The dependable Australian actor Guy Pearce is always welcome, even in a well-meaning dud like 33 Postcards. Versatile and unpredictable, he’s played to perfection everything from a flamboyant drag queen in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to a tough Los Angeles homicide detective in L.A. Confidential. In the Chinese-Australian co-production 33 Postcards, he turns up Read More
Nicolas Cage might sleepwalk through much of his career, but if you think he can’t act, take another look at his staggering work in Leaving Las Vegas, or catch up with his cathartic, above-average performance in the new urban crime thriller Seeking Justice. It’s a welcome surprise.
Directed by New Zealand’s king of pain Roger Donaldson, it begins with an SUV pushed off the roof of a New Orleans parking garage in the middle of Mardi Gras. Nobody gets hurt except the driver, thus setting the scene for a formulaic explosion of mayhem and silliness. But brace yourself. What follows is a roller coaster ride, off the beaten track and dashed with detours, and unexpectedly plausible. Read More
We finally believe New York‘s claim that TED talks have reached their logical endpoint, with this new video of Guy Pearce’s character in the upcoming Alien prequel Prometheus delivering a fake TED talk in 2023. It’s about his plans to “change the world”–plans that presumably shall result in the events of Read More
Scary movies can get away with breaking promises to their audience. They can resurrect exhausted clichés (creepy old houses packed with things bumping in the night) and they can even toss in stale character archetypes (the clueless father, the precocious child who sees things adults don’t). But one crime even the best horror can’t get away with is presenting characters so stupid that we lose all interest in whether they live or die. Which is the heart of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Read More
The Road
Running time 119 minutes
Written by Joe Penhall
Directed by John Hillcoat
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce
Welcome to the apocalypse. In The Road, the eagerly awaited movie version of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, the end of the world is no longer on Read More
FRAGMENTS
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Roy Freirich
Directed by Rowan Woods
Starring Kate Beckinsale, Guy Pearce, Dakota Fanning, Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Hudson, Jeanne Tripplehorn
Fragments is aptly titled. In style and format, it’s another connect-the-dots movie cut from the same bolt of cinematic fabric as Crash, 21 Grams, and Babel. Read More
On Thursday evening, Kevin Christiana, a Project Runway Season Four veteran, watched as the principal cast of Traitor celebrated the New York premiere of their film at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza. Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, and Saïd Taghmaoui squeezed onto a pair of plush red couches with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who is making his directorial Read More
At the movies, the summer’s already-overcrowded category I call “Nothing much, but better than The Matrix Reloaded ” is growing fast. This week, add The Hulk , another mindless but entertaining piece of cinematic comic-book technology that is short on coherence and big on everything else that inflates opening-week grosses and packs them in at Read More
Sigourney’s Sexy
Sting
As comedies go, Heartbreakers
goes pleasantly. It’s a romp about a curvaceous mother-daughter team of
crackerjack con artists who make their living bilking gullible men of
everything but their Calvins. What a racket. Mom (Sigourney Weaver, at her
cryptic, cynical best-and beautiful again, for the first time in ages) is a Read More
Hungry? Skip Ravenous
We’ve had vampires in Brooklyn and werewolves in Central Park, but cannibals in California is a new one on me. Get ready for Ravenous , a bloody, pretentious and paralyzing bore about soldiers in 1847 who feast on each other like blue-plate specials, turning fellow officers into stews and spareribs. The point Read More
