The plot of The A-Team can be summed up thus: Stuff happens, connected by dialogue. Helicopters explode; human beings are nearly incinerated; trucks burst into flames. "Ha ha! Wow! You blew that thing up!" says Bradley Cooper, or Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, or Sharlto Copley -- or maybe they all say it at once, though that would entail some extra coordination that's probably beyond their grasp. Meanwhile, big-name star Liam Neeson looks on, trying to add some class to the joint, though even he seems to know it's a losing battle.
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For those weaned on the original, watching The Karate Kid's franchise reboot is a little like running into your old crush at a middle-school reunion: Warmly familiar and yet altered enough to warrant a second look, the raw material's all there, it's just been moved around a bit. OK, more than a bit: The Sex and the City ladies follow the money to Abu Dhabi; the Karate kid and his widowed mom follow the jobs -- to China. This necessitates one of the film's most conspicuous and yet least noted swap-outs: In China one practices kung fu, but karate is Japanese, as was the original film's instructor, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita). And yet the title remains, asserting allegiance to brand over narrative logic. It's all the same crap anyway, right?
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In Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's illuminating but not lacerating documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the comic says, "No man has ever told me I look beautiful. They've said, 'You look great, you look terrific.' But never beautiful." Implicit in that bald statement is a sense of longing, the kind of thing you don't expect from a woman with the everyday vocabulary of a sailor on shore leave.
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Igor Stravinsky wrote that he left the Paris theater where the 1913 premiere of his revolutionary work, "The Rite of Spring," was inciting a bourgeoisie riot before it had finished its Prelude; he saw where things were headed. Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, a heady, austere, wholly unmoving account of their rumored affair, adopts the "Rite"'s debut as its own prelude, and its bravura execution offers intimations -- promising and less so -- of what's to come.
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Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is one of those movies -- like last year's inner-city down-a-thon, Precious -- that can't quite make a distinction between profundity and plain old bleakness. The story of a 17-year-old girl in rural Missouri who's desperate to find her ex-con father (he's skipped bail, endangering not just the family's modest house but its very survival), Winter's Bone often feels stiffly self-conscious: Even though it's based on a novel, it has the aura of a gritty documentary, as if Granik distrusted the idea that fiction alone could ever be good enough to get to the truth of human lives.
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In a world more perfect than the one we live in, you'd expect a romantic comedy called Killers to, well, kill -- with charm if nothing else. But the best Killers can manage is a little girly slap; it's so ineffectual and unfocused that after it's over, you're not even sure you watched a movie.
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The first look we get at Clive and Elsa, the rock-and-roll gene cutters at the center of Splice, is from the perspective of the biogenetic blob they have just coaxed from its gloppy, synthetic womb. Their faces are eager and expectant, shining beatifically but intently down on their latest creation: Welcome to the world! What can you do for me? Whether there's a place in that world for these not-found-in-nature experiments is hardly a concern -- "Fred," a partner for the already thriving "Ginger," was born in a lab and meant to stay there, a species created solely to host unique (human) life-saving proteins. That the new parents radiate total confidence in the wisdom of such activity -- even as they are watched in turn by their little monster -- is the first indication of what's in store.
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The big-screen comic adaptation no one was waiting for, Marmaduke has arrived, and all the questions you never had are answered at last: Is Marmaduke still a hilariously big dog? Who exasperates his owners? Will live-action technology be used to render his flatulence in real time? Does he try on bikinis and say "Ack ack ack!"? A creaky comic strip whose mediocrity has become a brand interchangeable with that of fellow syndicate mainstays Family Circus and Cathy, Marmaduke was inexplicably chosen to drive a feature vehicle; at least Garfield had the "talking cat" thing going on. Ah, but lo: Marmaduke speaks! And when that giant, slobbering pup turns to the camera, jowls digitally jiggling, and Owen Wilson's wobbly voice comes out, that final unasked question is put to bed: Will your worst fears be realized? Yes. Yes they will.
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In the unapologetically crude and shamelessly silly Get Him to the Greek, Jonah Hill plays a low-level record-company exec, Aaron Green, assigned to escort washed-up rock English rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) from London to New York and then on to Los Angeles, where this petulant, hard-living has-been will ultimately appear in a big comeback concert. Along the way Aaron will have to suffer a variety of humiliations: He'll be seduced by ambitious, voracious Vegas "entertainers" (much to the chagrin of his long-suffering doctor-in-training girlfriend, played by Elisabeth Moss, left at home); he'll be plied with substances that turn him into a blathering, paranoid idiot; and he'll be forced to hide baggies of narcotics in deep, dark secret places. Ah, the rock-and-roll lifestyle, source of much hilarity and debauchery.
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Long before "glamour" was a word applied all too casually to movie stars and red-carpet gowns, it was a term used to denote an enchantment or spell, a cobwebby thing that could either lull a human being into a woozy dream state or suddenly make him feel fully and bracingly alive. Neil Jordan's modern-day Irish fairy tale Ondine works that kind of glamour, at first offering us the illusion of pure, stolid ordinariness -- to the point of being, quite literally, gray -- only to shift, before our eyes, into something darkly glittering and spectacular. The magic of Ondine is all beneath the surface, a shimmery school of fish that you can never be fully sure you glimpsed, but whose existence you don't for an instant doubt. Maybe all you see is a silvery flash, but that's enough.
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"What do you have to say to the Staten Island community?" a reporter asks accused child murderer Andre Rand about halfway through Cropsey, an absorbing and openly personal look at the function and dysfunction of local legends. "They're the perpetrators of a fraud," Rand replies, before ducking into the armored van that will take him back to Rikers Island. They are the first words he speaks in the film -- a menacing voicemail is his only follow-up -- and they resonate throughout the rest of a documentary that gets a little lost within its own agenda of separating "the facts from the folklore."
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Handsome to look at and driven by a passionate -- if not exactly precise -- political sensibility, Agora is this spring's highest-brow sandal epic, by an Egyptian cubit. Considering its competition is the lumpy Clash of the Titans and this week's video game-inspired Prince of Persia, it's an endorsement earned by a pretty wide margin of default. Director Alejandro Amenábar has chosen the story of Hypatia, a fourth century Greek mathematician, as the subject of his seventh film, and sets it in a marvelous recreation of ancient Alexandria. A dust-and-geometry biopic with blaring modern resonances is a risky move even for Amenábar, who has been drawn to challenges of genre (as with the understated horror picture The Others) and topical material (his lyrical meditation on the right to die, The Sea Inside,) over the course of his still-young career. Unfortunately the one expectation that can be attached to the director -- a gift for elegant, involving stories and consistent, inventive filmmaking -- is obscured by Agora's tendency toward the blandly overwrought.
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Prince of Persia is a maybe-not-so-accurate historical epic based on a video game -- and that's the reason to see it, not stay away from it. By now everyone has seen the pictures of an impossibly buff and buffed Jake Gyllenhaal -- his skin looks as if it's been polished with centuries' worth of walnut oil -- as an ancient Persian warrior. We've all laughed derisively at his brooding stare and anachronistic rock-star tresses. But Gyllenhaal gets the last laugh in Prince of Persia: He's having a great time, he knows he looks awesome and he gets to ride horses. Plus, in the end his character gets the girl, a stunner of a princess named Tamina (though I immediately forgot her name and could henceforth think of her only as Princess Hummina Hummina). If you think you're above Prince of Persia -- and until I saw it, I certainly did -- then it's time to come off your not-so-high horse.
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As I suffered through the nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime of Sex and the City 2, I kept asking myself: What might I have done wrong, in a past life or in this one, that I deserve to have my eyeballs seared by Sarah Jessica Parker's loony desert-princess getups? To suffer the agony of watching four actresses who have previously given me so much pleasure become undone by crap dialogue and, in one case, an overinflated ego? To gaze upon a couple of amazingly well-groomed camels and realize that they have better hairdos than the human movie stars astride them?
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A bisected portrait of two families -- one small and thriving, one sprawling and dysfunctional -- both headed by the same, charming man, The Father of My Children examines the shipwreck of suicide and the grief of those left stranded in its wake. Writer and director Mia Hansen-Løve based the character of Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) on French independent film producer Humbert Balsan, with whom she was briefly acquainted before he committed suicide in 2005. A champion of her first film, All Is Forgiven, the paradox Balsan's death presented -- how could one so artistically vital and outwardly charismatic succumb to self-destruction? -- inspired the 29-year-old director's second, remarkable effort.
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