As mild, comforting and vaguely colonial as beans on toast, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel brings together some of Britain's top-shelf acting treasures for a story of late-life awakenings and self-discovery in India. Directed by John Madden (of Shakespeare in Love and, more recently, The Debt), the film is, underneath its surface of warm fuzzies, a precision instrument aimed directly at the heart of its intended, underserved older audience.
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The old-fashioned cancer weeper — a genre that includes pictures like Love Story, Brian’s Song, and the gold standard of chemocathartic melodrama, Terms of Endearment — has been in short supply these days, maybe because nakedly manipulative tearjerking is a hard sell with modern audiences. Jonathan Levine tried to freshen the genre with last year’s 50/50 and pulled it off with reasonably effective results, thanks largely to the unassuming charisma of his star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt: You don’t want to see anyone get cancer, but you particularly don’t want to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt get cancer. You may not want to see Kate Hudson get cancer, either, as her character does in A Little Bit of Heaven. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to like her. The tiniest bit of Hudson’s wrinkly-crinkly cuteness goes a long way, and in A Little Bit of Heaven, watching her waste away becomes slow torture. She’s like an adorbs Camille.
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If you're in the mood for something new to keep you up at night worrying (and who isn't?), Jessica Yu's new documentary Last Call at the Oasis will neatly do the trick of refreshing your sense of impending doom. Aside from times of drought, water never seemed as urgent a problem as climate change, peak oil, deforestation and the other issues on our path to world destruction. But Last Call at the Oasis makes a convincing case that we're on the verge of both Waterworld and large scale Erin Brockovich-style scenarios.
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Casting Kathleen Turner as a small-town mom nominated for “Catholic Woman of the Year” is about as risky as it gets in The Perfect Family, first-time director Anne Renton’s soft-willed religious tolerance parable. The whiskied voice alone makes it sound like Tallulah Bankhead has risen from the dead and crashed the sacristy where Monsignor Murphy (Richard Chamberlain) is laying out his vestments for Sunday Mass. But as the anodyne network drama title suggests, petty ironies are more this movie’s speed.
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The Avengers is less a movie than a novelization of itself, an oversized, self-aware picture designed mostly for effect: That of reliving the experience of a movie you’ve seen before and just can’t get enough of. The picture is broken down into narrative chunks that ultimately don’t tell much of a story – what you get instead is a series of mini-climaxes held together by banter between characters. The idea, maybe, is that people already love Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk and Thor so much — like, so, so much — that all a filmmaker really needs to do is put them all into a big stock pot filled with elaborate set pieces and some knowing dialogue and he’s golden. And maybe, given the heightened-lowered expectations of movie audiences, that really is all he has to do: It's possible to have looked forward to a movie all year, to enjoy watching it, and then to have completely forgotten about it the following week.
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The latest feature to emerge from Britain’s Aardman Productions workshop, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, succeeds in spite of a faint but persistent sense of factory settings and finishes. Following their partnership with Sony Animation for last year’s computer animated Arthur Christmas, Aardman (whose co-founder, Peter Lord, directs here, along with Jeff Newitt) has returned to the stop-motion claymation that helped build the company name. It’s a strange thing, knowing that a movie was literally handmade and still feeling it is vulnerable to the glaze of mass-farmed entertainment.
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It’s hard to say whether Sound of My Voice is a wholly bogus and pretentious indie enterprise or a weirdly compelling bit of low-budget storytelling. Probably it’s a little of both – this is the kind of picture that may often make you snort audibly, even as you’re wondering how the heck it’s going to resolve itself. And ultimately, even if the payoff isn’t quite what it should be, the picture leaves a faint chill in its wake. You probably won’t feel totally shafted for sticking with it – maybe just a little punk’d.
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James McTeigue’s The Raven, a thriller set in Baltimore during the last days of Edgar Allan Poe’s life, is a handsome-looking thing, with fairly grand period costumes and reasonably lavish sets. So much for production values: In every other way the picture is stiff and unyielding, hampered by a clumsy plot and diorama performances. The whole thing has the feel of a second-rate living-history exhibit.
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In movie terms, Jason Statham is a man without a country, an actor who fits so conveniently into a certain kind of movie that almost no one can think of him any other way. Where, oh where, can he go from here? Statham is the go-to guy for action movies that require an appealing, thoughtful protagonist who looks great shirtless, and Boaz Yakin’s Safe is, unfortunately, just more of the same, or perhaps even less of the same. It has neither the Red Bull–fueled crudeness of Crank nor the Frenchified lunatic vitality of the Transporter movies; it’s not even as cheaply entertaining as the generic hit-man retread The Mechanic. Safe shows Statham comfortably treading water, proving all the things he no longer needs to prove – chiefly, that he’s a terrific action performer who moves with more grace than pretty much anyone else in the film world. The picture fails to challenge him. Safe is safer than safe – it’s so relentlessly kinetic that it ends up being dull.
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The Five-Year Engagement begins where a lot of movies would end, with a proposal. Tom (Jason Segel), a chef, is driving to a New Year's Eve party with his girlfriend of a year, Violet (Emily Blunt), a psychology postdoc. He's so visibly nervous that she's worried he's unwell, questioning him until he pulls over to the side of the road, slams down a box containing a ring and confesses that he was going to ask her to marry him that night. He still does, and she still insists on going through with his plan of a surprise rooftop romantic dinner at the restaurant in which he works. That's because Tom and Violet are in love, and they're also nice, down-to-earth, well-intentioned people, qualities that suffuse the film as well, generally for the better but sometimes to its detriment.
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Can a person really be charming enough to get away with murder? Especially if the victim is a super-beeyotch to begin with? That’s the question asked, and almost answered, by Richard Linklater’s Bernie, in which Jack Black plays a Carthage, Texas, assistant funeral-home director who’s so beloved in his community that his fellow citizens are almost willing to look the other way when he breaks the sixth commandment.
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Before IMAX became a way to boost action sequences — Tom Cruise dangling from the tallest building in the world, the Joker's gang rappelling down from a Gotham City high-rise to rob a bank — the outsized format was primarily the domain of nature films like To the Arctic 3D, which aim to dazzle with large-scale shots of mountains and dolphins and Australia and other impressive-looking things. Forty minutes long and narrated by Meryl Streep, To the Arctic uses spoonfuls of cuteness — featuring walruses and caribou, though polar bears are its primary animal stars — to make its fairly grim environmental message go down a little easier.
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Like He's Just Not That Into You and What to Expect When You're Expecting, Think Like a Man is a film adapted from a book that offers advice instead of a story — Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, a bestselling dating guide for women from comedian and TV host Steve Harvey. If the work was actually as life-changing and popular when it was published as the movie suggests, I must have missed all the women fighting each other over copies in the aisles of stores (an actual scene). But despite its cloying genuflections to its source material, Think Like a Man is rowdy and funny and showcases an immensely likable ensemble cast it uses to delineate its war between the sexes.
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Chimpanzees are the putative subject of Chimpanzee, another in a line of Disney documentaries with big, blunt titles (Oceans, Earth, Nature) and very specific stories to tell. This time out, narrator Tim Allen tells us, our tale promises “drama, sadness, and joy in a world you and I may never set eyes on.” That world is the Ivory Coast rainforest, and we’re pretty much looking at it just then, but it becomes clear early on in the beauteous but outrageously martial Chimpanzee that things might not be what they seem.
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Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries is appropriately titled in more ways than one: Groups of the fluttering, flittery creatures make a dramatic appearance in the story, which is adapted from Rachel Klein’s popular young adult novel about a possible vampire stalking unsuspecting adolescents at an all-girls boarding school. And the picture itself is wispy and translucent – it has no weight or body, and in some ways it feels more like a TV pilot than a feature film, barely substantial enough to fill up the big screen. Even so, it offers glancing pleasures of the atmospheric kind – the impact is the equivalent of a filmy cobweb brushing against your cheek. It tickles more than it bites.
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