Tracy Letts’ searing stage thriller “Killer Joe” comes to the screen with all its nervous laughs, its jittery fear and sexual sweat intact. It’s yet another showcase for the new and improved Matthew McConaughey — in the title role — and a breakout opportunity for Juno Temple, as the odd, seemingly slow-witted object of Killer Joe’s desire.
And it is the best movie of the summer.
“We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a horror movie for parents. Strip away the showy flashbacks — cutting between several pasts and several points in the present — and it’s “We Need to talk About Damien.” Because the only simple, the only satisfying way of explaining the monster at the heart of this nightmare is “He’s the spawn of the Devil.”
In the movies, the old saying goes, some stars wear the hat. And sometimes, the hat wears them.
Say whatever else you want about Sylvester Stallone’s kitschy 1995 turn as futuristic comic book judge-jury-executioner Judge Dredd, the dude wore the helmet. Karl Urban replaces him in the new “Dredd 3D.” And frankly, the helmet wears Karl.
He never takes over the over-sized thing. It closes off his performance and masks his charisma. We only see his scowling jaw and hear his hissed one-liners, chewing out the rookie mind-reading judge (Olivia Thirlby) who forgets to wear hers.
“Sir, helmets interfere with my psychic abilities.”
“Think a bullet in the head might interfere with’em more,” the Judge mutters.
The things young Isabella Rossi sees on her fateful trip to Rome! She sees bodies contort into pretzels and climb walls and fling themselves across rooms, breaking restraints as they do. She sees blood and hears all manner of blood-curdling cursing in languages familiar and foreign.
And playing her in The Devil Inside, actress Fernanda Andrade — who is easy on the eyes — barely bats an eye. I guess she’s grown up with exorcism movies, so nothing’s going to shock her.
If it’s January, it must be low-grade horror season. And since The Rite cashed in last January, why not roll out a Blair Witchy hand-held “We’re making a documentary about my ‘possessed’ mother” documentary?
In “The Details,” the Devil isn’t in the you-know-whats. It’s in Tobey Maguire’s eyes.
He’s got the crazy eyes of the deranged, the bug-eyes of the shocked, the dazed eyes of the comically dismayed. All of which come in handy when you’re swirling down the drain of sexual betrayal, when you’re facing professional, personal and financial ruin, when you’re being outsmarted by raccoons.
Yes, raccoons. That’s how it all starts.
A brittle bitterness and forlorn melancholy hang over Terence Davies’ film of Terrence Rattigan’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 the following 90-plus minutes can’t help but wear a pall, and your ability to embrace it depends on how eager you are to wallow in that.
But it’s a clumsy, dated and stodgy production — ugly to look at, unromantic in the extreme. This isn’t Britain’s “finest hour,” but the five years after the end of World War II. And Davies makes the movie about those years of privation (prolonged rationing) dull, emphasizing the resignation and stripping it of the wistful nostalgia that this version of “Brief Encounter” needs.
Hester (Rachel Weisz) has just tried to kill herself. In the aftermath of that, she wrestles with the fallout from that event, the failed love affair that sparked it and the loveless marriage she abandoned for that affair.
Freddie (Tom Hiddleston) was a Royal Air Force pilot when she met him, a bubbling, manic warrior who thrilled to the blend of excitement and fear that was combat. Now, years later, all he can do is reminisce.
“We were doing something important for dear Ol’ Blighty,” back then, he laments to his omnipresent chum (Harry Hadden-Paton).
Hester is married to a judge many years her senior (Simon Russell Beale), a marriage presented here as an awkward, unpleasant arrangement. Sir William never granted her a divorce, but being a well-to-do mama’s boy, he never gave her much of a reason to stay, either.
After failing to kill herself, Hester is both chastised and nursed to health by her landlady and a neighbor. And as played by Weisz, we can never decide if what she’s remembering in these flashbacks was worth suicide, or if there’s enough for Hester to look forward to that makes another attempt at killing herself out of the question. It’s a dry, staid performance in a film that plays like a still-life in Post-War Brown.
One of the rumors about the play that Rattigan spent years shooting down was that it had gay subtexts that altered the central love triangle that has been the traditional interpretation of the piece. This incarnation muddies those waters all over again by casting actors opposite Weisz who generate neither sexual heat nor romantic fondness. Nothing we can see on the screen bonds her to either man other than the simple necessities of the plot.
Davies doesn’t give us anything for Hester to mourn for. It’s all right to plant the seeds of doom in the flashbacks, but surely we should get a sense of what it was that she got out of this manic-depressive courtship in the first place.
She gives a drained performance that makes for a dreary film, start to finish. And surely that wasn’t Ratigan’s intent.
MPAA Rating: R, for a scene of sexuality and nudity
Cast: Rachel Weisz, Tim Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale
Credits: Written and directed by Terence Davies, based on the Terrence Ratigan play. A Music Box release.
Running time: 1:38
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 of their improvised “gotcha” mockumentaries is missing. Cohen, forced to remember lines, stick to a script and sustain a character who only exists when the director says “Action,” struggles with the voice, the persona.
The result is a fitfully hilarious farce made up of patched-together comic “bits” — the bit where the dictator stages his own Olympics (and shoots other sprinters to win his race), the bit where the dictator, having annointed himself his nation’s chief surgeon, attempts to deliver a baby (with the camera taking in-utero point of view), the bit where the dictator and a flunky have an animated pseudo-Arabic chat about exploding fireworks, American landmarks and Osama bin Laden on a New York tourist helicopter tour.
Most of the bits are funny, but the film that connects them is flat, the performances — especially Cohen’s — incomplete, under-developed and poorly cut together.
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 with Michigan in the dead of winter.
We know, early on in “Deadfall,” where they must rendezvous. We learn, in the opening moments, Addison’s trigger happy. And when he tells his sister as they separate, “Use your wits,” we know what he means.
She’s Olivia Wilde. She’s going to bat her eyes at some fellow and get a ride. And if it takes long enough for the siblings to reach their rendezvous, we know we’re going to see Olivia Wilde in her birthday suit – weather be damned.
It’s a thriller built on melodramatic conventions, as Addison stumbles into the middle of a domestic dispute that he settles with a gun, and Liza hooks up with Jay, an Olympic boxer, fresh out of prison and on the run again. He’s trying to make it home to Mom (Sissy Spacek) and disapproving Dad (Kris Kristofferson).
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 in those kid-friendliest comedies of all, the adaptations of Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” movies, has had a growth spurt. His Greg Heffley is taller than his portly pal, Rowley (Robert Capron), almost tall enough not to have to take any more guff from his brother, Roderick (Devon Bostick).
In “Dog Days,” Greg’s voice has changed. But in the summer before he goes into eighth grade, he’s still inept around girls, still lying to his parents, still self-absorbed and rude to others.
The lying is what he does to “make a connection” to the pretty blonde Holly Hills (Peyton List). And to get to her, he takes advantage of Rowley and Rowley’s parents, who are members of the country club where Holly plays tennis.
Manny, Greg’s younger brother, is old enough to “lose” his baby blanket, worn down to “a couple of pieces of yarn held together by boogers.” And Roderick, Greg’s older brother, is still clueless enough to think his band, Loded Diper, will win the heart of Holly’s hot and rich older sister, Heather (Melissa Roxburgh).
What’s new here is Greg’s disconnect from his long-suffering dad, played with commitment and comic skill by Steve Zahn. Dad’s the one who can’t quite figure out how to disconnect the video game so that Greg plays outdoors — so he unplugs the whole TV. Dad enlists Greg in his Civil War re-enactment company — and the South rises again. He takes the boy fishing, only to find he’s squeamish at the sight of worms. He gets a dog hoping the kid will learn responsibility. The dog takes over the house. And father re-joins his old Wilderness Explorer troop so that Greg will learn to camp.
None of it works. They have nothing in common.
Dad wants his boys to be on a par with a jerk-jock neighbor’s kids. Good luck with that.
Greg only wants to play video games and impress Holly, and the lengths he goes to lead to his biggest mistakes.
But that’s what Kinney’s books and these movies manage to teach, in between the exagerated misadventures of childhood. Make mistakes, but own up to them. Treat people with courtesy, even nerdy parents who want to play “I Love You Because” games with their spoiled only child. And if you’re raising your child right, nothing will sting them more than admitting you’re “disappointed” in something they’ve done.
It’s not the best of the Wimpys, but Bostick is still a laugh a minute as Roderick, and for an hour, the laughs come quick and sure — slapstick stuff, mostly. And for parents and their tweens, “Dog Days” that’s enough to keep this, the kid-friendliest film franchise of them all, from being a disappointment.
MPAA Rating:PG for some rude humor
Cast: Zachary Gordon, Robert Capron, Peyton List, Devon Bostick, Steve Zahn, Rachael Harris
Credits: Directed by David Bowers, scripted by Wallace Wolodarsky, Maya Forbes and Gabe Sachs, based on the Jeff Kinney book. A 20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 1:34
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 but beloved TV program takes an affectionate ribbing in the film, which has more in common with “That ’70s Show” than its actual source.
But it’s a fun flashback to the days when a jilted witch (former Bond babe Eva Green, in fine fury) cursed the Byron-haired Barnabas Collins (Depp) to eternal damnation as a vampire, his immortality granted “so that my suffering would never end.”
