Rex Reed

ELEGY
RUNNING TIME 113 minutes
WRITTEN BY Nicholas Meyer
DIRECTED BY Isabel Coixet
STARRING Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, Dennis Hopper

Elegy, a depressing but well-made adaptation of a Philip Roth novella by Spanish director Isabel Coixet, explores the changing landscape of love between a history professor (Ben Kingsley) and a Cuban student 30 years his junior (Penélope Cruz). Her beauty takes his breath away, but their affair is ruptured by his anxiety, jealousy, insecurity and imagination—all crippled by her absence when she leaves him. He allows himself to become a fool for love, without putting up any resistance, but convinces himself it’s just a matter of time before she finds someone younger, more desirable.  read more »

RED
RUNNING TIME 98 minutes
WRITTEN BY Stephen Susco
DIRECTED BY Trygve Allister Diesen and Lucky McKee
STARRING Brian Cox, Tom Sizemore, Amanda Plummer, Noel Fisher, Kyle Gallner, Shiloh Fernandaz, Robert Englund

Dog lovers will adopt Red, but although the title belongs to a beloved Irish setter (or is it a rusty-colored Airedale?), the movie should appeal to people who like people, too. It is not about a dog. It’s about the dying values of truth, honesty and justice when bad things happen to good people and their pets. The brilliant actor Brian Cox—versatile, accomplished and always full of surprises—stars as Avery Ludlow, a quiet, reclusive old man in rural Oregon who owns a small general store and minds his own business.  read more »

Tom Wopat
The Metropolitan Room
Until July 31

You’ll have more fun on the cabaret scene, where two seasoned pros have cooled off the month of July like a frozen mojito. Every Thursday night, when the curtain falls on the Broadway musical A Catered Affair, Tom Wopat shakes it down to the great new Metropolitan Room at 34 West 22 Street to knock the crowds right out of their sandals. This shaggy dog looks better at 56 than he did as a pup, cutting his baby teeth on the old TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, and you gotta laugh when he tells the audience, “If you like me, I’m Tom Wopat; if you don’t, I’m John Schneider.  read more »

Lucie Arnaz
Birdland

I once wrote that Lucie Arnaz was a chip off the old blockhead. I was talking about genes, of course, but at Birdland—where she’s been knocking them wall-eyed and packing them in tight as ACE bandages—the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz is very much her own star. With power, passion, a dynamic vibrato for emphasis on the swing tunes and a lemon twist for tartness on the torch songs, she’s pretty much a one-woman phenomenon. The looks? Eat your hearts out, ladies. I’ve seen her eat, so I know she doesn’t live on Bibb lettuce, but I guess she walks 18 miles a day because she’s got the same sylphlike body and the same swanlike neck she had on her mom’s old comedy shows.  read more »

TAKE
RUNNING TIME 99 minute
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Charles Oliver
STARRING Minnie Driver, Jeremy Renner

Take is another in a meaningless parade of time-wasting marquee cloggers that have been coming at us this summer in sections. Directed and written by Charles Oliver, this bargain-basement crime melodrama about anguish, violence and redemption among the socially marginalized is a kind of Dick and Jane primer of how not to make a movie that will appeal to anyone with an attention span of more than 30 minutes.

Telling parallel stories simultaneously, it starts with Ana (Minnie Driver), a poor housewife with a small son who suffers from learning disabilities.  read more »

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
RUNNING TIME 135 minutes
WRITTEN BY Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies
DIRECTED BY Julian Jarrold
STARRING Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, Hayley Atwell

Here it is at last: the intelligent movie filmgoers have waited for all year. The film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited transforms one of the quintessential novels of the 20th century into one of the grandest, most enriching films of 2008. The 11-part 1981 miniseries was such a milestone in TV history that purists who watch the four-volume DVD set might squabble about the merits of reducing so much artistry into an almost two-and-a-half-hour film.  read more »

FELON
RUNNING TIME 104 minutes
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Ric Roman Waugh
STARRING Stephen Dorff, Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, Harold Perrineau

Prison movies may not be everyone’s idea of escapist entertainment, but with nearly two million people overcrowding the U.S. penal system already and the numbers growing daily, it’s a problem worth addressing. Audiences are gruesomely fascinated by horror stories behind bars, and like the phenomenal TV series Oz, the stuff that happens in a tense, taut new movie called Felon is nothing less than electrifying.

The versatility and charisma of the dynamic, always surprising actor Stephen Dorff is the catalytic converter in this harrowing story of an innocent man caught up in America’s flawed legal system.  read more »

THE DARK KNIGHT
RUNNING TIME 152 minutes
WRITTEN BY Christopher and Jonathan Nolan
DIRECTED BY Christopher Nolan
STARRING Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal

Some folks take metaphysical pleasure from the New Batman Philosophy According to Christopher Nolan: that good and evil lurk side by side in everyone, including Batman. But in my opinion, every Batman movie is about only one thing: action hero (the caped crusader with wings) vs. bad guys (everyone else). Writer-director Nolan’s Batman Begins, with its surreal and mystical mumbo jumbo about playboy Bruce Wayne’s beginnings, remains the worst Batman movie I’ve ever seen, although the comic-book addicts disagree.  read more »

MAMMA MIA!
RUNNING TIME 108 minutes
WRITTEN BY Catherine Johnson
DIRECTED BY Phyllida Lloyd
STARRING Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters

Amid the summer junk-movies that are already going down in history as artifacts, some folks will welcome, I suppose, the nauseating cornball music of the Swedish pop group ABBA which pounds its way through the monumentally inconsequential Mamma Mia! To me, the popularity of the jukebox blather of this gang of no-talents is only slightly less understandable than the war in Iraq. And the movie they’ve made of the bafflingly popular tourist attraction still playing on Broadway is only slightly more unbearable than finding myself the real-life star of all the Saw movies rolled into one.  read more »

DIMINISHED CAPACITY
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Sherwood Kiraly
Directed by Terry Kinney
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C. K.

Diminished Capacity is a harmless but monotonous trifle about a baseball card. Matthew Broderick is making too many movies and giving the same performance in all of them. This time, he’s a Chicago newspaper editor named Cooper who suffers a brain concussion and gets demoted to proofreading comic strips. His neurologist says he’s got what they call “diminished capacity,” but he no longer throws up when he drives a car, so he goes home to visit his mother (the wonderful Lois Smith) and discovers that everyone in his hometown has diminished capacity, too—especially his Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda).  read more »

August
Running time 88 minutes
Written by Howard A. Rodman
Directed by Austin Chick
Starring Josh Hartnett, Adam Scott, Naomie Harris, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rip Torn, Robin Tunney, David Bowie

Worse still, there’s a deadly, amateurish infection going around called August, with yet another novocained performance by zombified Josh Hartnett as a dot-com Internet star named Tom Sterling, who invents a company called Landshark with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott). Nobody knows what Landshark does, but when Tom explains it, he says: “That’s so third quarter ’99. You want bleeding-edge, mission-critical, cross-platform robust scale. What you want is E. Pure E. Not E commerce.  read more »

TheWackness
Running time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Thirlby, Famke Janssen, Mary-Kate Olsen

Not the least of the problems facing people who write about movies on a weekly basis is the deadlines. You can’t say, “I think I’d rather go to the beach today.” The empty space looms at you like a computerized monster, always demanding to be filled with your words, whether you have anything to say or not. Also, they say as you get older your attention span shortens. I don’t know about that, but I can promise you as sure as Monday follows the weekend that as the world changes and filmmakers get younger, the quality of motion pictures has diminished, and I find very few movies of worthwhile value to hold my interest.  read more »

Liz Callaway
Feinstein’s at Loews Regency
Through June 28

As usual, when it comes to value received for money spent, the music scene surpasses the movies. At Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, glorious jazz diva Ann Hampton Callaway’s younger, shorter and equally talented sister Liz is knocking their socks off. A veteran of Broadway show tunes and classy concert halls, she has chosen, for reasons of self-satisfaction only she can explain, to celebrate the pop tunes of the 1960s. She calls this cabaret whim “The Beat Goes On” and as Fats Domino used to chide at the Peppermint Lounge, “It do, babe, it sho’nuff do.  read more »

Expired
Running Time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Cecilia Miniucchi
Starring Samantha Morton, Jason Patric, Teri Garr

“Expired” is the word you see before they tow your car away. So it is little wonder that a new movie called Expired should be about—what else?—a meter maid. “I’m one of the most hated people in the world,” says Claire, a poor, hapless Santa Monica parking enforcement officer played with wistful, unhappy but eternally optimistic fervor by the quirky actress Samantha Morton. “People run from me like the plague. Insult me. Give me the finger. Verbally abuse me.  read more »

Finding Amanda
Running Time 100 minutes
Written and directed by Peter Tolan
Starring Matthew Broderick, Brittany Snow, Maura Tierney, Peter Facinelli

Finding Amanda is an inconsequential little low-budget throwaway with another stagnant, indifferent performance by the underwhelming but overexposed Matthew Broderick as a mediocre Hollywood TV writer named Taylor Peters. Taylor is so unreliable, indifferent and irresponsible that each episode of his sitcom is like a knee replacement. A severe case of writer’s block has reached the level of mental illness. He also suffers from a gambling addiction so serious that it has derailed his career and almost wrecked his marriage to the long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) he has lied to for years.  read more »

Wanted
Running Time 110 minutes
Written by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov
Starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp

Even in the summer garbage dump of bloated bilge aimed at computer hackers and sleepwalkers with I.Q.’s under 40, a bucket of swill called Wanted reaches the bottom of the waste heap. There are so many things wrong with this cabbage-headed comic book that I don’t know where to begin. I guess it doesn’t matter. Since none of it makes one word of sense, you can just jump in anywhere.

From what I understood of the alleged “plot,” it seems that 1,000 years ago a secret group of assassins called “The Fraternity” went around ridding the population of bad guys.  read more »

The Incredible Hulk
Running Time 114 minutes
Written by Zak Penn
Directed by Louis Leterrier
Starring Edward Norton, William Hurt and Liv Tyler

Five years have passed since the first big-screen Hulk wasted the reputation of director Ang Lee on a computer-generated comic strip nobody wanted to see. That film suffered punishing reviews and a devastating 70 percent drop-off in attendance in the second week, from which it never recovered. But you can’t keep an old, green, 10-ton Brussels sprout down for long. It’s too early to predict if The Incredible Hulk, the CGI sequel, will sink to that same level of box office infamy, but take it from me: You’ll have the DVD by Labor Day.  read more »

The Happening
Running Time 91 minutes
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo

There’s a moment in the boring, brain-dead new M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening when Mark Wahlberg turns to the camera, trying to suppress a grin, and asks, “Can this really be happening?” I ask the same question every week, but it just gets worse.

It’s not a good sign when a director casts Mr. Wahlberg, a ruddy rapper-turned-actor who looks like a choirboy selling crack in the apse, as a science teacher pondering the mystery of why honeybees are disappearing from coast to coast.  read more »

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
Running Time 101 minutes
Written by Ann Peacock
Directed by Patricia Rozema
Starring Abigail Breslin, Chris O’Donnell and Julia Ormond

Considering the surfeit of popular junk that is currently polluting the ozone, an enchanting little movie like Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is so sweet and sanitized it makes me feel almost guilty for liking it. But this vehicle for Abigail Breslin, the Oscar-nominated surprise sensation of the acclaimed Little Miss Sunshine, is not only a brisk, beautifully conceived period piece that spells entertainment with a capital E—it exalts the cheerful audience-participation innocence of those family films that used to star Margaret O’Brien, Dean Stockwell and Peggy Ann Garner.  read more »

Quid Pro Quo
Running Time 82 minutes
Written and Directed by Carlos Brooks
Starring Nick Stahl and Vera Farmiga

Look high and low, but you won’t find a weirder movie than Quid Pro Quo. In 1989, a high-speed car crash kills the parents of a boy named Isaac Knott, leaving him an orphaned paraplegic. Eighteen years later, confined to a wheelchair, he’s a 26-year-old investigative reporter who tells odd stories of life in New York City on public radio. (Same job Jodie Foster had in The Brave One, which should have been a warning. Must be a dangerous career choice, because this one also leads to trouble.) Tracking down a story about a man who pays a doctor to cut off his perfectly good leg, Isaac (played by the gifted Nick Stahl, from In the Bedroom) discovers a sordid underworld of fetish freaks who get off on amputations.  read more »

In two of the town’s swankiest cabaret rooms, the testosterone levels are soaring. Every Monday night at the Algonquin, Rue McClanahan (the feistiest of TV’s aging “Golden Girls”), in her directorial debut, guides her husband, Morrow Wilson, through a center ring salute to Noël Coward, in the aptly titled Noël Coward 101. He doesn’t resemble Noel, or sound like him, but his quips and pointed, well-chosen anecdotes about the renowned composer, songwriter, playwright, novelist, painter and performer aim darts at the funny bone and rarely miss their mark.  read more »

Chris & Don. A Love Story
Running Time 90 minutes  read more »