To say that That's My Boy is a step up from the recent output of Adam Sandler and his company Happy Madison Productions really is to suggest only that the film isn't likely to be screened as some sort of new Guantanamo interrogation technique. Jack and Jill, Zookeeper, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star — these movies aren't merely bad, they're sandpaper-on-skin excruciating, unfunny to the point of inspiring hostility toward whoever's chosen to make them. Sandler, once upon a time, was king of a winning kind of anarchic, gleeful stupidity — Billy Madison holds up so well (seriously, it does) because it feels like it's just every idiotic gag that he and his buddies could come up with while crowded around a table littered with bongs and beer cans, crammed into an hour and a half. These late features have an undercurrent of misanthropy — their silliness isn't inclusive, its confrontational and unpleasant, as if it was a chore to have to be bothered to actually make the movie in order to get everyone paid.
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Both of the trailers that preceded the screening I attended of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted featured burps as punchlines. Like, each one built to and then peaked with a bug-eyed animated creature’s belch. After the first burp the little kids a few rows ahead of me erupted in jubilant, little kid laughter; the second was met with bored silence. If even your short-limbed target audience doesn’t like being played for a chump, how to keep them entertained across two previews, much less two sequels?
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Dark Horse is a romance and a comedy in the way that Titanic is a movie about a boat trip. The latest film from Todd Solondz, that auteur of misery masquerading as humor, Dark Horse is about a 35-year-old named Abe (Jordan Gelber, who's halfway between Jeff Garlin and Vincent D'Onofrio) who still lives at home with his parents (Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow) and works at the real estate development office his dad owns. With his receding hairline and paunch, Abe is an undeniably aging guy existing in a limbo of arrested development -- he's a man-child, but in a creepily realized way, a corpulent adult acting like a teenager, looking painfully out of place in his T-shirts and childhood bedroom adorned with action figures.
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Aubrey Plaza might just be the anti-manic pixie dream girl, the gloriously glowering inverse of that giddy, whimsical creation who lives only in the movies, where she waits her whole life for a morose protagonist to charm and rescue. Plaza, with her indie rock Wednesday Addams vibe and remorseless deadpan, never seems like she's there to coax someone else into enjoying life. She's got her own things to worry about, and anyway, why does she need to do you that favor?
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Though he plays one of the great roués of literature – the social climbing, bloomer-dropping hero at the center of Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel – the focus on Robert Pattinson in Bel Ami is notably above the belt. This is certainly true in the literal sense, where first-time directing team Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod lavish attention on Pattinson’s extraordinary face, even get a little lost in it at times. But it also feels like the source of a larger lack – that of the libidinous physicality and charismatic breadth of a well-rounded scoundrel.
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Jane Fonda shows up so infrequently in movies these days that it doesn’t matter if they look potentially good or dismal: Even when the performances (not to mention the movies around them) don’t quite work, Fonda always gives you something to watch. That’s certainly true in Bruce Beresford’s Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, an aimless if good-natured picture that casts Fonda in the role of a Woodstock-dwelling, ugly-art-making hippie-dippie mom who welcomes her estranged and very uptight daughter – played by Catherine Keener – back into her mother-earth arms. Her goal: To get her offspring, and her offspring’s offspring, to loosen up and start getting it on.
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People with a strong sartorial sense know the difference between what’s elegant and what’s merely elaborate. It’s not the same in the movie world, where big and overcomplicated is so often mistaken for better, when really it’s only...big and overcomplicated. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, designed as a sort-of prequel to the director’s 1979 terror-in-space aria Alien, is elaborate all right. But it’s imaginative only in a stiff, expensive way. Scott vests the movie with an admirable degree of integrity – it doesn’t feel like a cheap grab for our moviegoing dollars – but it doesn’t inspire anything so vital as wonder or fear, either. Prometheus has been one of the most anticipated pictures of the summer, but its lackluster payoff is summed up perfectly by one of its chief characters, a scientist who travels a long way from Earth in the hope of meeting the allegedly superior beings who created us humans: “This place isn’t what we thought it was.”
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Because it didn’t screen for critics, and because of a water-main break in the only New York theater showing the film today, it took me three tries to see John Gulager’s Piranha 3DD. That means I had to walk up to the ticket booth and say “One for Piranha 3DD, please” exactly 3DD times.
That was three times too many.
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Filmmaker Chris Eyre made his name with his 1998 debut Smoke Signals, a delicate indie adapted from a short story by Sherman Alexie about two young men living on the Coeur D'Alene Indian Reservation who go an a road trip to retrieve the belongings of one's recently deceased estranged father. It was a small, wistful thing that offered a look at characters and a community that don't get a lot of time on screen. Hide Away, Eyre's newest work -- since Smoke Signals he's made four features that have mostly headed to TV — is in the same emotional vein as that first film, but heads away from the rez for a setting that's more figurative and characters that are more generic (by choice, though it's also a problem). It's a slender story of mourning that manages some lovely bits of mood while also being dreary and a little preposterous in its spareness.
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Why can’t heroines just be heroines anymore, instead of micromanaged personalities who may as well have the words “Role Model” tattooed across their foreheads? That’s the fate suffered by poor Kristen Stewart as the warrior princess athlete orphan Christ figure Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman. She’s not just Joan of Arc — she’s Joan of Archetypes.
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High School has such a winning premise that you want to send everyone involved in making it back to the drawing board for a do-over — just take it from the top, folks, and this time everyone actually have a good time.
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If you could distill essence de chat into a few well-chosen pen strokes, you’d end up with something like Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s superb animated adventure A Cat in Paris, a picture whose modest demeanor only underscores how expressive and imaginative it is. This isn’t the kind of big-budget animation we get from the major studios: It’s richness of another sort, a feat of hand-drawn animation that relies on spare but succinct character design and a dazzling sense of perspective — rather than a volley of cultural in-jokes — to tell its story. The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way — its charms have a noirish gleam.
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Although he converted to marry his devoutly Catholic wife in 1926, Graham Greene was famously called to the faith during his time in Mexico, where he exiled himself in 1938, after an over-stimulated review of a Shirley Temple movie threatened him with extradition to the United States on libel charges. It was in Mexico that Greene conceived the first novel in his “Catholic trilogy,” The Power and the Glory, about a priest on the run during the Cristero War.
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The premise of Chernobyl Diaries, in which a group of twentysomething tourists are menaced by malevolent beings while paying a visit to Pripyat, the abandoned Ukrainian town that used to house workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, has been described by some as uncomfortably exploitative of a real-life tragedy. But real-life tragedies bleed through into horror cinema all the time — the genre is frequently a reflection of subconscious dread and anxiety, from the nuclear detonation-born Godzilla menacing a Japan less than a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the monster that attacked New York in Cloverfield, 54 years later, in a wash of imagery reminiscent of 9/11.
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It would be very easy to show up here and report that Men in Black 3 has no reason to exist, that it’s just another threequel that didn’t have to be made. The truth is a little more complicated: Men in Black 3 — which was, like its two predecessors, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld — is neither as much fun as the first picture in the series nor as totally useless as the second. It has an actual story line, one that’s quite moving in places. And it features a bit of casting that’s pure genius. Men in Black 3 is almost good enough to make you care about its existence. And yet not quite.
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