Starring:
Jennifer Aniston, Owen Wilson, Almudena Alcazar, Ana Ayora,
Haley...
Review:
From John Grogan's bestseller comes a film about an untrainable
Lab, named after Bob Marley, who teaches Grogan (Owen Wilson) and
his wife (Jennifer Aniston) what matters in life. Watching the
stars try to out-cutesy the mutt is one for the puke bucket.
Rating:
1.5 Stars
Starring:
Review:
A return to the cloying sweetness of Big Daddy
territory for Adam Sandler. He's a hotel maintenance guy who tells
stories to his niece and nephew that sort of come true. The
shortage of wit and the excess of goo can be summed up in Sandler's
line to these children of divorce: "I'm like the stink on your feet
— I'll always be there."
Rating:
1 Star
Starring:
Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Ari Folman, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel
La...
Review:
A potent and profound document of war and its aftermath done as
a cartoon — what's that all about? Watch and learn, cynics,
even if you think animation is strictly for kung-fu pandas and you
know squat about assassinated Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel.
For what's on view in Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir,
submitted for Oscar consideration by Israel as both
foreign-language film and animated feature, is hallucinatory
brilliance in the service of understanding the psychic damage of
war.
Folman, a former Israeli soldier who served during the 1982
Israeli-Lebanese war, has repressed his memories of the invasion of
Beirut — more specifically, the massacre of Palestinian
civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Though the
killings were committed by the Christian...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Starring:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathryn Hahn,
D...
Review:
What does a cult 1961 Richard Yates novel about a 1950s marriage
rotting in the burbs have to say to a new century? Plenty, and hold
on, because the raw and riveting Revolutionary Road hits
you where it hurts. To hear Kate Winslet, as April Wheeler, express
her desire "to be wonderful in the world" is to be reminded of
stifled urges with no expiration date.
Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, as her husband, Frank, could not
be better in the roles of young marrieds who (shades of Mad
Men) move from Manhattan to the suburbs, promising themselves
it's all just temporary. April dreams of taking off for Paris,
where she'll work while Frank pursues his artistic impulses. Add
two kids, thwarted ambitions, adultery — Frank with a
secretary (a vivid Zoe Kazan) and April with a married
neighbor...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Starring:
Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Carice
Va...
Review:
Tom Cruise starring in the fact-based story of a plot to kill
Hitler by Nazi Col. Claus von Stauffenberg sounds like Oscar bait.
It isn't. And the sooner you accept it, the more fun you'll have at
this satisfying B movie. Hearing Cruise's American accent is
jarring at first. But his British co-stars, including Kenneth
Branagh, Tom Wilkinson and Eddie Izzard, don't sound German either.
No worries. X-Men director Bryan Singer and his Usual
Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie will keep you in
the game. Operation Valkyrie referred to a shadow government that
would control Germany in case the Führer (David
Bamber) bit the bullet. Stauffenberg and his cohorts planned to
assassinate Hitler, kick in Valkyrie and forge a truce with the
Allies. Since he lost his left eye in battle, as...
Rating:
2.5 Stars
Starring:
Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes
Review:
Delicate business is being transacted here concerning the nature
of guilt, legal and moral. OK, that should scare off the
action-junkie crowd. Now we can talk. Director Stephen Daldry and
playwright David Hare, collaborators on The Hours, have
done something profoundly right in bringing Bernhard Schlink's
controversial German novel to the screen: They've made it personal.
What if the person you love turns out to be a monster? That
question arises when 15-year-old virgin Michael Berg (David Kross)
starts a summer affair in postwar Berlin with tram conductor Hanna
Schmitz (Kate Winslet). After sex, Michael reads to her from the
works of literary giants, and then this older woman who calls him
Kid disappears.
Eight years later, Michael, now a law student, finds Hanna
again, revealed as a...
Rating:
3 Stars