Movie Reviews
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Abduction
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
"Twilight" alumnus Taylor Lautner makes his debut as a leading man in a film tailor-made for him. "Abduction" puts Lautner in motion and never goes wrong as long as he remains in motion. The buff teen werewolf of "Twilight" plays a young man who has his world upended and finds himself on the run when enemy agents attack his home and the people he knew as his parents aren't who they say they are. In the opening minutes, we meet Nathan (Lautner), a studly wrestler ... (read more)
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Dolphin Tale RealD 3D
Michaelk Phillips, Chicago Tribune
I'll be honest, in the spirit of the honestly shameless heartwarmer "Dolphin Tale." I saw it in a somewhat distracted, agitated state. Forty-five seconds into the opening credits, I'm watching ocean-dwelling dolphins nosing around all sorts of potential dangers (a rusty fishing tackle box, a fateful metal crab trap), and the film's in 3-D so the dangers loom with exceptional emphasis, and the picture's premise depends on putting the eventually tailless protagonist -- a real-life dol... (read more)
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Moneyball
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Director Bennett Miller's "Moneyball" is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization. It's also the best sports movie in a long time, period, as well as honestly inspirational -- even though nobody knocks one into the lights, causing showers of sparks to blend into the night sky with the fireworks. This is not that film. It's better than that film. The focus on facts, figures, sabermetrics and cold, hard stats never competes with the human being... (read more)
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Straw Dogs
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
Equal measures smug and savage, Rod Lurie's infuriating remake of Sam Peckinpah's vengeance thriller "Straw Dogs" still packs a visceral punch. An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big-city liberal outrage, it's not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious. Lurie, whose career has become a careen (unreleased or under-released failures) since "The Contender," has cleverly re-set the tale, that of a mild-mannered bookish and emasculated ci... (read more)
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Drive
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Drive" begins extremely well and ends in a muddle of ultraviolence, hypocrisy and stylistic preening, which won't be any sort of deterrent for those who like its looks. Director Nicolas Winding Refn's avenging-angel thriller premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where Refn won the directing prize, and every supersaturated image is designed for hushed adoration. If the movie were a movie star, it'd be looking just past you to see if someone cooler had recently come in. Ryan... (read more)
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I Don't Know How She Does It
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Thwarted by the same awkward timing that zonked "Confessions of a Shopaholic" two years ago, just when shopaholics began to seem extra-heinous, the film version of "I Don't Know How She Does It" doesn't know how to do what I think it's trying to do. I think it's trying to acknowledge the real-world pressures shaping millions of women's work/life to-do lists. When the investment firm wizard played by Sarah Jessica Parker tells a colleague she got into fund management becaus... (read more)
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Warrior
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The feverish mixed martial arts infomercial "Warrior" opens up so many cans of emotional whup-ass that after a while you think: Enough! It's whupped! It's whupped! And yet the tears will flow by the gallon. Every time you start resisting, somehow the film makes the sale, again. Director and co-writer Gavin O'Connor is a full-throated entertainer, meaning he goes for the throat every second. He's also an escape artist, writing his characters into outlandishly cliched corners and then... (read more)
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Contagion
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Director Steven Soderbergh knows how to keep calm in the face of a global pandemic. He's the anti-Michael Bay, the un-Roland Emmerich. No fake-documentary "realism" here; Soderbergh values the silence before the storm, or a hushed two-person encounter in which one or both parties are concealing something. Written by Scott Z. Burns, "Contagion" -- likely to provoke a widespread outbreak of midscreening antibacterial hand gel usage -- contains little in the way of on-screen ... (read more)
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Seven Days in Utopia
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
In "Seven Days in Utopia," a mild-mannered young golfer has a mild meltdown in the middle of a tournament. That's followed by seven days of perspective-patching among mild-mannered, God-fearing folk in rural Texas. Faith and "fore" walk hand in hand -- sort of -- in this soft-centered, faith-based drama starring Lucas Black of "Friday Night Lights," "Get Low" and "Jarhead." Based on David L. Cook's self-help novel, "Golf's Sacred Journey:... (read more)
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Love Crime
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips The sleek French thriller "Love Crime" accomplishes a staggering amount, without much fuss, in its first two minutes. A swank Paris apartment, evening. Christine, the upper-echelon agribusiness executive played by Kristin Scott Thomas, is going over plans for the upcoming Cairo meeting with her fastidious assistant, Isabelle, played by Ludivine Sagnier. "Bordeaux?" offers Christine, after inquiring about her ... (read more)
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The Debt
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
When Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds and this year's breakout actress, Jessica Chastain of "The Tree of Life" and "The Help," can't make much out of a political thriller, you know something's off with both the political and the thriller components. A chaotic remake of the 2007 Israeli drama "Ha-Hov," director John Madden's "The Debt" contains enough narrative stuffing for two or three separate pictures or a six-hour miniseries. While it's poss... (read more)
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Colombiana
Boyd van Hoeij, Chicago Tribune
Variety Critic The Olivier Megaton-directed "Colombiana" may not be the brainiest of action films, but one of the merits of producer Luc Besson's latest brainchild is that fanboys worldwide will come away with a scrap of horticultural knowledge as well as a pretty good time. Sexy, vengeful contract killer Cataleya (a feline Zoe Saldana) is named after a Colombian orchid species, signing her victims with a lipstick drawing of her floral namesake. Rather than adopting a tired, flashba... (read more)
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Brighton Rock
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips In mediocrity lies opportunity. The new film version of Graham Greene's 1938 novel "Brighton Rock" isn't very good, but if you haven't yet seen the 1947 film version of Greene's book, do so! It's the right time. It's sharp and pungent and worthwhile for reasons beginning with, but hardly limited to, a 23-year-old Richard Attenborough's portrayal of the sadistic thug Pinkie Brown, whose haunted vision of damnation, rede... (read more)
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Circumstance
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Set in Iran but shot in Lebanon, for obvious reasons, the coming-of-age drama "Circumstance" stars two photogenic and expressive marvels, Nikohl Boosheri and Sarah Kazemy, as teenage friends and lovers living under the thumb of an oppressive regime. Modern-day Tehran comes alive in the underground club sequences of New York-based writer-director Maryam Keshavarz's feature. Yet the film wages an internal battle between ... (read more)
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Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
When fantasy filmmaker Guillermo del Toro says he considers the 1973 made-for-TV movie "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" the scariest thing ever made for the medium, he's not really talking about the teleplay itself. He's remembering, fondly, his own preteen susceptibility -- what it was like to be a freaked-out kid watching a moderately well-made, cleverly suggestive haunted-house thriller (with goblins!). I felt the same way the year before when "The Night Stalker" aired, or... (read more)
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Our Idiot Brother
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Floating through life on a personal high only partly provided by cannabis, the bearded, Crocs-sporting, semiprofessional farmer specializing in organics (or rather, "biodynamics") is played, winningly, by Paul Rudd in an enjoyable shamble of a picture called "Our Idiot Brother." The character qualifies less as an idiot than as the most trusting soul in America, a man of limited ambition but infinite warmth, crazier about his golden retriever, named Willie Nelson, than he i... (read more)
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Higher Ground
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
We envy the will and passion of others; we're only human. In the fine, searching, new independent film "Higher Ground," director and star Vera Farmiga plays Corinne, a member of a fervent evangelical Christian church somewhere in the Midwest. It's not the key relationship in the film -- that would be the one between Corinne's own selves, looking for resolution -- but Corinne's most significant friendship is with Annika, the charismatic earth-mother played by Dagmara Dominczyk. With ... (read more)
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Fright Night RealD 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Plenty gory, but graced by a jovial sense of humor and an enjoyably guts-centric use of 3-D, director Craig Gillespie's remake of the 1985 vampire film "Fright Night" may not tickle the fancies of those who have a close personal friendship with the older version. I have no such relationship. I brought no carry-on baggage to what Gillespie and screenwriter Marti Noxon deliver their way, with a cast of surprising quality. In relation to the original, some things about the new "Fr... (read more)
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One Day
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Like "Same Time, Next Year" with less guilt or "When Harry Met Sally ..." with a somewhat different ending, "One Day" pops in and out of the lives of characters played by Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess across two decades, spanning university graduation to older, wiser 40-dom. A huge hit in England and elsewhere, David Nicholls' clever best-seller comes to the movies in an adaptation Nicholls himself wrote. Lone Scherfig, lately of "An Education," direct... (read more)
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30 Minutes or Less
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Fast, cheap and out of control, and set in glamorous Grand Rapids, Mich., director Ruben Fleischer's "30 Minutes or Less" doesn't even crack the 80-minute mark if you exclude the end credits. The same was true of Fleischer's feature film debut, the very funny "Zombieland," which contained more visual wit and kinetic energy than most action comedies we're seeing lately. Fleischer and his editor, Alan Baumgarten, have complementary senses of humor; they know how to cut for m... (read more)
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The Help
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"The Help" has Viola Davis going for it, and she is more than enough. The actress deserves the Academy Award nomination (if not the Oscar Itself) she'll be receiving come early 2012. I'm not working for her; I'm just passing along news of the nearly inevitable. Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material. You can talk all you want about how a movie begins and ends with the screenwriter(s), or lives and dies on a d... (read more)
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The Whistleblower
Mark Olsen, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips When a movie is "inspired by true events," the ideal is that the real-story backdrop will lend an air of authenticity to the drama, but often it inadvertently leads to excessive earnestness or aggrandizement. "The Whistleblower" is one such film, too well-intentioned for its own good. The movie tells the story of Kathy Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer who signs on with a private contractor to act as a U.N.... (read more)
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The Change-Up
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The occasion was a bedroom farce, as they used to call them, from a more buttoned-up era. When the comedy "Any Wednesday" opened on Broadway in 1964, Walter Kerr reviewed a then-unknown Gene Hackman and noted, memorably, the actor's "wonderfully light-footed habit of stepping off a joke before it begins to complain." Isn't that an exquisite description of an actor's timing and demeanor? Now, flash forward to 2011 and the hard-R, body-switching comedy "The Change-Up,&q... (read more)
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Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Swift and nimble, like the rising ape at its center, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is gratifyingly free of the usual big-budget blockbuster weight and volume. After so many galumphing origin stories involving human-based superheroes, it's nice to get one about a simian revolutionary in training, and one that really does stand alone as a satisfying prequel requiring little or no knowledge or nostalgia for the five "Planet of the Apes" pictures of the late 1960s and early... (read more)
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Bellflower
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Woodrow and Aiden, best pals in their 20s who left Wisconsin for California together without a plan, grew up on a steady childhood diet of "Mad Max." They liked the Mel Gibson bloodbath enough to rewatch a VHS copy dozens of times, while daydreams of surviving the apocalypse and someday driving a car emitting "huge flames to burn our enemies" danced in their heads. Who says dreams must die when adulthood comes calling? In "Bellflower," a rewardingly twisted hybri... (read more)
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Cowboys & Aliens
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Wait, cowboys and aliens? In the face of constant, competitive challenges, the movie industry clings to a handful of truths, among them: Sex sells; concessions pay the bills; Taylor Lautner may have trouble headlining a movie on his own; and a film can deal in cowboys, or it can traffic in aliens, but probably it cannot accommodate both. Just because no one's tried it before doesn't mean it's worth trying. And yet "Cowboys & Aliens," in which Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford take on c... (read more)
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Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In the aggravatingly punctuated romantic comedy "Crazy, Stupid, Love." (can you even believe that period?) does anyone ever discuss why the central couple, played by Steve Carell and Julianne Moore, should or shouldn't be together? Or the romantic challenges that face two people who met in high school, when they were pre-adults, and settled down when their friends were still wound up over their latest romances? No, they don't. They do not talk about such matters. Too bad, because th... (read more)
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Friends With Benefits
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Since American media sexualizes almost everything except sex, Hollywood romantic comedies about two people making hey-hey without any big plans for any big future rarely come easily, or operate from a spirit of carnal delight. The strain of being hip and loose, yet mindful of the conventional, even Puritanical rom-com imperatives, is too much to handle. Leave complicated sexual lives to the French, many Americans mutter, even as they secretly envy the easy Gallic flirtation, not to mention th... (read more)
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Captain America: The First Avenger RealD 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Everything good about ``Captain America: The First Avenger, which certainly is the most stylish comics-derived entertainment of the year, sets director Joe Johnston's film in direct opposition to the attention-span-destroying likes of ``Transformers 3. It's paced and designed for people who won't shrivel up and die if two or three characters take 45 seconds between combat sequences to have a conversation about world domination, or a dame. This is the fifth film in the interconnected Marvel co... (read more)
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Another Earth
Betsy Sharkey, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips "Another Earth" is quietly and movingly out of this world. Director Mike Cahill has woven sci-fi imaginings and quantum physics theories of parallel universes into a provocative meditation on the prospect of rewriting your life history. It is no simple task to spin such abstract notions into smart entertainment, but there is such a strong creative voice stirring in Cahill's first feature that it's easy to forgive the s... (read more)
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The Names of Love
Kevin Thomas, Chicago Tribune
Director Michel Leclerc and his co-writer Baya Kasmi illuminate the ethnic, racial and religious issues that have beset France from World War II to the present -- through, surprisingly, the unfolding of a classic romantic comedy plot. "Le Nom des Gens" ("The Names of Love") is so inspired and insightful that it is frequently hilarious yet does not shy away from tragedy. Leclerc and Kasmi's ability to explore complex, volatile social issues with such exuberant humor won the... (read more)
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Zookeeper
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
We want the same thing from our comedians that we expect of great ballplayers -- that they "leave it all on the field." And Kevin James does that. From his various team-ups with Adam Sandler to "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," James hurls himself at the physical shtick and never lets on that he knows he's not making art. In "Zookeeper," James and his stunt-doubles take a pounding -- pratfalls, bicycle spills, porcupine pokes. It's a kid-friendly romantic comedy, a " ... (read more)
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Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Musical groups come together and they come apart, and even the ones that come apart occasionally get back together for gigs and another fan-tantalizing prospect of a new album. So it is with A Tribe Called Quest, the subject of debut feature filmmaker Michael Rapaport's bracing documentary -- a reminder, part "Behind the Music" and part something better, that even artists professing love and togetherness have a hard time keeping it going. Members of ATCQ have expressed varying degre... (read more)
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Horrible Bosses
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
You can practically hear little coils of contempt tightening inside Jason Bateman every time he's in a pickle on screen. In the new comedy "Horrible Bosses" the Bateman specialty is the are-you-trying-to-tell-me response. At one point in the film, when confronted with some improbable information, the "Arrested Development" alum asks one of his partners in idiot crime: "You found a hit man online?" "Horrible Bosses" is not Noel Coward, nor is it trying t... (read more)
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Monte Carlo
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
So "Monte Carlo" turns out to be a lot easier to take than both "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" and "Larry Crowne." You never know. Here's the sort of hardened show business veteran we have in Selena Gomez, who spent two seasons way back in her preteens on "Barney & Friends." We have the star of Disney Channel's "Wizards of Waverly Place." We have the star of Disney's TV movie "Princess Protection Program." We have a hardworking voc... (read more)
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Larry Crowne
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The best romantic comedies have a blithe, take-it-or-leave-it spirit. "Larry Crowne" has the opposite. It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest. Set in an American middle class only vaguely like the real one, "Larry Crowne" co-stars Julia Roberts as a community college instructor of public speaking and English (I think; the script is vague) who rivals the Cameron Diaz layabout in "Bad Teacher" in aggressive slackerdom. The main star, though, is th... (read more)
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Bad Teacher
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
An employee of the Chicago public school system, the ha-cha seventh-grade educator Elizabeth portrayed by Cameron Diaz in "Bad Teacher" blows most of her classroom time showing her students (whose names she never learns) movies such as "Lean on Me," "Stand and Deliver" and "Dangerous Minds" while she nurses a hangover or longs for her next bong hit. Dumped by her fiance, this craven schemer has returned to the job she thought she'd left behind. But a da... (read more)
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Cars 2 RealD 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Cars 2" had every chance to improve upon the leisurely 2006 animated feature from Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Studios. Yet here we are, stuck with a merchandising assembly line in lieu of a movie. Despite its technical and design finesse, this ranks as Pixar's weakest project to date, as well as the first from the animation powerhouse that can be described as craven. Twelve films into the life and times of Pixar, it's clear the "Cars" pictures are best assesse... (read more)
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Mysteries of Lisbon
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips A formal marvel carved from, and around, a narrative whopper, Raul Ruiz's adaptation of the mid-19th century Portuguese novel "Mysteries of Lisbon" arrives in U.S. theaters as a two-part, four-hour version edited down from a six-hour version produced for European television. It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right. The prolific Chilean director died earlier this year at age 70. Throughout the machina... (read more)
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Green Lantern RealD 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Green just isn't the superhero color this year. Beyond its dominant hue, director Martin Campbell's earnest, noisy "Green Lantern" has little in common with the blase comic indolence of "The Green Hornet," which starred Seth Rogen and came out, to general disdain, five months ago. (Now there's a name for a villain: Gen. Disdain.) The media-generated questions preceding the arrival of "Green Lantern" have focused on the question of whether Ryan Reynolds, who had y... (read more)
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Super 8: The IMAX Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Set in 1979 during the summer of "Alien" and "Breaking Away," "Super 8" evokes a time before smartphones and YouTube, when making movies with your pals (inspired by the last five movies you saw at the two-screen theater out by the shopping center) took some effort, risked serious social isolation and constituted a high, rarefied calling. It's a good time, this movie -- a critter picture conjoined with a coming-of-age picture. While its more obvious '70s and '80s ... (read more)
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X-Men: First Class
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Primarily for dues-paying "X-Men" club members in good standing, rather than anyone wandering by a multiplex wondering if the prequel stands on its own, "X-Men: First Class" settles for moderately engrossing second-class mutant superheroism. Plus it includes January Jones as Emma Frost, here depicted as Austin Powers' dream shag, and Rose Byrne as a perpetually aghast CIA operative. Mainly, though, the film features Michael Fassbender in a pivotal role. That's enough to li... (read more)
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Kung Fu Panda 2 RealD 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It takes somewhat longer for the awesomeness to turn all that awesome. And you can't really replicate that element of surprise that the first movie had going for it: a fan boy panda that gets to team up with his martial arts heroes. But "Kung Fu Panda 2" delivers more heart than laughs, and is, if anything, more visually dazzling than the 2008 original film. Cuddly, plush Po (voiced by Jack Black) is now a reasonably accomplished and competent Dragon Warrior, a sixth member of the F... (read more)
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Bridesmaids
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
There's a reason "Bridesmaids" isn't called "The Bridesmaid." Kristen Wiig, the star and co-writer (along with Annie Mumolo) of director Paul Feig's comedy, has a self-effacing streak running right alongside her deadly deadpan streak. Even when she's playing the lead, she's not really playing the lead. Reedy and extremely pretty, Wiig has a dry, backhanded way of nailing laughs. In the posters and ads for "Bridesmaids," all Wiig's female co-stars strike bigger po... (read more)
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L'amour fou
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips According to his longtime lover and business partner Pierre Berge, the designer and global name-brand Yves Saint Laurent adored haute couture "but he was never fooled by it." He took it seriously, but just enough, Berge says. At the same time, he says, "a courtier brings to mind the fame, the triumphs, the applause, the catwalk. But that's not all. It's a terrible profession." The swank, engaging documentary ... (read more)
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Everything Must Go
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The alcoholic son of an alcoholic, sales manager Nick Porter was born in a Raymond Carver short story called "Why Don't You Dance?" published in the 1981 Carver collection "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." The story, which takes place at a yard sale among one man's stuff and his regrets, has been expanded into "Everything Must Go," from debut feature film writer-director Dan Rush. Will Ferrell, mining the minimalist vein he explored in "Stranger ... (read more)
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Thor RealD 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
At this point in the Marvel Comics-derived superhero cycle, audiences can be forgiven for feeling a tad worn out, both for reasons of quality and quantity. My rear end's thor just thinking about how many more we have coming. Yet sometimes a product exceeds expectations. I like "Thor," for example. This is remarkable, considering the lameness of the first 25 minutes of director Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of the Marvel character introduced in 1962. A stolid visual stylist at best, B... (read more)
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Fast Five: The IMAX Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
As adolescent male power fantasies go, "Fast Five" has an undeniable trashy charm. Things blow up right and left, muscle cars are pulverized, sexpots vamp and brawny men wallop the tar out of one another. Yet there are pauses between adrenaline-packed driving sequences, shootouts and explosions for three romance subplots and two involving babies. Here's a summer popcorn flick strong enough for a man and gentle enough for a woman. The story, such as it is, begins with an exhilarating... (read more)
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Incendies
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Now this is how you adapt a play for the screen. Not by opening up the action in extraneous, travelogue-minded ways. But by burrowing so deeply into the characters' psyches, their discoveries become your own, and at some point, you realize you're watching a better film than any you've seen since 2010. The source material is the play "Scorched" (2003) by Wajdi Mouawad, a Lebanese-born theater artist who emigrated to Quebec and then Montreal. Brilliantly adapted, his play has become t... (read more)
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The Double Hour
MIchael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips I've seen the fabulously acted Italian thriller "The Double Hour" twice now, and for all its intricate manipulations, it stays with me for a very simple reason: The love story at its bittersweet heart is played for keeps. Fans of "Shutter Island" make the same argument regarding that picture, and the romantic ache at its core. Someday I'll give that one's bombast and grandiosity a second look. "The Doubl... (read more)
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Rio RealD 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Midway through one in a manic string of chase sequences in the animated "Rio," the uptight macaw voiced by Jesse Eisenberg says, "I would love to go five minutes without almost getting killed." This is the movie's strategy: near-perpetual peril, dialogue that's ... almost funny and an extremely bright color palette, plus the musical supervision of the great Sergio Mendes, whose LPs I still have in the house somewhere, my tastes' not having changed much since 1966. Re-heari... (read more)
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Hanna
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Hanna" presents the problem of the well-made diversion that is, at its core, repellent. It is not because of who's on screen. In director Joe Wright's film, Saoirse Ronan sets her piercing gaze on the role of the teenage daughter of a trained CIA assassin, played by Eric Bana. The story begins in snowy northern Finland where father, rugged but humane, schools his little girl in all manner of brutal combat and survival tactics. Dad's former supervisor, a slab of granite-like resolve... (read more)
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Meek's Cutoff
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips At one point in "Meek's Cutoff," set in 1845, the frontier settler played by the excellent, plain-spoken Michelle Williams fires two warning shots after an alarming encounter with a Native American. Hurriedly she loads the rifle with gunpowder and ammunition, while director Kelly Reichardt observes the action from a patient, fixed middle-distance vantage point. It takes a good while -- precisely as long as it would in ... (read more)
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Miral
Sheri Linden, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Julian Schnabel broadens his canvas for his fourth film, "Miral," turning his lens on multiple protagonists and a half-century of Middle East strife. On the face of it a bold undertaking, the Jerusalem-set feature plays out with an awkward staidness. The story of four Palestinian women, "Miral" is no political tract but a Sirkian melodrama. The painter-turned-director knows how to manipulate his images to cre... (read more)
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Win Win
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips "Transformers 3" is sure to have more of them, and they will be louder. But the year's single most exquisite sound effect can be heard in "Win Win," the latest easygoing charmer from writer-director Tom McCarthy. The film's protagonist, a cash-strapped suburban New Jersey attorney played by Paul Giamatti, works in an office with his fellow part-time high school wrestling coach, an accountant played by Jeffrey... (read more)
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Mars Needs Moms RealD 3D
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Feature animation comes at us in so many different technologies and modes of expression these days that the possibilities are boundless. So are the pitfalls. A good-looking shell of a movie such as "Rango" comes along, offering a string of nots -- it's not in 3-D; it's not a sequel; it's not based on material from another medium; it's not ashamed of pilfering film history, with minimal wit, for its own purposes -- and the result is hailed in many quarters (I was in the minority) as ... (read more)
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Rango
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
As a family demographic product, "Rango" has a million selling points, among them an unusually strong voice cast headed by Johnny Depp in tremulous-aesthete mode, a popular live-action director making his feature animation debut, and a twist on a genre temporarily back in vogue, thanks to "True Grit." It is, for what it is, a work of considerable care and craft. And it's completely soulless. I may be in the minority. But seeing this sour riff on everything from "Cat B... (read more)
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The Company Men
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A single spontaneous moment pops up in the otherwise obsessively well-ordered ensemble drama "The Company Men," written and directed by "ER" and "West Wing" alum John Wells. It's a quick shot in a hotel room tryst of Maria Bello bopping back into frame, unexpectedly, with a wolfish grin on her face as her character -- a corporate layoff specialist -- bids farewell to her lover, a high-flying but soul-corroded executive played by Tommy Lee Jones. The actors in thi... (read more)
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True Grit
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The new "True Grit" restores all the grit removed in the first version (the 1969 Henry Hathaway film starring John Wayne) of the 1968 Charles Portis novel. All of Portis' sardonic wit has been retained this time, and then some. The "then some" derives from this project's writers, directors and editors, all of whom are Joel and Ethan Coen, who edit under a pseudonym and who have been making Westerns (of variously disguised sorts), film noir riffs and revenge tragicomedies t... (read more)
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Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore 3D
Glenn Whipp, Chicago Tribune
The title might be "Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore," but you can't really talk about this OK sequel to the best-forgotten 2001 kids movie without addressing another animal -- namely, the elephant in the room. "Cats & Dogs" is the latest family movie to be unnecessarily converted to 3-D, which means that if mom and dad want to take the kids to see the fur fly this weekend, they're going to probably pay a premium surcharge to receive absolutely nothing of value in ... (read more)
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Inception
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Sometimes the first adjective spoken in a movie speaks volumes. The first one you hear in the new thriller "Inception" is "delirious," describing the psychological state of a man, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has washed up (or awakened) on a beach and is brought into the home of a wealthy man he has known in other circumstances, somewhere in time. "Delirious" describes the movie as well, which assuredly offers audiences sights heretofore unseen. Despite riffs... (read more)
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Detestable Moi 3D Numerique
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
An agreeable jumble, the animated feature "Despicable Me" sells its 3-D in ways you wouldn't call sophisticated or witty. But you certainly notice it. Front car in a roller coaster, up, up, up, then down, down, down -- aaaaahhhhAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!! Like that. And now and then, I like it like that, no matter how dubious this second coming of 3-D is starting to smell. Compared with the restrained sophistication of Pixar's approach to the technology, and in sharp contrast to such murky,... (read more)
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How to Train Your Dragon: An IMAX 3D Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The swoops and dives of the exuberant 3-D DreamWorks Animation feature "How to Train Your Dragon," in which the teenage hero breaks all the Viking rules and befriends the winged enemy, should prove as addicting to its target audience as similar scenes have in a little something called "Avatar." Freely adapted from the books by Cressida Cowell, "How to Train Your Dragon" exists to support its flying sequences, just as last year's animated DreamWorks offering, &quo... (read more)
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Bronson
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
English actor Tom Hardy is rumored to be the new Mad Max in that franchise's reboot. If he does end up in Mel Gibson's boots, judging from Hardy's riveting work in the new film "Bronson," the "mad" part won't be an issue. Not widely known in America, the protagonist of "Bronson" is famous in his home country as "Britain's most violent prisoner," a man (now in his 50s) who has spent 34 years behind bars, 30 of those in solitary confinement. This is a man... (read more)
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Zombieland
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Warts, entrails and all, I had a ball at "Zombieland." It's 81 minutes of my kind of stupid. The premise gives you absolutely nothing new in terms of what zombies do, or look like, or run like, and the genre's more stringent aficionados may get sniffy when confronted with a modest, high-spirited gore comedy. But I laughed more often, and harder, at the best gags here than I did with any number of other comedies this year. And there's something inherently droll about plunking down Je... (read more)
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Under the Sea
Michael Esposito, Chicago Tribune
Jim Carrey narrates "Under the Sea 3D," a new installment in the underwater 3-D filmmaking that IMAX pretty much owns these days. Nothing compares to the images in these films, and director Howard Hall, whose previous offerings include the IMAX hits "Deep Sea 3D" and "Into the Deep 3D," knows his way around the underwater camera - all 1,300 pounds of it - and personally tallied 358 hours of the dive team's 2,073 hours under the sea (accomplished in 1,668 total di... (read more)
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Wendy and Lucy
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
America is full of people like Wendy Carroll, the young woman at the center of director Kelly Reichardt's small, supple new film "Wendy and Lucy." Somewhere along the line - we're not given the usual facile reasons - her promise and possibilities have been thwarted. She is a couple of hundred dollars away from homelessness, living with her sweet-faced dog out of a Honda Civic in dire need of repair. These two have traveled from the Midwest (we're told Wendy has a sister in Muncie, I... (read more)
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Twilight
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Low-key" is not the adjective you'd expect to describe a highly anticipated vampire movie, but there it is. "Twilight" is a film of intelligent strengths and easily avoidable weaknesses, a modest film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's publishing phenomenon. It is faithful to its source material, which will likely please the fan base. It's also better written than Meyer's book, which tends toward froth and fulmination. (Sample line: "I was in danger of being distracted ... (read more)
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Mamma Mia!
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It's funny what you buy completely onstage and resist completely, or nearly, on-screen. Case in point: "Mamma Mia!" -the ABBA-fueled stage phenomenon that has now become "Mamma Mia! The Movie." Of course I never miss a Meryl Streep musical. On-screen she sang in "Silkwood," "Ironweed," "Postcards From the Edge" and plenty in "A Prairie Home Companion." Onstage Streep put her pipes to work on Brecht and Weill's "Happy End";... (read more)
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The Happening
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening," there's something in the air, or the parks, or something, that causes people to stop whatever they're doing, slide into a trace and commit suicide. That same cryptic something apparently also causes talented writer-directors to forget how to seduce an audience. Shyamalan has had a rough streak, what with "The Village" and "Lady in the Water" and now this. True, "The Happening" rests on a workable premise, and the... (read more)
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Chicago 10
Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune
The flashes of heat in our current presidential campaign are mere sparks to the flames of 1968, that pivotal period in the conflagration known as the Sixties. There were years of stoking. Growing rage over Vietnam. A civil rights struggle. A generational rebellion like none before or since. An establishment angry over what it deemed decadence and coarseness in youthful garb and speech. And, just before the Chicago Democratic Convention, the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kenned... (read more)
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4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Great acting comes in all shapes, sizes and temperatures, and sometimes a murmur of the heart speaks as loudly as the grand theatrical gesture. For a demonstration in the opposite of what Daniel Day-Lewis is up to, gloriously, in "There Will Be Blood," just savor the cool, subtle assurance of the greatest performance not recognized by this year's Academy Awards. The portrayal belongs to Anamaria Marinca, whose Sphinx-like countenance masks an emotional nightmare in "4 Months, 3... (read more)
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The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Scott Schueller, Chicago Tribune
Take maniacal classic video game champion Billy Mitchell, questionable video game world-record organization Twin Galaxies and unemployed dad Steve Wiebe vying to usurp the champ, and you've got a great story. On its surface, "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" smells like the plot of a bad Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson comedy. Put Stiller in a unitard, mustachioed, with the hair of an '80s heavy-metal drummer and pit him against All-American, apple pie-eating Owen Wilson in an outda... (read more)
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Grindhouse
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Fanboy vengeance is theirs! Like so many stray body parts, the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double bill "Grindhouse" gathers up two 85-minute features, "Planet Terror" by Rodriguez and Tarantino's more talkatively sadistic (and far better) "Death Proof"; a quartet of coming-attraction trailers for fake `70s-schlockazoid pictures of various genres, one of which is a riot; and 1,001 memories of the genuine grindhouse trash that malnourished many a grateful yo... (read more)
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God Grew Tired of Us
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"God Grew Tired of Us," Christopher Quinn's straightforward documentary, follows the fortunes of three Sudanese refugees in their new American lives. It's worth seeing simply for the reunion between one of the men, a lovely spirit named John Bul Dau, and his long-separated mother. Just off the plane from Sudan, the woman greets her son by dancing, singing, collapsing in the airport in astonished gratitude. It's a fantastic scene, and you can detect in it all sorts of culture shocks ... (read more)
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Children of Men
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Dsytopian nightmares are so yesterday. They're a dime a dozen in the movies; earlier this year, for example, "V for Vendetta" came up with exactly 10 cents' worth of cinematic interest in exchange for your $9.50. The latest hellish forecast for our planet, however, makes up for the sluggishness of "Vendetta" in spades. It is "Children of Men," based on a P.D. James novel, and as directed - dazzlingly - by Alfonso Cuaron, it is that rare futuristic thriller: grim ... (read more)
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Night at the Museum
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
You know Ben Stiller isn't coming off well in "Night at the Museum" when his character, a third-shift security guard at New York's Museum of Natural History, is beset by Attila the Hun and his marauding hordes and you find yourself rooting for the hordes. Stranded in this charmless fantasy, Stiller is reduced to his old halting, squirming tricks. Hot (well, cold) off his "Pink Panther" remake, director Shawn Levy squanders a rich premise. Working from Milan Trenc's book, a... (read more)
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V for Vendetta
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
If the h-for-hype "V for Vendetta" connects with a wide American audience, then something truly has shifted in the homeland-insecurity pop landscape of the early 21st century. It means we're ready for a cultured, sophisticated, man-about-town terrorist who espouses the belief that "blowing up a building can change the world." Finally, a film to unite movie-mad members of al-Qaida with your neighbor's kid, the one with the crush on Natalie Portman. Various film enthusiasts,... (read more)
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Last Days
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
When actor Michael Pitt comes wandering out of the woods in the opening scene of Gus Van Sant's new film, "Last Days," playing reclusive rock star Blake - a character who takes part of his bio from Seattle grunge legend Kurt Cobain - it's as if civilization were being put on hold. An eerie quiet takes over the screen. Branches rustle, water rushes. As this jammy pants-clad rocker, looking irretrievably stoned, staggers around, sloshes through the river and finally urinates into the ... (read more)
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Kung Fu Hustle
Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune
"Kung Fu Hustle" swaggers into theaters this Friday, delivering a full-on-the-mouth, sloppy-wet kiss to Hong Kong martial arts movies. Named Best Picture by the Hong Kong Film Critics Association, Stephen Chow's action-comedy suggests influences as diverse as early Gordon Liu movies, the Mortal Kombat video games and Looney Tunes cartoons. "Kung Fu Hustle" also represents, in part, an Asian movement to recapture international audiences. Blockbusters such as Quentin Taranti... (read more)
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The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," in which Bill Murray plays a shaggy-dog American version of oceanographer-filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau, is a comedy that seems to have most everything going for it but the ability to make us laugh. Despite its cast and director, it's an amazingly unfunny movie, drowned in its own conceits, half-strangled by the tongue so obtrusively in its cheek. Anderson, the writer-director of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbau... (read more)
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Howl's Moving Castle
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" is a great animated feature - and one made, obviously, as much for older audiences as very young ones. But this wondrous movie probably shouldn't be put in age brackets at all. It's perfect for anyone with a youthful heart and a rich imagination. Though highly reminiscent of the whimsical Japanese genius' last two films, 1997's "Princess Mononoke" and 2001's "Spirited Away," it's even more densely virtuosic. This new film t... (read more)
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Kill Bill: Vol. 2
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
"Kill Bill, Vol. 2" is the sound of a filmmaker in love with his own voice. For sure that voice is lively and distinct, which is what made "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" so watchable even as you suspected that it was more of a bravura exercise than an emotionally engaged piece of storytelling. But after spending an additional two-plus hours with "Vol. 2," you may be seeking a cure for cinematic verbal diarrhea. "Vol. 2" was supposed to provide the payoffs that &qu... (read more)
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Mean Girls
Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune
The biting teen comedy "Mean Girls" heralds the silver-screen big bang of two promising careers: actress Lindsay Lohan and comedy writer/actor Tina Fey. In one movie, Lohan ("Freaky Friday") goes from a Disney-sculpted actress to her own star, transported by "Saturday Night Live" head writer Fey's nervy comic script. Lohan stars as 15-year-old Cady Heron, whose childhood in Africa with her zoologist parents leaves her ill-equipped for the jungle politics of high ... (read more)
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Shaun of the Dead
Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune
Following the success of "28 Days Later," this year's remake of "Dawn of the Dead" and the recently released "Resident Evil: Apocalypse," you would think the zombie genre has ambled its course. Think again. With "Shaun of the Dead," British filmmakers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have rolled out a gleefully gory, pitch-perfect parody of George Romero's zombie films. But this isn't a movie about other movies. "Shaun of the Dead" stands on its ow... (read more)
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Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
There's no question that Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking. What's questionable is whether it's more than that. He's been much imitated since his one-two punch of "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) and "Pulp Fiction" (1994), yet as you watch "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" (the story's second half, "Vol. 2," comes out in February), you realize that no one combines tension and release, violence and humor, dialogue and action an... (read more)
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The Warrior
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Asif Kapadia's "The Warrior," which the director-writer describes as an "Eastern" (a Western set in the east), is a stunning debut film. In this remarkable fable-like work of adventure, tragedy and possible transcendence, Kapadia - of Indian descent but raised in England - takes the old genres of the Western or samurai film and resets them in the breathtaking landscapes of India's Rajasthan desert and Himalayan mountains, transmuting the old forms into something both achin... (read more)
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Tortilla Soup
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
One might not necessarily assume that the multifaceted story of a Taiwanese family could be easily transplanted into a Mexican-American household. Yet Ang Lee's 1995 Taiwanese family drama "Eat Drink Man Woman" has made a surprisingly graceful transition to the Los Angeles setting of Maria Ripoll's "Tortilla Soup," a remake that reimagines the "Eat Drink" patriarch widower chef and his three daughters as Mexican-Americans dealing with issues of assimilation as we... (read more)
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Cartel
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Blow starts off on a roaring cinematic high, but then it collapses into darkness and depression. And though, to some extent, that's the effect director Ted Demme wants, the movie goes too far. Demme and his screenwriters are trying something interesting: They want to make a realistic, no-holds-barred chronicle of the drug trade in the '60s and '70s -- about cocaine, the Colombian cartels and a real American dealer, George Jung (played by Johnny Depp), who helped make coke the chic hard drug o... (read more)
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A Nightmare on Elm Street
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"You gotta stop that kinda dreamin,'" said the naive mother in the original 1984 "Nightmare on Elm Street," and of course the advice was not heeded, and Freddy Krueger (billed as "Fred Krueger") and his metallic claw-fingers wiped out teenager after teenager, and a franchise was born. Director Wes Craven's film never did get the critical respect of, say, John Carpenter's first " Halloween," but its creepiest scenes -- the body-bag appearance at the high... (read more)
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Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure
Michael Esposito, Chicago Tribune
National Geographic's "Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure" dives into the toothy Cretaceous era's undersea world where the Great Plains were part of the seabed in an inland sea, a North American Mediterranean, 80 million years ago. The stories, narrated by Liev Schreiber, are based on fossil records. For example, the star of the film is a female dolichorhynchops or "doli" (pronounced "dolly"), a dolphin-sized marine reptile that fed mainly on fish and squid... (read more)
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Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
"Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams" is a film that's both sensitive and a shocker, an unvarnished portrait of a tumultuous relationship between a single mother and her daughter in postwar Sarajevo. It's also a dramatic contemporary fresco of a neighborhood reeking with remembered horror: the tongue-twistingly named Grbavica (pronounced approximately: gra-vee-tsa), which became a torture center during the Bosnian War ethnic cleansing. Part of the movie plays like a lower-class Eastern ... (read more)
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