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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans; Red Cliff

Fri, Nov 20 Listen

This year's prize for clumsiest title goes to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. I wanted to get that out of the way so I could talk about a defining moment in the movie, set in post-Katrina New Orleans -- it's when Nicholas Cage's rogue cop pulls up to a seedy building to make an arrest...Red Cliff, set in China in the twilight of the Han Dynasty, lends new meaning to the notion of Baby on Board when a fearless swordsman plunges into battle with an infant strapped on his back...

2012; Pirate Radio

Fri, Nov 13 Listen

2012 is Roland Emmerich's latest assault on planet Earth and its moviegoers, and it isn't the end of the world: it only feels that way...Pirate Radio follows the form -- when it chooses to follow any form -- of a cat-and-mouse game between the British government, circa 1966, and a crew of deejays beaming round-the-clock rock and roll from a decrepit tanker anchored in the North Sea just outside Britain's territorial waters...

A Christmas Carol; Precious

Fri, Nov 6 Listen

To put it bluntly, and Scroogely, Disney's 3-D animated version of A Christmas Carol is a calamity... In a shockingly beautiful new film called Precious, one of the most telling moments comes toward the end, and it's hardly more than a throwaway -- the heroine glances at a mirror and sees herself...

This Is It; Cirque du Soleil

Fri, Oct 30 Listen

After all the media madness about Michael Jackson over all the years and decades, it comes as bittersweet news that he lives vividly in This Is It... I've checked out two Cirques recently, a movie called Cirque du Freaks and the Cirque du Soleil, which is back in town and playing under a big blue-and-yellow tent next to the Santa Monica Pier...

Amelia

Fri, Oct 23 Listen

I've seen the movie Amelia, and I can tell you that Amelia Earhart is still missing...

Where the Wild Things Are

Fri, Oct 16 Listen

The movie version of Where the Wild Things Are honors the book in every imaginable way...and in ways no one could have imagined until Spike Jonze and his crew came long...

An Education

Fri, Oct 9 Listen

This week brings a thrilling new film called An Education. It's a tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom, and it's thrilling for all sorts of reasons...

The Invention of Lying; Zombieland

Fri, Oct 2 Listen

Nobody doesn't like Ricky Gervais, and his new comedy soars for a while on the wings of a clever premise: it's set in a world where everyone tells the truth. In the spirit of that world, I cannot tell a lie: The Invention of Lying... Zombieland teems with wild-eyed chewers and spewers. They're only lurid wallpaper, though, in an improbably delicious comedy about a quartet of human survivors crossing an America that's been taken over by ravenous hordes...

Capitalism: A Love Story; Coco Before Chanel

Fri, Sep 25 Listen

Michael Moore starts Capitalism: A Love Story with a sequence of secuirty-camera videos showing holdups in progress, and ends it by showing himself, like some vigilante version of the environmental artist Christo, stringing great lengths of yellow crime-scene tape around banks and brokerage houses in Lower Manhattan... Clothes may make the man, but the woman makes the clothes in Coco before Chanel, Anne Fontaine's smart and sumptuous French-language account of the legendary designer during...

Bright Star

Fri, Sep 18 Listen

Bright Star is Jane Campion's dramatization of the love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (aside from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress.) But the effect is exhilarating and deeply pleasurable...

Telluride Film Festival Picks

Fri, Sep 11 Listen

Love at first sight can be as dangerous as it is exciting, and the sme goes for love at first screening. I fell hard and heedlessly for a film called An Education, which happened to be the first of 14 films I managed to see in the course of three movie-besotted days at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend... (Joe also reviews A Prophet, The Last Station, Bright Star and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.)

Funny People; Flame and Citron

Fri, Jul 31 Listen

The people in Judd Apatow's Funny People are painfully unfunny, and remarkable off-putting...In Flame Citron, two melancholy Danes share center stage in the movie, but neither one of them is Hamlet...

(500) Days of Summer; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Fri, Jul 17 Listen

In the preface of (500) Days of Summer, a narrator says, "You should know right up front this is not a love story..." I wrote a mixed revue in the Wall Street Journal for the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince...

Bruno; Soul Power

Fri, Jul 10 Listen

Well, here's the bad news: Brno is no Borat. Here's the worse news: Brno crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously awful to genuinely awful... Period pieces can be marvelous or musty, depending on the period, as well as the piece. Soul Power is marvelous, and no wonder -- among the performers in this concert film are James Brown, B.B King, Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba and Celia Cruz, all at the peak of their powers...

Public Enemies

Fri, Jul 3 Listen

Michael Mann's Public Enemies never lacks for interest, or interesting info. Back in the 1930's, for instance, the FBI was simply called the Bureau of Investigation before being formally federalized...

The Hurt Locker; Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Fri, Jun 26 Listen

The Hurt Locker starts with a quote from the journalist Chris Hedges -- "War is a drug" then makes that case with masterful clarity and phenomenal forceIn Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a National Security Adviser confronts the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime he's a good robot, trying to help us foolish humans defend ourselves against an army of bad Decepticons and says, angrily, "Who are you to pass judgment on us?"

Whatever Works; The Proposal

Fri, Jun 19 Listen

Boris Yellnikoff is the prolix geezer played by Larry David in Woody Allen's Whatever Works. He was once a world-class physicist teaching string theory at Columbia, but the only string he strums now is misanthropy... At one point in The Proposal Sandra Bullock shakes the handlebars of her runaway bicycle and says frantically, "Why are you not stopping? Stop! Stop!" At more than one point in this wheeze of a romantic comedy I wanted to shake her and say...

Imagine That; The Taking of Pelham 123

Fri, Jun 12 Listen

Raise those lowered expectations a bit before you see Eddie Murphy in Imagine That... The Taking of Pelham 123 is Tony Scott's fevered remake of the 1974 thriller about a hijacked subway train...

Land of the Lost; 24 City

Fri, Jun 5 Listen

General Motors may be in a class by itself when it comes to bankruptcy, but so is Land of the Lost. This dramatically, thematically and artistically bankrupt fantasy cost something in the neighborhood of $100 million to make and isn't worth the celluloid it's printed on... Studs Terkel, the late chronicler of American workers and their work, would have loved 24 City. I certainly did, and I hadn't expected to be stirred by an account of Chinese workers and their labors over the course of...

Drag Me to Hell; Departures

Fri, May 29 Listen

The good news -- and there's no bad news -- is that Sam Raimi's horror flick Drag Me to Hell is smart, funny and cringe-worthy for all the right reasons, and up to speed on the mortgage crisis too... Most of the events in Departures flow from a comical misunderstanding. After a Tokyo orchestra is disbanded, a discouraged young cellist, Daigo, looks for a new line or work...

Terminator Salvation; Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

Fri, May 22 Listen

In Terminator Salvation, primal screams come with the bleak territory. Any character of consequence gets to unleash one, and there's plenty to scream about... Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is critic-proof; nothing I might say would have the slightest effect on its commercial fate...

Angels and Demons; Management

Fri, May 15 Listen

Angels and Demons draws a sharp historical distinction between the Illuminati (the bad guys) and the Catholic Church's Preferiti (the good guys), but the movie may leave you feeling like a member of the Stupefiti... Management, a debut feature by Stephen Belber is a sentimental and modestly enjoyable fantasy of mutual need...

Star Trek; Galaxy Quest

Fri, May 8 Listen

Joe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Star Trek. He also mentions Qalaxy Quest, which is just being released on DVD.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine; Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

Fri, May 1 Listen

It's been a while since I've seen anything as unpleasant as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but one sequence sticks out...Does anyone love to watch Matthew McConnaughey act?... If his self-pleasure seems unearned, it's at least appropriate to the character he plays in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a bizarre conflation of chick flick and A Christmas Carol...

The Soloist

Fri, Apr 24 Listen

Every Little Step; State of Play

Fri, Apr 17 Listen

How long has it been since a mo vie left you literally speechless? For me it's been a week. When the lights came up after a screening of Every Little Step, a friend and I turned to each other but we could only gulp and emit small gasps...Sources are as crucial to filmmakers as they are to investigative journalists. In the glossy, ambitious thriller State of Play, Russel Crowe is a powerful presence as Cal McAffrey, a veteran reporter for a newspaper that resembles the Washington Post...

Valentino: The Last Emperor; Adventureland

Fri, Apr 3 Listen

Early in the course of Valentino: The Last Emperor, an interviewer asks the legendary fashion designer whether he ever wanted to be a fireman or a train driver. No, no, Valentino says with amusement, he always dreamed about movie stars, the silver screen, about everything beautiful in the world. Greg Mottola (Superbad) is back, as both writer and director, with Adventureland, an ambitious film that sets the goofiness of extended adolescence against the sadness of being adrift in an adult...

Monsters vs Aliens; Shall We Kiss?

Fri, Mar 27 Listen

One of the retro monsters in DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs Aliens is a scientist with the head of a cockroach. He points to another monster, a blobby blue cyclops called B.O.B., and says haughtily, "As you can see, he has no brain..."Shall We Kiss? gives us storytelling as art. Emmanuel Mouret's romantic drama, in French with English subtitles, is expert, intricate, ineffably droll, surprisingly provocative and completely enchanting...

Duplicity; Sin Nombre

Fri, Mar 20 Listen

To give Duplicity its due, Tony Gilroy's romantic caper goes against the Hollywood grain by smartening itself up instead of dumbing itself downBy Hollywood standards Sin Nombre is a very small movie, shot in Spanish on a tight budget in Mexico, but it's a very big deal

Sunshine Cleaning

Fri, Mar 13 Listen

At the end of Sunshine Cleaning, a foxy grandpa shrugs off the extravagance of an advertising claim he has made by saying, "It's a business lie. It's no the same as a life lie..."

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