Daily Archives: December 31, 2012

  A brittle bitterness and forlorn melancholy hang over Terence Davies’ film of Terrence Ratigan’s post-World War II melodrama “The Deep Blue Sea.” A story that begins with a failed suicide attempt and then strains to justify that action for … Continue reading →

With “The Dictator,” Sacha Baron Cohen and his partner in comic crime, director Larry Charles, leave the improvisation of “Borat” and “Bruno” behind and return the more structured world of scripted comedy. And the strain shows. The unruliness, the chaos … Continue reading →

The heist went well. But the getaway goes sideways, as getaways often do. That puts brother and sister casino robbers Addison (Eric Bana) and Liza (Olivia Wilde) on foot, split up and dashing through the snow toward the Canadian border … Continue reading →

Kids, even the wimpy ones, grow up so fast. It’s hard to finish a film franchise with them before they’re shaving, dating and turning up in the tabloids. Zachary Gordon, the fresh-faced lad who landed the coveted “Wimpy Kid” role … Continue reading →

The years, gray hairs and wrinkles fade away from Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the cobwebs are brushed off “Dark Shadows” in Tim Burton’s campy and dark take on the late 1960s vampire soap opera. A cheesy and cheap … Continue reading →

Michael Caine once confessed that he’d taken an acting job, on occasion, for “the travel” – the chance to spend a few weeks or months in the Bahamas or Monaco. And every now and then one of his peers will … Continue reading →

One doesn’t realize one has missed the airless irony of Whit Stillman until one sees Stillman’s first feature film in 13 years. The dry martini chronicler of young, monied ennui, Stillman captured the outliers of a disaffected generation with his … Continue reading →

John Cusack has heard the sniping. He’s Internet savvy, a bigtime Twitter user. So he knows the early reviews of “The Raven,” in which he plays the poet/thriller writer Edgar Allan Poe as a haunted man on the trail of … Continue reading →

  David Cronenberg loses himself in the florid soliloquies of Don DeLillo in “Cosmopolis,” the filmmaker’s creepy, cryptic and ever-so-chatty take on DeLillo’s novel of the Wall Street one-percent. It’s the talkiest movie of Cronenberg’s career, a sermon really. That … Continue reading →