CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE is everything that the perfect bromance flick should be, starting with the improbable but undeniable chemistry between stars Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson. Add a script that shows them off to best effect, with its wicked sense of the absurdity and suspense of the situations in which these two find themselves, and what… Read More »
EXTRACT
There is a poetic, if not necessarily gentle, justice to Mike Judges paean to the working man and woman, EXTRACT. Not all of them are smart, but they all have an affinity for their chosen field, and a willingness to go all the way to achieve their respective dreams. Its bedrock American values skewed through… Read More »
COUPLES RETREAT
You cant fault people for wanting to take a trip to French Polynesia on someone elses dime. The water is so very blue, the sunsets are so very spectacular, the palms swaying the trade winds are so very alluring. And yet, as Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn sat down to write the screenplay set there,… Read More »
HORRIBLE BOSSES
Some men are born great, some men have greatness thrust upon them. Nick, Kurt, and Dale (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day), the three schlubs at the center of HORRIBLE BOSSES fall in the latter category. Sort of. As the heroes of a subversively prescient black comedy, they are the quintessential little guys rendered… Read More »
IDENTITY THIEF
Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman are two of the funniest people on the planet. Theirs is the comedic version of perfect pitch, be it broad slapstick, or subtle irony, they take a line or a situation and wring from it every possibility for guffaws, chuckles, and even chortles. So why, when you have these two… Read More »
THE KINGDOM
THE KINGDOM wants to be SYRIANA by way of BLACK HAWK DOWN, but by earnestly following those templates, it renders itself an unsatisfying pastiche that has neither conviction nor surprise, much less the pervasive sense of uncertainty for which it so desperately strives. Instead, it comes across as schmaltzy, predictable, and insidiously imperialistic. It’s the… Read More »
MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM
In MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM we discover that neither bright and shiny sets nor silly socks a fun film makes. Sprung from the sadly underfevered imagination of Zach Helm (STRANGER THAN FICTION), this fable is like something imagined by Turgenev during what would have been even for him one of his more bleak interludes. The plot… Read More »
THE SWITCH
THE SWITCH, based on the short story Baster by Jeffrey Eugenides, is a quiet comedy that is also an introspective mood piece about Wally (Jason Bateman) an inadvertently funny, introspective and somewhat moody man. Speaking to a particular pocket of time, the first decade of the 21st century, and a particular place, New York City,… Read More »