It’s a fact that several of Woody Allen’s movies have found him paired on-screen with women decades his junior (Mira Sorvino, Tiffani Thiessen, Mariel Hemingway, etc.). But with Whatever Works, it appears the 73-year-old filmmaker finally drew the line and elected to pair 21-year-old Evan Rachel Wood with someone closer to her own age.
So he sent in 62-year-old Larry David to pinch-hit.
For Matt Brunson’s full review, click here.
Moviegoers hoping that Public Enemies would have been the film to save the summer season from its own worst impulses will be disappointed to learn that the Michael Mann production, while hardly part of the problem, is certainly no solution. A classy motion picture whose individual moments are greater than the whole, this period gangster saga may be filled with exciting gun battles yet can’t deliver the firepower in ways that matter the most: empathy, originality, and a willingness to burrow beneath the legend.
For Matt Brunson’s Full review, click here.
By Matt Brunson
With a title like Monsters vs. Aliens, the latest animated effort from DreamWorks sounds as if it could match all those Pixar gems in terms of emerging as a toon tale equally likely to entertain the adults as the small fry. After all, what film-lovin’ grownup, specifically one weaned on a steady diet of ’50s fantasy flicks playing all night on late-night TV, could resist a movie guaranteed to be crammed with more inside jokes than anybody could reasonably hope to absorb during the initial viewing?
Unfortunately, Monsters vs. Aliens doesn’t come close to fulfilling what appeared to be its lot in (cinematic) life. Sure, there are plenty of bright colors and wacky characters and slapstick antics to amuse the children, but many adults will, to a degree, be left wanting.
Read the rest of Matt’s review here.
Watch the trailer here:
By Matt Brunson
It’s not that writer-director James Gray makes bad movies. It’s just that it’s difficult to remember anything about the movies he makes — they’re so low-key, they make similarly quiet and brooding pictures look as rambunctious as Transformers by comparison. 2007’s We Own the Night starred Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg and had something to do with bickering brothers on opposite sides of the law. 2000’s The Yards also starred Phoenix and Wahlberg and somehow involved an ex-con with good intentions being dragged back into a life of crime. And all I recall about 1994’s Little Odessa is that, uh, it included actors and buildings and perhaps a few props.
Two Lovers seems as likely as Gray’s previous pictures to fizzle away, Alka-Seltzer-style, until there’s little left but a faint aftertaste. Marginally interesting but not exactly successful, this Brooklyn-set drama casts Phoenix as Leonard Kraditor, who lives with his parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov) after a failed suicide attempt sparked by a romantic fallout. The folks try to steer Leonard into a relationship with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a business associate, but even as Leonard tentatively tries to make a go of it with this insecure woman, he finds himself drawn to his new neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a self-described basketcase who’s having an affair with a married man (Elias Koteas).
Read the rest of Matt’s review here.
Watch the trailer here:
By Matt Brunson
It’s unlikely that Knowing will become a classic YouTube howler like The Wicker Man (go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6i2WRreARo to enjoy the hilarity), but this latest dud starring Nicolas Cage does bring to mind the title of MAD magazine’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind spoof. With its plotline involving extraterrestrials, a kid in potential peril, and a man obsessed with uncovering the truth behind unexplained phenomena, this could easily have been tagged Clod Encounters of the Absurd Kind.
Sober in its intentions but laughable in its execution, Knowing begins promisingly, as a letter written by a little girl in 1959 finds itself, 50 years later, in the hands of John Koestler (Cage), an MIT professor whose wife died in a hotel fire a year earlier and who now must raise his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) by himself. Koestler soon figures out that the piece of paper, on which the child scrawled nothing but a lengthy series of numbers, actually foretold all the major disasters of the past five decades (well, all the disasters that resulted in deaths, as it appears the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were not included). The problem is that three of the prophesied disasters have yet to occur, leaving Koestler in the unenviable position of trying to figure out how to stop large-scale tragedies from taking place. Meanwhile, a group of shadowy figures spend their time trailing young Caleb; they’re meant to appear menacing, but that’s hard to accomplish when they basically all look like Sting impersonators.
Read the rest of Matt’s review here.
Watch the trailer here:
By Jill Jacobs
For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Ben Folds is playing Ovens Auditorium this Sunday! Here’s a little preview of what this North Carolinian sounds like in concert. Sham on.
