A little sci-fi, a "Devil Wears Prada" rip-off, a runaway train loaded with explosive toxins, an indie darling, a Sundance winner, a political thriller, surely there's something here for you.
Morning Glory
Rachel McAdams gets a job as a producer on a morning news show, where she must calm the battle of egos between her co-anchors, played by Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton, all while trying to keep her romance with a colleague, played by Patrick Wilson, afloat. Imagine a less smart and funny version of screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna's big hit, “The Devil Wears Prada." In theaters everywhere, read our review and watch the trailer
Unstoppable
Denzel Washington and Chris Pine must set aside their differences and join forces to stop “8 freight cars of hazardous chemicals--We’re not just talking about a train, we’re talking about a missile the size of the Chrysler Building!” from blowing up a Pennsylvania town in the latest piece of popcorn fun from director Tony Scott. In theaters everywhere, read our review and watch the trailer.
A little sci-fi, a "Devil Wears Prada" rip-off, a runaway train loaded with explosive toxins, an indie darling, a Sundance winner, a political thriller, surely there's something here for you.
Morning Glory
Rachel McAdams gets a job as a producer on a morning news show, where she must calm the battle of egos between her co-anchors, played by Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton, all while trying to keep her romance with a colleague, played by Patrick Wilson, afloat. Imagine a less smart and funny version of screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna's big hit, “The Devil Wears Prada." In theaters everywhere,
Unstoppable
Denzel Washington and Chris Pine must set aside their differences and join forces to stop “8 freight cars of hazardous chemicals--We’re not just talking about a train, we’re talking about a missile the size of the Chrysler Building!” from blowing up a Pennsylvania town in the latest piece of popcorn fun from director Tony Scott. In theaters everywhere, read our review and watch the trailer.
Made outside the studio system for a mere $20m, at least this isn't a big-budget disaster, but boy is it a mess with flat characters, out-offocus shots and a sense of déjà vu hanging like an alien swarm over every scene.
It doesn't approach You Again in terms of awfulness, but it's within a plasma beam's distance.
THE REEL LOWDOWN IF YOU LIKED...
Godz Pand YOU Godzilla (1998), Pandorum...
Cool It
A documentary, based on the book of the same name by Bjorn Lomborg, that looks at the controversial writer's claims that many of our fears about--and fixes for--the environment are wildly misguided. In limited release, watch the trailer
Tiny Furniture
Lena Dunham is the writer, director and star of this intimate and highly autobiographical portrait of a young woman's return to the nest following college, a film that won Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest. In limited release, watch the trailer
Fair Game
Naomi Watts is Valerie Plame and Sean Penn is Joe Wilson in director Doug Liman's dramatization of the couple's notorious battle with the Bush Administration, one that ultimately led to her cover as a 20-year veteran of the CIA being blown. Expanding into new markets, read our review and watch the trailer
The Taqwacores
By turns clumsy, thought provoking and funny, it follows a young college student in Buffalo seeking to live in a home with fellow Muslims who will help him stay true to his faith. He instead finds himself in a cauldron of inter-faith strife stoked by fans of Taqwacore, a fictional Muslim punk scene that takes its name from “taqwa,” an awareness of Allah, and “core,” from hardcore. In Los Angeles, read our review and watch the trailer
Winter’s Bone
The big winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, it stars Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old Missourian who must care for her younger siblings and her sick mother. The family's fortunes take a sharp turn for the worse when Sheriff Baskin stops by to inform her that her bail-jumping dad put the family's house and land in the Ozarks up for his bond. It's essentially a mafia movie, with flannel shirts, accents, rusty old pickup trucks and dense woods. The look and feel director Debra Granik brings are well crafted, but the story has an uneven and frustrating pace and a finish that feels suspiciously tidy. In limited re-release, read our review and watch the trailer.
Like Déjà Vu, this is has plenty of circle-cam shots and pointless cuts, but also takes its time with set-up and stock (but enjoyable) character development; it doesn't bulge with pumped-up mayhem and in fact Washington and Chris Pine don't even get into day-saving mode for at least the first half of the movie. Scott may be a product of the big-80s/Bruckheimer aesthetic, but his approach to this material is often more measured than his career would suggest (even his most overcranked movies go further into experimental territory than fellow lover of cuts, control rooms, and the military Michael Bay). Sure, this movie is pretty silly and it's a little weird that Washington has now made more Tony Scott pulp-em-ups as he has Spike Lee joints (especially when Lee's Inside Man can provide more New York City pulse as a lark than Scott could muster for the Pelham redo), but if you don't mind those endless shots of and from helicopters, or some stupid cutaways to local news, you can sit back and enjoy Washington and Scott riding the rails. For the trilogy-capper, I'm thinking Washington and Scott need to hijack that flying time-traveling train from the end of Back to the Future Part III.
Tiny Furniture: Lena Dunham writes, directs, and stars in Tiny Furniture, which exhibits a good three hundred percent more productivity than her character Aura, a recent graduate prone to hanging out in her underwear at her mom's place—and not the sexy co-ed type of underwear-lounging, either, but rather the could-you-put-on-some-pants variety, an actual request a neighbor makes before leaving her small child in Aura's charge. Returning home to New York after completing her film theory major, Aura bickers with her artist mom and insufferably high-achieving high-school-aged sister (played by Dunham's actual family members), fumbles through unpromising relationships with a couple of guys, reconnects with an obnoxious childhood friend, and gets a crummy (though, it must be said, exceedingly easy) restaurant job. She spends a lot of time in her mom's geometric apartment, shot in stark, static frames—the title refers to one of her mom's photography projects, but it could just as well describe Aura's entire postgraduate life.
As a chronicle of young/adult aimlessness, Tiny Furniture has a litany of antecedents, including Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, any number of mumblecore movies, or even the spring-break ennui snapshot The Exploding Girl from earlier this year. Dunham, lightly tattooed with a Jenna Fischer-ish voice, distinguishes herself by writing characters who don't cover their insecurities with banter or, well, you know, mumbling; Aura's like a mumblecore character without the cushion of a loosely knit scene (another high school friend describes her as "the girl who always goes home early"). Eventually, she throws a full-on (well, maybe half-on) twenty-two-year-old tantrum, and her ineffectual attempts to act out provide some of the movie's biggest laughs. Those laughs, in classic dramedy tradition, are a little frontloaded; the naturalistic yet often hilariously phrased dialogue from the first half becomes progressively more sullen and less delightful as the movie wears on and Aura goes from aimless to seeming downright joyless, but that's probably by design. Tiny Furniture lacks the emotional kick of the Baumbach or Zwigoff movies, but has its own tiny, numerous rewards; Dunham's comic voice is subtle yet unmistakable.
Morning Glory: While writing my review of Morning Glory, I was thinking about Rachel McAdams. She has a reputation as sort of a thinking person's Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock; a charming movie star with a serious actor's choosiness. Yet McAdams has yet to star in anything better than Mean Girls. Now, this is no small thing; Mean Girls is awesome. But you wouldn't think, offhand, that McAdams would share a career peak with Lindsay Lohan. McAdams has appeared in plenty of good movies, across a variety of genres: Red Eye, The Family Stone, The Time Traveler's Wife, and even her weaker stuff, State of Play or The Lucky Ones or what have you, has a certain respectability (even Sherlock Holmes is one of the more understandable popcorn gigs), as does the affable if not particularly exciting Morning Glory. But it would be nice to see her general effervescence beaming from a movie made by more than a competent workman. In fact, I'm officially bummed that she wasn't able to grab the solo lead in Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity. In fact, why can't she step into P.T. Anderson's Scientology movie and get it financed immediately?
Skyline: I haven't seen this one, not least because it isn't getting the press-screening treatment. Aliens attack Los Angeles and apparently go for the movie stars first, leaving only Donald Faison, Eric Balfour, and Brittany Daniel (who sounds kinda-sorta famous, but is actually just some chick from Dawson's Creek) to defend us. This explains why for the next round of L.A.-based attacks, we recruit comparably megawatt fighters like Michelle Rodriguez, Bridget Moynanhan, Michael Pena, and Aaron Eckhart. Whatever, I saw all of these other movies already so I probably will see Skyline.This can’t go on forever,” one of a handful of survivors of an alien invasion reasons about a half hour into “Skyline.” And so it doesn’t. Only about92 minutes, as it turns out.
I would say this latest venture from “The Brothers Strause” is mercifully short. But mercy or pity don’t figure in the ambitions of the siblings who shared credit (blame?) for “Alien vs. Predator- Requiem.”
This year’s answer to “Independence Day” is a special effects experiment in search of a movie, much like the far-lower budget (and somewhat more effective) “Monsters,” now playing in a few theaters.
A bunch of attractive 20somethings party all night and wake up to an unearthly light. Vaporish fireballs fall all over Los Angeles. And then people are sucked skyward into beast-ships where, we can assume, they’re dinner guests — the main course. The wrinkle here is, you look into the light, you’re drawn to it.
Eric Balfour of TV’s “24″ and “Haven” is Jared, prepared to stick-like-glue to his newly-pregnant girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson, of TV’s “Trauma.” They were visiting Terry, played by Donald Faison of TV’s “Scrubs.”
You see a pattern here? Faison might have had the Will Smith role, that of the hip black guy who growls “Aw HELL no.” But no. he only shoots his pistol at the beasties and yells “You want some’a that?” Or words to that effect.The survivors of those first abductions bicker or whether to hunker down or make a break for it. Time passes through time-lapse photography as they hide out. They watch a lot of what transpires through a spotting scope through the windows of Terry’s penthouse.
That’s indicative of why “Skyline” is an epic fail of a monster movie. There’s no urgency, no close-contact immediacy to it. The group starts as a sextet, shrinks to a quartet, adds a couple of people, loses a couple more. And we don’t care for an instant about any of them, don’t identify with them and don’t try to reason their way out of this hopeless mess with them. That neck-up style of acting so suited to TV doesn’t work in a movie where you’re dealing with the unfathomable.
The characters, like the viewer, are simply bystanders — observers of a special effects battle between Stealth fighter bombers and Predator drones and alien squid ships and their offspring.
Thus, “Skyline” plays like an effects guru’s resume reel, not a movie.
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