Helen Mirren controls the weather in The Tempest, Julie Taymor's gusty, peripatetic screen version of Shakespeare's thunderous play. As Prospera, a female iteration of the original's vengeful wizard, she rules the island to which she was condemned, the sky above it, and the sea that tosses at its shores. Mirren also does her level, ensorcelling best to give ballast to the film's erratic tone by force of will and peerless commitment. She stalks the heath, herds the youngsters, and trades commands for unerring obedience with her wispy spirit, Ariel (Ben Wishaw, nude and denatured). Yet she cannot wrest the film from the meteorological whims of Julie Taymor, princess of the plodding, mistress of mayhem.
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The Tourist is one of those movies that will leave some viewers scratching their heads, wondering why there isn't more action, more snazzy editing, more obvious crackle between its stars, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. But I suspect the people who get The Tourist will simply adore it: It's the kind of espionage caper that doesn't get made anymore, a visually sensuous picture made with tender attention to detail and an elegant, understated sense of humor. In style and construction, its spiritual godfather is Stanley Donen's Charade; thematically, its fairy godmother is Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve. If it were a drink, it would be a Bellini, fizzy and sweet and dry all at the same time.
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Based on events that occurred in the 1970s and stuck in a "women in trouble" time machine set to 1958, Frankie and Alice builds a hothouse frame around the story of a Los Angeles woman whose multiple personalities are funking up her life. A psychiatric procedural directed by Geoffrey Sax, Frankie and Alice also answers the question of how many screenwriters, in 2010, it takes to come up with a line like, "He's so fine I'd f--- him for free!"
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David O. Russell's The Fighter is a movie with a chip on its shoulder. Whenever it should bounce backward, it lunges forward; it jabs instead of feints, and stomps down hard when it needs to dance. Based on the true story of pro-boxer half-brothers Dickie Eklund and Micky Ward, from the working-class town of Lowell, Mass., The Fighter masquerades as an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser in which an underdog makes good, largely by accepting the love and support of his family. There's just one problem: Micky -- the underdog, played by Mark Wahlberg -- has every reason to think the members of his family are clowns and losers, but in the end, the movie won't let him recognize it. Russell sets up a gritty, grimy tale of rivalry and resentment between brothers, only to insist on steering the thing into one big group hug. It's a case of a director either not following his instincts, or not having many to follow in the first place -- it's hard to say which.
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This week's Bad Movie We Love teems with 2010 Oscar bait and the energy of a billion Gleebasers: It's Newsies, mistah! Jawnalism's finest musical! It's got ink on its fingahs! And Christian Bale's undying shame, too. Yes, Mr. Batman, The Fighter's best supporting actor, starred in Disney's 1992 flop about the newsboy strike of 1899 when he was just 18-years-old. He was joined by fellow Oscar buzzee Robert Duvall, Bill Pullman, kiddie legends like Luke Edwards and David Moscow, and -- mysteriously -- Ann-Margret. Read all about it! Costs a penny, yeh maniac.
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Whether the film subsumed the parochial lesson or the parochial lesson ate into the film is hard to say, but either way The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is marked by conflicting and ultimately mutually consuming appetites. The third installment in the series of adaptations of C.S. Lewis' parabolic children's classics plays possum with its themes of Christian good vs. ungodly evil, so that its loosey-goosey conceit is not driving the film -- a sleek effects vehicle, to be sure -- but getting taken for a ride.
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Though based on the Hemingway novel published 25 years after his death, Hemingway's Garden of Eden feels more like the result of an ungodly alliance between Harlequin house writers and the cut-and-paste masterminds at A&E Biography. Hemingway worked on the novel from 1946 until his death, leaving its 200,000 words unpublished. The story is roughly autobiographical, derived in part from to his second marriage (to wealthy Pauline Pfeiffer), but allusions to Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, whom Hemingway reviled, seem to figure as well. As adapted by former Paris Review editor James Scott Linville and directed by John Irwin, The Garden of Eden suggests the bad first novel that Hemingway never wrote. There's a reason This Side Of Paradise never made it to the screen.
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A pain in the ass for someone with a job to do, films that open without screening for critics usually draw one of two responses: 1. Yes, that was probably a wise decision; or 2. Have a little faith, studio chickens! I'm not sure how a system that's pushing Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford's upcoming Cowboys and Aliens would assume that critics won't get a film like The Warrior's Way; it's been a mad, mixed-up genre world for some time now. Yet if writer/director Sngmoo Lee's feature debut isn't the first revisionist udon western, surely it will wind up being close to the only one. A shame, in a way, because I suspect a little company would only confirm that it's also one of the best.
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There's plenty of sweetness at the core of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's bold, bleak little comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, in which Jim Carrey plays a gay con man who meets and falls in love with a sweet Southern boy played by Ewan McGregor -- while the two are in prison, no less. Ficarra and Requa -- the writers of Bad Santa, making their directorial debut -- set an ambitious mark for themselves and don't quite hit it. This is a love story in which one of the partners repeatedly does some really bad stuff, and while it's easy enough to admire him for his ability to get away with it all, it's harder to square the way he so cheerfully dupes innocent people, including his beloved. Posing as a lawyer when you've never even been to college? Bilking the company you work for (and whose employ you entered under false pretenses) out of millions? Whatever happened to just sending flowers?
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All Good Things, Andrew Jarecki's feature follow-up to his dark family scrapbook Capturing the Friedmans, has got a whopper story, two magnetic leads, and a killer case of the directorial bends. Where Friedmans, a documentary, derived athletic momentum from its balance of gold mine material and Jarecki's skillful dedication to ambiguity, All Good Things seems to cast around inside its story of a rebel heir and the bluebloody tragedy his life becomes. It tries on this angle and that tempo, but never finds a confident design for its content or its characters. I want to say it's the kind of thing a director can miss by a millimeter, but Jarecki's telling of the Robert Durst story flails too far off course, too often, to retain the viewer's good faith.
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Darren Aronofsky's ballerina-crackup drama Black Swan opens with a dream sequence in which a wispy-boned young woman twirls and flutters to the strains of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. She dabs at the stage with her dainty pink shoes, the stage lights shining through her all-too-translucent tutu. Suddenly, a figure appears from the darkness -- why, it's a handsome male dancer dressed all in black! He looks really nice, not scary at all, but wouldn't you know it? Suddenly, he turns into a swaggering black swan, flapping his arms all masculine-like and threatening to take our little cygnet -- who we now can see is Natalie Portman -- doggy-style. What ever could this dream mean? One thing's for sure: It ain't about dancing poultry.
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Attention: You will see I Love You, Phillip Morris when it hits theaters Friday. It's a blitz of romantic desperation, flash, and (sigh!) gayness. You must go. To prepare you for Jim Carrey's gloriously shady role as Steven Russell in Phillip Morris, I give you this week's Bad Movie We Love, where Jim Carrey plays the most gloriously shady role of all -- Death in High Strung. Join us as we revisit writer/comedian Steve Oedekerk's low-budget, low-meaning flick, and discuss how Carrey's uncredited part might be his most genius.
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Though it's wrong to think that curmudgeons are more complex than shiny, happy people are, it's probably safe to assume they make more interesting movie characters -- as long as you don't have to live with them. In Barney's Version, Richard J. Lewis's adaptation of Mordecai Richler's novel, Paul Giamatti plays the kind of guy most of us wouldn't want to live with, a grouchy two-bit television exec who's blown through several marriages and who doesn't seem to have much use for anyone. But the modest trick of the performance, and of the movie around it, is that a person who seems wholly unbearable at first ends up being someone we can almost care about. That's the power of art: What does it mean when you find yourself reaching out to a guy you can barely tolerate?
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Set in Philadelphia's summer of 1976, Night Catches Us opens with the sound of Jimmy Carter's voice wending through an urban neighborhood, planting the usual, soft promises as it passes. His vow to give power back to the people is, I imagine, why first-time writer and director Tanya Hamilton pulled that particular clip from the teeming archives: It adds a layer of situational resonance to her story of the last days of the Black Panther movement, before that story even begins.
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Almost two centuries of holiday-friendly goodwill go up in a sun-blotting, smokestack cloud in The Nutcracker in 3-D, the most confounded in the long and miscegenetic line of adaptations of E.T.A. Hoffman's 1816 story. Gone, too, is the considerable rehabilitative capital vested, by the 2007 film Ratatouille, in one of nature's more wretched people: the common sewer rat. This stunning one-two clobber by Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky sent me reeling to the far reaches of my seat. I wasn't alone: During a critical moment in the screening I attended, one girl of about 9 bolted from the front row to find her father, who had chosen to sit at a more adult remove.
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