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Chris Rock's Rock-Star Moment: <i>Top Five</i>, Reviewed
Chris Rock has such a warm, magnetic presence that it's baffling that he has never seemed that comfortable as an actor. Cutting and ferocious as he may be onstage, onscreen he often comes across as timid, like he doesn't belong. (It's telling that when I think of his film career, the first thing t...
Sequel Fatigue: <em>The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1</em>, Reviewed
I've now seen three Hunger Games films, and I feel confident saying that eventually, something is finally going to happen in one of them. There's been no shortage of incidents—action scenes, plot twists, emotional moments—but what's strange about this series is that everything always seems to ...
Despicable Us: <em>Foxcatcher</em>, Reviewed
Foxcatcher is a movie about America, but what makes it so compelling is that you don't realize it at first. Directed by Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball), the film is too subtle—and, frankly, too strange—to explicitly make some simple, overarching, grandiose statement. And yet, when you replay ...
The Superhero Starter Kit: <em>Big Hero 6</em>, Reviewed
If you were trying to turn a kid onto action films for life, you could do a lot worse than starting him or her off with Big Hero 6. So fundamentally familiar that its alternate title might as well be My First Marvel Superhero Movie, it does just about everything you'd expect from an animated ad...
Christopher Nolan's <em>Interstellar</em> Is Half-Unwieldy And Half-Amazing
Two years ago, just as I was about to see The Dark Knight Rises, I wrote a glowing overview of its director's career. A huge fan of Christopher Nolan since his second feature, 2000's Memento, I explained how he had almost single-handedly restored my faith in blockbusters thanks to his Batman films...
Edward Snowden, Before The Storm: <em>Citizenfour</em>, Reviewed
Movies are lots of things, but "important" isn't one of them. It's not that they can't be meaningful and life-changing, but when a critic's praise tries to go beyond that, it raises red flags for me....
Michael Keaton Forever: <em>Birdman</em>, Reviewed
Birdman doesn't have any right being as fantastic as it is. Structured around a gimmick—the whole movie is meant to look like one continuous shot—and featuring a potentially eye-rolling plot device (a has-been actor's personal and professional life comes crashing down on him in the days before...
Bill Murray's Memes Now Outshine His Movies, And <em>St. Vincent</em> Won't Help
What was the last great Bill Murray performance? Maybe Broken Flowers from 2005? Lost in Translation from 2003? Nowadays, some of his best work—or at least the work that gets the most attention—is nowhere near the big screen. He shows up at bachelor parties. He crashes regular folks' engagemen...
Love, Actually: David Fincher's Dark, Thrilling <em>Gone Girl</em>, Reviewed
In early 2011, when David Fincher was getting ready to shoot The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo while in the midst of Oscars promotion for The Social Network, the director made a revealing comment about how he separates his work into two categories: "movies" and "films." To his mind, Fight Club a...
André 3000 Channels Hendrix, Finds Himself In <em>Jimi: All Is By My Side</em>
In the early 2000s, OutKast seemed poised for world-conquering superstardom. But flush with the success of 1998's Aquemini and 2000's Stankonia (and hit singles like "Rosa Parks" and "Ms. Jackson"), the Atlanta hip-hop duo of André 3000 and Big Boi fractured instead. When the double-solo-album...
Family Futile: <em>This Is Where I Leave You</em>, Reviewed
This Is Where I Leave You feels like a social experiment in how much slack we're willing to cut a movie filled with actors we like. There's nothing particularly new or interesting in this umpteenth story about a family coming together after the death of one of their own, and yet the collective g...
Toronto Film Festival 2014: 10 Movies We Can't Wait To See
The Toronto Film Festival, which starts Thursday, is always excellent one-stop shopping for many of the major films hoping to crash the Oscar and best-of-the-year conversations. Beyond the world premieres, it also features the best of what played at Cannes, as well as plenty of films that alread...
Stay Home: Four Great New Indie Movies, Available On Demand
As we've mentioned in the past, Labor Day weekend is one of the worst on the Hollywood calendar. It's when studios dump their duds, knowing full well that everyone is too busy doing one last barbecue before summer ends. So rather than suffering through The November Man or As Above, So Below, w...
The Perfect Imperfect Couple: <em>Love Is Strange</em>, Reviewed
Leo Tolstoy's line "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" could be applied to romantic relationships as well—especially if you're not in a good one. From the outside, a happy marriage can look like an aberration, a fluke, or just dumb luck. Because so muc...
Perfectly Imperfect: Saying Goodbye To Robin Williams
One of the dumbest things the public does is think it "knows" celebrities. Those people we see on our TV or on a movie screen, because they come into our lives and make us laugh and cry—we believe we have some sort of special connection, not to the characters they play, but to the actors themse...
Rock Bland: <em>Hercules</em>, Reviewed
What makes Dwayne Johnson such an appealing movie star is that he's never seemed hung up on being a movie star. Not unlike Jason Statham, he has a twinkle in his eye that suggests he's having way more fun at his job than most of his action-hero brethren. That sense of fun (self-effacing withou...
Nothing Up Woody Allen's Sleeve: <em>Magic In The Moonlight</em>, Reviewed
Magic in the Moonlight is the sort of Woody Allen movie that longtime fans have trouble defending, not because it's terrible or lazy—it's neither—but because it's so painfully familiar. Likeable and completely disposable, his new comedy has its chuckles, but as he gets closer to the 50-feature m...
Big, Dumb, Unsexy: <em>Sex Tape</em>, Reviewed
Sex Tape is such a dumb movie that it's hard to know where to start. So let's try this: Its premise is total nonsense. Married-with-kids couple Jay (Jason Segel) and Annie (Cameron Diaz) decide to spice up their inert love life by filming themselves with Jay's iPad doing every position mentioned...
From <em>Slacker</em> to <em>Boyhood</em>: Ranking Richard Linklater's Movies
Today, Richard Linklater's acclaimed Boyhood (which we love) opens in select cities. (It'll be expanding next week and be practically everywhere by mid-August.) To celebrate, we decided to rank all 16 of the man's commercial features, and what we hope you'll notice is that over a 23-year career, he'...
Great Ape: <em>Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes</em>, Reviewed
Three years ago, expectations for Rise of the Planet of the Apes were understandably low. The director (Rupert Wyatt) wasn't well-known, a lot of people despised the film's star (James Franco) for his Renaissance Man routine, and we all remembered how terrible Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes...