From Shakespeare and Austen through Tracy and Hepburn, when it comes to romantic comedies, chemistry is king. It’s one reason the rom-com has long seemed like the toughest code for Hollywood to crack.
But never underestimate the power of snappy, rapid-fire banter, the paving stones of the Hollywood road to romance.
Here’s an unconventional French Holocaust drama, a film that plays as a guilty remembrance of a dark corner of French history tucked into a ticking clock thriller.
Audacious, violent and disquieting, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is a summer sequel that’s better than it has any right to be. This movie about how the apes rose up against the humans who would trap them, cage them and use them in medical experiments is a stunning job of back-engineering the familiar “Planet of the Apes” story and another leap forward in performance capture animation.
Ripped from the recessionary zeitgeist, raunchy and rude and built around something like a dream cast, “Horrible Bosses” gives those ill-mannered “Bridesmaids” a run for their money.
You’ve never seen a Mel Gibson quite like this.
Distraught, depressed and suicidal, yes. He’s been fond of that MO over the decades, sticking a gun in his mouth, wracked by guilt over this, persecuted over that.
But in Jodie Foster’s film “The Beaver,” based on a much-praised Kyle Killen script, Gibson goes further off his rocker than we’ve ever seen him. And it’s a little unsettling.
The comedy envelope has been pushed, pulled, twisted and torn during this current run of smash hit R-rated sex comedies. But “The Change-Up,” the punctuation at the end of the summer of “Bridesmaids,” “Bad Teacher” and “Friends With Benefits,” dares to ask and answer that question that’s been out there since “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” and “Wedding Crashers” kicked off the craze.
How far is too far, and when does amusingly raunchy just seem coarse?
“The First Grader” is an earnest and well-intentioned if somewhat emotionally dry drama about one man’s pursuit of redemption and an education, a Kenyan who sought to enroll in school to learn to read in his 80s. This “inspired by a true” story hits many of the expected importance-of- education grace notes, but never quite reaches the lump-in-your-throat reaction that was plainly its aim.
Fun, though not nearly as much fun as it might have been, “TrollHunter” is a bit like a Norwegian version of “Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale,” the Finnish horror film about “the REAL (and really evil) Santa Claus.”
Jason Statham is consistently interesting as an action hero — a dynamo who leans into the frame, with or without a gun. I’ve been a fan since his early Guy Ritchie days, on through “Transporter” and “Bank Job,” through “Crank,” and “Killer Elite” even.
He makes some stinkers — a LOT of stinkers. “Parker” co-stars Jennifer Lopez.
What are the odds that this won’t suck?
Well, not good. The studio was pitching interviews with the stars. They were offering to show the movie, provided no review was written.
WTH? Seriously? Why not post “This film has been rated SUCKY” on the TV ads? It’s always riskier to release a film unpreviewed/reviewed. Critics have to go out and see it at midnight the night before, and since the studio has already told us it’s damaged goods, we don’t even have to stay awake through all of it.
Granted, it is a “January movie.” But still…
The trailer is a decent sell, but the folks releasing the film have pooped all over it before it comes out. Sad.
Dominic Cooper goes positively Pacino in “The Devil’s Double,” a film biography of a real-life Iraqi “Scarface” and the poor sap ordered to be his stand-in.
