It is to her everlasting credit that a famously exasperating perfectionist like Barbra Streisand could survive a limp noodle like The Guilt Trip. This cheesy comedy concerns a nerdy, 30-something loser named Andy (Seth Rogen) and his obnoxious, overbearing mother Joyce (Ms. Streisand) on a road trip from Manhattan to San Francisco that is understandably Read More
Put a staggering accomplishment called The Impossible, from Spanish director J. A. Bayona, at the top of the season’s must-see list. This intense nerve-shredder about a vacationing family separated in the violent and unexpected Indian Ocean tsunami that struck the southeast coast of Asia on Dec. 26, 2004, is the most wrenching disaster movie in Read More
It’s always reassuring to see a nutty director go straight. Austria’s Michael Haneke is famous for his lurid, violent and thoroughly sick exercises in torture and sexual depravity. Wait a sec. Did I say famous? Only to the occasional film festival audience. The public has avoided him like a dose of swine flu. Who sat Read More
Let others slobber over Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. In this year of looking over our shoulders at past leaders with more heroic leadership qualities than the ones we’ve been getting lately, I’ll stick with Bill Murray as Franklin D. Roosevelt. There are two Hyde Parks—one in London and one in upstate New York on Read More
A Western-style outlaw flick all dressed up like a contemporary thriller and set in a blizzard in the Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan, Deadfall is an above-average genre piece with a terrific cast that builds to a bloody Thanksgiving dinner shoot-out I found pretty close to unforgettable. Addison (Australian hunk Eric Bana) and his femme Read More
Seventeen years after his impressive 1995 debut film The Brothers McMullen, writer-director-actor and indie-prod summa cum laude Edward Burns returns to the working-class Long Island landscape of his first success with The Fitzgerald Family Christmas. You can’t go home again.
In this overly familiar and ultimately meandering exercise in tedium, Mr. Burns also plays the Read More
What are you doing New Year’s Eve? The cultured and the wise will be punishing the parquet at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency for the last time, saying goodbye forever to one of New York’s most venerable cabaret kingdoms. Yes, it’s one more nail in the coffin of the kind of sophisticated nightlife that used to Read More
The versatile, underrated Scotsman Robert Carlyle finally gets a starring role in California Solo, an unusual character study about a retired Britpop guitarist from the 1990s who moved to America after his band broke up and has been living for the past 15 years or so as a reclusive, alcoholic laborer, haunted by private demons Read More
For a big star, Brad Pitt chooses to waste his talent in boneheaded ways that never cease to amaze me. For every single solid, carefully written, value-packed entry in his oddball career—like Se7en or Moneyball—you get two or three choices only a moron could make. To a growing list of dumbbell duds like Tree of Read More
There are many reasons why Alfred Hitchcock is the most famous and instantly recognizable film director of all time, and all of them are reliably, artistically realized in Hitchcock. With so much year-end junk polluting the market, it’s easy to see why this is one of the best movies of 2012. With rich performances, a Read More
