Nymphomaniac Review

whispers B (Sophie Kennedy Clark), best girlfriend to the highly sex-driven Joe (Stacy Martin). B is serious. Joe knows it’s a joke. As they traipse through their late adolescence having as much as sex as possible with willing men, a project that’s part camaraderie and occasionally a contest for the young women, B eventually falls away from Joe when sentimentality enters the realm of their non-stop conquest agenda. And Joe’s fine with this. She’s got more men to hunt down and subdue.

Adult Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) narrates this story after she’s found lying unconscious and bleeding in an alley by meek, intellectual Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard). He brings her home to his book-filled yet otherwise drab flat, gives her a cup of tea, puts her to bed to recover, then listens to her recount her development, from childhood to present injured state, as an unmediated "nymphomaniac." While she recounts the way sex has informed her philosophy, numbed her body, damaged her family, compensated her and pushed her past the diagnoses and interventions of outsiders, Seligman interrupts Joe to digress on analogous subjects like fly-fishing, musical theories of dissonance, Fibonacci numbers, the great East-West schism in the medieval Christian Church, weaponry, blasphemy and celibacy. He’s both the best and worst listener a compulsively sexual storyteller could ask for.

Joe’s men (Shia LaBeouf, Hugo Speer) come and go. A scorned wife (the monstrously wild Uma Thurman) crashes into it all for a quick minute to provide her three young sons with a good look at Joe’s

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier Review

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Ninetysomething and still faster than you, Steve Rogers/Captain America nevertheless encounters challenges specific to his unique circumstance. He’s adjusting to contemporary life by keeping a handwritten list of the American pop culture he missed during his Rip Van Winkle years.

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Dom Hemingway Review

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We meet master safecracker Dom Hemingway (Jude Law, beefed up and balding) naked, standing in a prison cell doorway, receiving sexual attention from another inmate. During this jailhouse power exchange, Dom motormouths the first of a film’s worth of ornate monologues, profane crime-speeches that feel like Guy Ritchie crashing an episode of Gilmore Girls. This particular rant is about the majesty of his own penis and it’s almost funny, much like Dom himself. Almost immediately afterward, Dom gets out of prison and, first order of business, sets about maiming the man who married his wife while he sat twelve years in the joint for not giving up his extremely dangerous boss (Demian Bechir, playing Russian, weirdly enough).

Over the next 100 minutes or so, writer-director Richard Shepard frames Law Danny Boyle-style, swooping and rushing and slow-motioning and hurling his loutish body through the air in car accidents set to operatic arias. Dom’s a sitcom Bronson, and his story of not-redemption is chopped into episodic chapters that, taken together, form a half-interesting character study of a criminal whose lack of self-awareness, cruelty, alcoholism, regret and cluelessness are matched only by his sheer dumb luck. As mishaps and bad decisions and manslaughters mount, the only shred of evidence that he's a human being and not a cartoon manufactured on a 3D printer is his mopey pining for the lost affection of his now-adult daughter (Emilia Clarke).

The downside to the glimmer of soul: it slows down Dom’s anti-goodness momentum. He’s an unapologetic bad man in a film that wants us to feel, at least when the

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Only Lovers Left Alive Review

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At this exact moment in pop culture history there is nothing more boring than being a vampire -- always tormented and misunderstood, always in a big fight with some other supernatural monster squad, always in love with the wrong non-vampire. Each new media incarnation feels the need to flip the script, forcing the blood-fueled into silly new mythologies about baseball and sunlight, enforcing the rigid code of model-hotness, desperately trying to make enough cultural noise and ignite the attention span of a weary, post-Twilight population.

Unless you’re Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston), that is, vampires under the directorial command of low-key/high-style weirdo Jim Jarmusch. Then everything is awesomer than Legos. Eve’s an impossibly chic jetsetter, turning heads as she stalks through nighttime Tangier. Adam’s a bit of a brooding art-hermit in the most bombed out part of Detroit. Together they’re into books (she can speed read all the languages), vintage guitars (he collects them and creates anonymous underground music highly sought after by sonic nerds), languorous sex, messy hairstyles, scratchy Wanda Jackson records, goofy disco videos on YouTube and sucking on blood popsicles that drop them slow-motionly into narcotic ecstasy. Eve scores

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Draft Day Review

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Will you get this movie's joke about Ryan Leaf? It’s fine if you don’t. I didn’t. I don’t follow football at all. My favorite Super Bowl was the one in 1996 when the Steelers played the Cowboys and I ignored it to go see Michael Mann’s Heat (helpful tip: always pick a dude movie on game day, you'll have the theater to yourself). And I’m from Texas and was living in Dallas at the time, so my resolve, as you can see, was strong. Of course, in all fairness to the Super Bowl, I also ignored the Academy Awards this year to go see an opera, so maybe I’m generally just not a joiner. But I do love North Dallas Forty (because it’s caustic), Big Fan (because Patton Oswalt is kind of heartbreaking in it), and Rudy (because I’m not made of stone).

Anyway, I had to Google poor, broken down Ryan Leaf to get the reference. But it was the only moment during the surprisingly decent Draft Day where I felt myself turn into a confused, head-cocked-to-one-side canine, and that’s good news for non-sport-minded moviegoers. It’s less a football film than a football-ish film, a fan-courting battle of wills starring the suits, scouts and CEOs who really run the show.

A little more than twelve hours are left until the NFL draft and Sonny Weaver (Kevin Costner, taking it easy), the general manager of the Cleveland Browns, is extremely busy. He has a losing streak on his hands and a strong desire to land incoming quarterback Bo Callahan (Josh Pence), the same college superstar every other team wants. Meanwhile, the Browns' own quarterback (Tom Welling) is demanding a chance to prove his worth; solid player Vontae Mack (Chadwick Boseman, 42’s Jackie Robinson) is begging to join the Browns himself; Sonny’s colleague Ali (Jennifer Garner) informs him that she’s pregnant with his baby and Sonny's mother (Ellen Burstyn, dominating her small amount of screen time like she’s trying to win her own Super Bowl ring) picks the worst possible moment to push Sonny into participating in a memorial for his estranged and recently deceased coaching legend father.

Frequently pushing Sonny’s personal life to the margins, director Ivan Reitman and screenwriters Scott Rothman and Rajiv Joseph focus on his desire for a respectable football legacy, as well as the power moves and cutthroat deals behind the draft’s scenes, all of which are infused with a healthy dose of ego from everyone involved. And that means a lot of extended sequences of people talking on the phone. And I mean a lot. To un-boring that less than cinematic situation as best he can, Reitman makes sure that characters are usually walking somewhere as they speak and that the frame is almost constantly wiping back and forth or split into halves and thirds like a masculinist Pillow Talk. You get used to it even if you never stop noticing its gimmicky presence.

Comparisons to the darker, superior Moneyball are inevitable, as are complaints about the film’s eager willingness to sidestep a lot of the uglier corporate aspects of professional sports. But that was never on this story's mind in the first place. It just loves the game. So call it wishful and idealistic and nobody will really mind; it lives in a fan-loving universe where goodness and team spirit are legitimate currency and underdogs get a real shot, kind of like if Rudy grew up to study stats and negotiate salary caps.

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Rio 2 Review

that’s close enough.

A sequel to something like this just needs more stuff packed into it. So more stuff is packed into Rio 2, both the good and the you’ll-never-remember-it. Domesticated book-learnin’ Blu (the voice of Jesse Eisenberg) and his wife Jewel (Anne Hathaway) now have three baby birds of their own, live in a nice house, and know how to make pancake batter as well as how to operate spatulas, which is, I suppose, a step up from a diet of regurgitated worms. Naturally, this sort of suburban comfiness can only generate malaise, and that prompts the entire family to fly back into the wild. There they discover a huge flock of Blue Macaws like themselves, presided over by Jewel’s long lost father (Andy Garcia), a Great Santini-esque alpha male who never misses an opportunity to remind Blu that he’s soft.

The good-hearted, endangered species-minded humans from the last film (Rodrigo Santoro, Leslie Mann) hunt for their "lost" bird-friends, an illegal logging operation (

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Oculus Review

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, are you the mysterious malevolent entity that instigated a cruel spiral of madness, emotional disintegration, torture, murder, gross fingernail stuff, and the populating of our sweet upper middle class home with laser-eyed phantoms, or are you just the repository of transferred childhood psychological trauma and, sincerely, just some old mirror?

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Joe Review

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There are, as you may be aware, two Nicolas Cages. One of them is a respected actor who won an Academy Award. The other, it can be assumed, wants nothing more than to direct and star in a film where Bigfoot and She-Hulk battle a Cambodian drug cartel run by a Satanic coven. Some people consider that a case of divided loyalties at best, career sabotage at worst; I think it’s just the man’s way of keeping his life interesting. In any case, when Cage’s two selves collide you wind up with performances like his unjustly overlooked brilliance in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call

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Heaven Is For Real Review

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When Colton Burpo (played here by cherubic newcomer Connor Corum) was four years old, his appendix ruptured and he nearly died. On the operating table he experienced what he describes as Heaven. Not only did he go there, he met his great grandfather, as well an unnamed sister lost to miscarriage. According to Colton’s father, minister Todd Burpo (Greg Kinnear), who eventually wrote a book about the boy’s experience, Colton couldn’t have possibly known about these things. Whether or not any of this actually happened is something only the Burpo family knows. For the purposes of this review let’s say it’s all true.

Let’s also say that Heaven Is For Real Ministries, as the Burpo’s ongoing business concern is known, one involving the book’s translation into over 30 languages, a traveling show called Heaven Is For Real: LIVE, Sunday School curriculum materials, and merchandise emblazoned with the face of Jesus (painted by Akiane Kramarik, a young Lithuanian girl who experienced a similar near-death visit to Heaven and who now creates portraits of a blue-eyed Son of God in the style of

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Transcendence Review

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It turns out that unregulated technology in the hands of one person will eventually become problematic on a grand scale. And if you thought that handing the unregulated technology over to one-dead-person-turned-artificially-intelligent-phantasm would circumvent human error and power-mad hubris, you were wrong. It will be perfectly unsurprising if you are unsurprised by that news.

Transcendence would like to be the film that refreshes that vintage sci-fi story by laying down some Inception-style mindfreaking. To that end, Oscar-winning Inception (and Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) cinematographer Wally Pfister makes it his directorial debut and flocks the narrative with luxuriously freaky visuals and Johnny Depp as a floating head inside a computer.

Shot with a radioactive bullet by an anti-tech terrorist group, genius computer dude and TED-talker Will Caster (Depp) finds himself slowly dying. His wife and colleague Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) devises a plan to adapt Caster’s research, keeping him "alive" by uploading his brain to a supercomputer. Much like in Spike Jonze's Her (and in the lives of everyone who communicates exclusively via cellphone), Evelyn maintains her marriage via constant interaction with Caster's digital image and a handful of analog symbols of their love (vintage vinyl records, mostly). A true living-deader, Caster can think, access much-needed research funding, eat the entirety of the internet and push medical science forward by helping wounded people regenerate their flesh. He's a secular resurrection story and he comes in peace, just not for long. Those regenerated people aren't fully "there" anymore.

And then everything goes wrong all around. The plot details of that wrongness are better left unspoiled, but Transcendence's turn toward a struggle for the physical and intellectual destiny of all human life spoils itself all the same with internal confusion, an unwillingness to push past sci-fi cliché and a retreat into action-thriller sameness when it’s time to wrap it all up. Whatever the bigger picture was supposed to be, it got smallered, maddeningly so.

Good thing nobody told Rebecca Hall. Read through her character's actions, Transcendence isn’t science fiction at all, but a story of spousal grief, denial and the inability of a surviing partner to mourn and move on. Pfister surrounds her with a frame full of darkness and we become as intimately connected to her pain as we are disconnected from Depp’s checked-out non-performance (in his defense, he is playing a disembodied head with a brain-suitcase full of 110110000111100). She's the heart in a machine that's lost its way. Maybe somebody should try turning it off and turning it back on again.

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RoboCop Review

she told me, which was enough of a review to convince. Then we saw RoboCop. And she was right. It was about something, a not-so-stealth protest film, wrapped in extreme violence and brutal humor, all punk rock qualities. Verhoeven, working from a script by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, rocket-launched movie violence against real-life violence and fake authoritarian stupidity against the birth of creeping, contemporary fascism. He’d seen World War II up close as a child in The Netherlands and those reverberations worked their way into this mainstream Hollywood action movie. 1987’s methodology may seem heavy-handed or dated as seen in the light of 2014, but we still didn’t need a remake.

So here’s the remake. And it’s not necessary. But it’s trying.

The story runs roughly along the same track. An uncorrupted cop (Joel Kinnaman) is destroyed by his job and rebuilt as a robot, becoming a perfect crime-stopper but losing his humanity in the process. He must assert his personhood and regain what soul remains in his new machine body while, at the same time, battling evil criminal and corporate forces against the backdrop of a hellish Detroit. Satirical humor takes a back seat, only rising to the surface thanks to Samuel L. Jackson’s wild-eyed portrayal of a take-no-prisoners, Extreme Patriotism TV pundit.

But early reports of a politics-free RoboReboot were wrong. Director Jose Padilha’s (Elite Squad) strength may be his muscular action sequences, but the Brazilian filmmaker is something more than a hack for hire. Embedded in this update from screenwriter Joshua Zetumer are nods to the insidious, soothing nature of corporate domination, the future-is-now nightmare of drones as street-level

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Winter's Tale Review

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Bad Movies don’t just happen, you know.

Genuine Bad Movies, the kind that endure, take a lot of weirdness and a lot of hard work and mistakes and rigorous attention to making terrible decisions. All of those decisions must be fully and completely wrong and all of them must be perfectly timed. The finished product, if it wants to exist in a longterm state of Bad Movie grace, has no choice but to come about as the result of ineptly calibrated systems of variables and a little bit of anti-magic. Only then can the Bad Movie congeal into a wiggly Jello mold of garbage-flavored pleasure.

Winter’s Tale, the story of a young burglar (Colin Farrell, 38 and playing 21) and his love for an illness-ravaged young heiress (Jessica Brown Findlay, Downton Abbey's doomed Lady Sybil), enacted against a supernatural backdrop of demons, angels and miracles, is almost that kind of Bad Movie. It certainly aims for the anti-magic.

But to explain why it only hits the

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Endless Love Review

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Endless Love was a 1979 Scott Spencer novel with an ironic title. It featured a young couple in love and in trouble who wound up realizing that love was not always, in fact, endless. Then it was a 1981 movie about obsession and late homework and arson and icky family sex voyeurism. It starred Brooke Shields at the height of her teen fame, when hyper-horny late 70s pop culture and designer jeans marketing campaigns collided with the film industry, and together they all used her as a research subject for an experiment in just how far business could push the public into responding, cash-wise, to images of extremely sexualized underage girls. At the same moment it was a Lionel Richie/Diana Ross love duet that celebrated a kind of love not actually depicted in the film, a song that dwarfed its accompanying movie in popularity. It also dwarfed all other songs that had the misfortune to be on the radio at the same time.

Now it’s a movie again, one seemingly based on the song’s lyrics and not the problem-filled original book or film adaptation. Unlike those thorny objects, the song's lyrics leave no room for doubt or wavering or half-feels. They build and build as Ross and Richie one-up each other in a contest of harmonizing, more or less throwing each other into the air like a pair of acrobatic figure skaters who know they can never fall and crash. It’s sonic religious mania, except it’s about losing your secular virginity on a bed made of marshmallows. You’d never know it was the theme song to a movie where the boyfriend deliberately sets the girlfriend’s house on fire just so he can fake-rescue her.

This idiot-child of a remake is committed to a vision of non-awkward adolescent romance and perfect white skin and wavy hairstyles. It corrects all that old creepy stuff and focuses squarely on pretty things behaving prettily. Working-class David (Alex Pettyfer) and rich princess Jade (Gabriella Wilde), young lovers who meet at high school graduation and almost immediately begin making out, spend quite a bit of time stealing away for tasteful, PG-13 humps with one another when they aren’t frolicking at teen parties that seem to center around soft drinks and games involving impromptu dance choreography. It’s a way to spend a summer.

David’s mechanic father (Robert Patrick) is chill about the arrangement; so is Jade’s mother (Joely Richardson), a wet-eyed cheerleader for teen fornication who rarely misses an opportunity to announce how

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About Last Night Review

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The multiple narrative possibilities of the choose-your-own-adventure story is probably not what anyone had in mind for this romantic comedy, which extracts its key components from David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago and the subsequent film version, 1986’s About Last Night, starring Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins. But it’s all here.

On the romantic comedy front, this update keeps it mostly tight. The characters, four single friends in Los Angeles falling in and out of bed and love with each other, are approximately realistic adults who spend their time yakking a blue streak to their best friends -- yet not necessarily to their romantic partners -- and hammering out more complex approaches to relationships than most simple-minded films in this genre ever allow. If it fails to fly at all times it’s because it runs into the same stumbling block seen in movie after movie featuring people in love

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3 Days to Kill Review

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Kevin Costner would like his share of the Neesoning, please, a chance to warm it up with a little late-middle-age movie star heat. Can’t blame him for that. Who wouldn’t want to be the king of Throat Punch February -- or at least the prince -- instead of letting that tall, Irish badass with

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