Movie Nation

“Robot & Frank” may be the oddest credit in Frank Langella’s sixty years on stage and screen.

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Most movie musicals, even in the Age of Glee, still face that awkward moment when somebody — say her name is “Sherrie Christian” — riding a Greyhound, bursts into “Motoring” by Night Ranger, and the rest of the bus bursts in to join her for the chorus.

Audiences today titter at that. But you measure the movie by how quickly the audience gets over that and into your musical.

“Rock of Ages,” the big screen version of the jukebox musical set to ’80s “hair metal” anthems and ballads, never does.

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The bland lead the bland through a sea of New Year’s revelers and Times Square product placement in “New Year’s Eve,” Garry Marshall’s bloated all-star follow-up to his “comeback,” Valentine’s Day.

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 Five films, over $660 million at the worldwide box office, you have to hand it to “Resident Evil.” In ten years, it has become, while few who enjoy good films have noticed, the most successful video game film franchise in history.

These movies have kept action-horror hack Paul W. S. Anderson in business and sustained model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich in between her other rare appearances on the big screen.

The movies? To a one, violent, nonsensical bloodbaths, bad on several levels. At least last time, they seemed to spend some money, expand their vision of the combat zone and that resulted in a bigger, more action-packed and by far more successful exercise in first-person shooter mayhem.

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 “To Rome With Love,” Woody Allen’s latest stamp on his European work visa, is a film not without its charms. But they are so few and far between that the film’s raison detre stares you in the face for a solid 100 minutes.

It’s a lame selection of bad bits from late ’90s era Allen comedies cut and pasted to fit the location.

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You don’t think of empathy as something you have to teach your child. They’re born with it, you’d guess. Or life itself will teach it to them.

Laurie Bonner (Anna Gunn) didn’t take that chance. A widow and a single mother of two, she knew others had it even rougher than her, so she encouraged that trait in her kids.

“One day you’re just living your life, and then BAM, you’re struggling.”

One took it to heart. Another, Zach, started filling a little red wagon with hurricane relief supplies.

And as “Little Red Wagon” makes perfectly clear, for Zach (Chandler Canterbury), that was just the beginning.

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“Red Dawn” is a lot funnier than you remember.

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The image of Edgar Allan Poe passed down to us is that of a dour, pale and morbid drunkard, a poet haunted by lovers who died in his arms. But he was also a playful wordsmith, an eviscerating critic, a man fascinated by cryptography (codes) and fond of dissections.

That’s the Poe of “The Raven,” a fanciful, witty and suspenseful revision of Poe’s last days that is more entertaining than it has any right to be. 

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The hunters become the hunted in the blink of an eye in “The Raid: Redemption,” a neck-snapping/leg-stabbing lead and blood-spattered action overdose from Indonesia. It’s an orgy of beautifully shot and choreographed brawls, shootouts and knife fights, perhaps the cinema’s closest imitation of a first-person-shooter video game ever.

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The rarefied world of classical music is the setting and the intimate “perfect square” of a string quartet the crucible for “A Late Quartet,” a melodrama of love, lust, betrayal and Beethoven. It’s a quiet film of tempestuous but predictable situations and emotions, a movie made watchable by its illustrious cast.

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