a whole ’nother level to what it has done to David Gordon Green. Someone took the most glorious bottle of vintage champagne and whipped up Tang mimosas.

Killing Bono (review)

In Dublin in the late 1970s, a bunch of guys who fancied being rock stars even though they couldn’t play a lick of music formed two bands that developed a friendly rivalry. One of those bands went on to become U2. This is the story of the other band.

The Eagle (review)

Lunkhead Channing Tatum as a soldier in Roman-era Britain? Must be processed Hollywood cheese, and hence hootingly entertaining, right? But Tatum acquits himself admirably here, in a film that clearly intends to ensure Hollywood cheese is the last thing that comes to mind…

The Concert (review)

This is how you get your arthouse-averse friends to watch a foreign fil-um: show them The Concert. Yes, they’ll have to read subtitles, but it is just simply crammed with so much Hollywood feel-good that a studio remake is surely just around the corner, probably starring Reese Witherspoon with a French accent and Stanley Tucci pulling a Russian one.

Paul (review)

What if you and your most superbly geeky bestest friend ever met an alien? I mean a real life honest-to-Carl Sagan extry terrestrial. What if? You would plotz. You would. Like Nick Frost’s Clive does here, you would giggle like a loon and then faint, out cold from the sheer splendidness of this happenstance. I know I would.

A Woman Like That (review)

Forget movies about art as you’ve seen them before. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ellen Weissbrod takes a compellingly intimate tack in her look at the convention-busting 17th-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi, creating an extraordinary synthesis that is part art appreciation, part personal diary…

Drive Angry 3D (review)

I’d like to call Drive Angry Ghost Rider 2: Ghost Driver, except that a sequel to Cage’s previous awful example of cinematic demonic road rage is, in fact, already in production, for our sins. I might better call it Con Air Goes to Hell, because of the beautiful — and by beautiful, I mean, of course, vile and reprehensible — way it picks up the gauntlet thrown down by that violently misogynist film and slaps that gauntlet right at the viewer. In 3D!