Daniel Craig carries a Steve McQueen cool — a man of few words toughness — in his latest film. And had McQueen ever taken on a Western that also involves bug-eyed aliens kidnapping the locals, he’d have played it a lot like the Once and Future James Bond.
Though maybe he’d have picked a different hat.
Jenna Fischer talks directly to the camera in early scenes in “A Little Help.” She lets us see the life that’s overwhelming her, the bitterness that threatens to swallow her whole and the irritation she’s trying her darnedest to hide.
Ryan Gosling is ripped, randy and risible in “Crazy, Stupid Love,” an ensemble romantic farce that has the “serious” actor let his funny flag fly.
Yeah, it’s a Steve Carell comedy, sort of the dark, divorcing sequel to “Date Night.” But Gosling, Emma Stone and Marisa Tomei make this film from the directing duo who gave us “I Love You Phillip Morris” work. Most of the time.
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.
