The movie begins with a tired shot: The camera sweeps past the gigantic CG ship, tracking briefly alongside Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) as he’s running. The camera sweeps again to show us (cue angelic choir) a sunset that looks as ostensibly fake as the ship. Generic music rises with tribal drums and swelling horns, regurgitating the mood if not the exact melodies of Klaus Badelt’s…
“The Promise” is one of those films that begins with, “When the world was young…” Whatever its idiosyncrasies, this mythology-regurgitating film does have some qualities. A young girl steals a biscuit from the hands of a fallen soldier on a battlefield. Instantly, one soldier seems to come alive—a child, actually. He takes the bread but offers it back if she promises to…
The mission, should you choose to sit and bear it, involves Ethan Hunt (Cruise), who is now retired from active duty in the IMF (Impossible Mission Force), rescuing a nearly-disavowed agent who has an explosive implanted in her head—not to mention a bad contact lens job implanted in her eye, but nevermind. The character and the general concept are based on the TV series by Bruce Geller, which featured…
Where does one begin to comment on a film like this without injecting one’s self and one’s ego into the words being written? That is, after all, the style of “United 93.” There’s no trace of artifice, intention, agenda, style, or plot in the film. The tension that builds relies heavily on what we already know, so there’s no manufactured twist needed here. Our anxieties are…
Akeelah Henderson (Keke Palmer) seems like a typical girl on the surface. She talks about boys with her friend, Georgia (Sahara Garey), at Crenshaw Middle School. But underneath her loquaciousness lies an insecure prodigy. She hides her perfect test scores from her peers, fearing ostracism for her intelligence. Her oldest brother is in the military, and…
Just before this movie started, my wife and I were having a conversation about, incidentally, the misogynistic violence in certain films of late, such as “Wolf Creek.” But just what is the biggest con in David Slade’s “Hard Candy?” It could be…
You know it. You’ve seen it. It’s the “rebel gets community service as penance for her crimes” plot. The punishment? She has to serve her time in the Vickerman Gymnastics Academy. However, while Haley Graham (Missy Peregrym) is rather analogous to Emilio Estevez’ character in “The Mighty Ducks” (from Disney, which is part of Buena Vista Pictures, the distributor of this movie), the film attempts…
“You make me feel like a better person, and I’m… not a better person,” says Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant) to his girlfriend as she announces she’s leaving him. Indifference is a word that requires more effort to type than the emotion that typifies Tweed’s attitude toward her. He’s of course a caricature of Simon Cowell, the garrulous talent judge of the ubiquitous…