Thriller Rated R
“…may not be pure Campion, but it’s also the sort of movie only Campion could have made.”
Action/Adventure Rated PG-13
Amazing visuals are put in service of an increasingly convoluted story in this computer-animated adaptation of the popular video game in which a futuristic scientist leads a last stand against invading aliens. The human characters are astonishingly realistic – it’s the spiritual/scientific mumbo jumbo coming out of their mouths that rings false.
Drama Rated R
A slick gangster wants to make a few more big bucks and then get out of the game, but his boss has other ideas. Sound familiar? It’s all too familiar in this British import, despite a high-strung lead performance from Daniel Craig. Director Matthew Vaughn furiously tries to develop his own style here, but it
Forest Whitaker plays Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator whose reign of paranoia and murder haunted the country for most of the 1970s, yet The Last King of Scotland isn’t exactly a biopic. Based on Giles Foden’s novel, the movie depicts Amin through the fictional eyes of a Scottish doctor (James McAvoy) who travels to Africa
Drama Rated PG-13
Written and directed by Susannah Grant (the screenwriter of Erin Brockovich), this is the rare chick flick that defines its heroine on her own terms, not in terms of the husband or boyfriend she wants or has. Appropriately, the movie opens with the loss of a man. After her fiance is killed in a skiing
Action/Adventure Rated R
Hollywood seems to think every eighth-grade class needs its own Pulp Fiction, and so the graduates of 2007 get Smokin’ Aces, a grating exercise in trendy nihilism designed to appeal to the amoral adolescent in all of us. The setup is simple enough to inspire a video game – a bevy of contract killers converge
“…like watching a car compactor at work in a junkyard.
It’s appropriate that Stick It even has a title that sneers, for watching the movie is like spending an hour supervising detention. Missy Peregrym plays a former gymnastics star who has rebelled into the tomboy world of bike tricks. After her latest stunt, a judge orders her to attend a strict gymnastics academy. The gimmick
Haven wants to be one of those interwoven, multiple-plot dramas, but the problem is the movie seems to decide that about halfway through its running time. After spending quite a bit of time following a shady businessman (Bill Paxton) who flees with a bunch of dirty money and his daughter (Agnes Bruckner) to the Cayman
There’s a healthy respect for the craft of writing in this story of a reclusive author (Sean Connery) who mentors an underprivileged but talented teen-ager (Rob Brown) in the Bronx, but things turn arch and silly fast. Director Gus Van Sant gives in to all of the treacly contrivances he avoided in the similarly themed
