Theatrical Reviews »

Several months ago while Quentin Tarantino promoted Inglourious Basterds, he mentioned that he might only make a few more films before he retires because, as he said, he didn't want to make "old man" movies. If anyone is unclear as to precisely what an "old man" movie is, they need look no further than Everybody's Fine, Robert De Niro's latest film, about a father trying to reconnect with his adult children after the death of his wife.

De Niro, once an indisputable fount of actorly integrity and hard work, has in recent years played a series of characters that either demanded little of his oft-discussed commitment, or exploited his persona as an intimidating figure both on and off screen. And while the character he plays here indicates a return to the kind of character work that made him a screen icon, there's no denying that the film itself is the cinematic equivalent of career achievement award, which is why Everybody's Fine is well-done and effective but too treacly to be truly powerful.

The delicate planning scenario (The Great Train Robbery, Rififi), the humorous spin (Small Time Crooks, Quick Change), the hidden master plan (Inside Man, The Lookout), the crew of hardened professionals (Ronin, Heat), the sexy, over-the-top robbery (Oceans 12, The Italian Job), and the aftermath (Reservoir Dogs); these are the six core orbits almost all heist films fall into. If one were to draw a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between the six circles, Nimrod Antal's Armored would land almost exclusively in the aftermath category. There's no planning involved, no comic relief, no last minute twist, no grandiose kidnapping, no inkling of men with enough skill to count how many exits there are from any room they're in.

No, Armored is a simple story of a group of blue collar workers who ferry millions in cash to and fro for an armored transport escort service and decide one day that they're going to rob themselves during a staged, fake heist, making away with the bank's insured $42 million. As with all heist films, however, things do not go as planned, and so the audience spends the bulk of the picture post-heist in the midst of the bloody consequence stage of what was supposed to be a bloodless operation.

Now to say that Armored has no extended planning sequence or no grand scheme is not to say that it is lacking such machinations, rather they were not required by the story at hand. And though this may turn off viewers who are accustomed to seeing the What, Where, When, and How thoroughly established before hand, it's not a problem for Nimrod Antal, who manages to transform a simple story into an engaging 88 minutes by spending all of his time on the Who and the Why. The trailers may have potential viewers believing Armored is going to be an explosion-packed thrill ride that follows a group of sympathetic Joe Schmoes making off like bandits, but that's not what Antal has delivered; and that is actually a good thing.

Susanne Bier's 2005 melodrama, Brothers, was just that, a simple soap opera between a war vet, his wife and his brother, and while Jim Sheridan's update isn't terribly different at its core, its all-American setting quietly places a firmer emphasis on the toll of our current war at home.

Just as Tommy Cahill (Jake Gyllenhaal) is getting out of another stint in jail, his brother Sam (Tobey Maguire) is about to ship off to Afghanistan for another tour of duty. His wife, Grace (Natalie Portman), wishes him well, as does everyone, but soon enough, his helicopter is taken down by enemy fire and news comes that Sam was among the casualties - although he is actually a prisoner of war. Tommy, out of guilt, and Grace, out of need, draw closer to one another, close enough to rile up the suspicions of a changed Sam once he returns home...

What I expected from Transylmania was a barrage of tired teen sex comedy gags shoehorned into a vampire movie spoof, and while Transylmania certainly delivered all of the exposed silicon breasts, pot smoking, and gross-out gags I anticipated, there's something downright quaint about the film -- a retro quality that I wasn't expecting. It's more of an old-fashioned hassle-in-the-castle farce, stuffed to the gills with dusty comedy relics like a character under a hypnotic spell that causes her to change personality at inopportune times or an ever-so-wacky case of mistaken identity featuring a college doofus who ends up being a dead-ringer for a vampiric overlord. This is dinosaur stuff. A rubber chicken and a squirting flower would've really capped things off.

Oren Skroog plays Rusty, pretty much the least believable college student I've ever seen in a movie, opening the film with a lengthy cast introduction montage, in case you happened to miss National Lampoon's Dorm Daze 1 and 2. By the way, surprise! Transylmania is a sequel, and not just a sequel, but like High School Musical 3 before it, the first theatrical sequel (and a Part 3) to a direct-to-video franchise. All of your favorite characters from Dorm Daze are back including Asian Stoner, Caucasian Stoner, Good Twin, Bad Twin, Desperate Nerd, Oversexed Bimbo, Alpha Male Dumb-Ass, Bi-Curious Guy, and Premature Ejaculator. It's a sprawling cast for a movie like this, but, by the film's end, I was thankful for the seemingly dozens of characters running around because it meant more time away from the hugely unnapealing Oren Skroog and his Peter Tork hair-do.

Armed with a collection of the world's notable directors, Paris je t'aime hit screens with a good deal of impact and buzz. It was to be the first piece in producer Emmanuel Benbihy's "Cities of Love," a collection of films detailing romance and metropolitan life across the globe, a series planning to travel to the likes of New York, Rio, Shanghai, Jerusalem, and Mumbai.

Three years later, the second installment is finally upon us with New York, I Love You. With only minor changes, the film continues the tradition of joining many internationally diverse filmmakers for the journey through a popular city, but the buzz has diminished. The film is slowly making its way across screens in the U.S., and will break into Canada come November 27. But how could one of Hollywood's most beloved cities find its ode so woefully under the radar? It's not an easy question to answer because while New York, I Love You might be flawed, it's also sweet, engaging, and nicely representative of that small island cluttered with millions of people.

By: Eugene Novikov, reprinted from the Telluride Film Festival '09

Just before the kid was born, the world burned. We don't know why, and the characters don't talk about it -- perhaps they don't quite know themselves, or maybe they've decided that it no longer matters. The Boy's universe is grey, full of ash, dust, and the ruins of a civilization he never saw. This is all he knows. His mother, seeing no point in going on, killed herself shortly after his birth. She was not alone. Many of those who didn't take their own lives were soon murdered by the desperate and hungry.

Skip ahead nine or ten years. The kid and his father wander the barren roadways heading south toward the coast for no clear reason other than that it gives them a tangible goal toward which to strive. (And there's always the hope that the ocean will be something other than gray.) Every day is a knock-down, drag-out fight for survival. They run, hide, starve, and fight off attackers who want their food, or their clothes, or, at one point, their flesh.

I set the stage like this not to horrify you or to gross you out, but to give you a sense of the relentless, pervasive grimness of The Road -- and then to turn around and say that The Road may be the most profoundly optimistic and life-affirming film you will see this year. Those who have read Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name won't be surprised by this. John Hillcoat's faithful, near-perfect adaptation beautifully captures McCarthy's synthesis of all-encompassing darkness and enduring hope.

By: William Goss, reprinted from Fantastic Fest '09

One can't ask too much of a film called Ninja Assassin -- that's a given -- but James McTeigue's proper directorial follow-up to V for Vendetta does its damnedest to take that insta-pulp title and weave around it a worn-out tale of forbidden love, family betrayal, and government conspiracy. Complete with some hard-to-see fight scenes and some harder-to-hear dialogue, all delivered with a poker-straight face and capped off with some super-splattery kills, it's like a graphic novel adaptation with comic book punctuation, a film so flagrant in its fakery that it almost forgets to have any fun.

Raizo (Korean pop star Rain, of Speed Racer and "Colbert Report" fame) was once an orphan, raised by a secretive clan to, um, assassinate as, well, a ninja would. One forbidden fling and one shamed father later, and our pariah protagonist is off to Berlin in order to save Europol* agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) from the grisly fate that her criminal investigations have inevitably drawn.

I will say this for Old Dogs: It is exactly as funny as you'd expect a movie to be that stars John Travolta and Robin Williams as two bachelors who must suddenly take care of precocious 7-year-old twins, and that was directed by the man who made Wild Hogs. Which is to say, it is not the least bit funny, not once, not even for a minute. Imagine a season's worth of plot devices from TV's most generic sitcom crammed into 88 excruciating minutes.

Here are the thoughts of Williams' character in this frantic, contrived mess: I had a one-night stand seven years ago, and it turns out I'm the father of twins! And now I have to babysit them for two weeks! But I'm working on the Big Account at my job, and I don't have time! Oh no, they don't allow children in my condos -- apparently not even temporarily, to visit -- so we have to stay with my best friend at his un-child-proofed apartment! Oh no, if I screw up this golf game with the client, it'll blow everything -- and I accidentally took my friend's medication this morning that gives me hallucinations! Oh no, my friend and I are going to breakfast with the kids, and everyone thinks we're their grandparents! And now the staff is singing a "welcome to the grandparents' club" song, which surely does not exist in real life anywhere! How embarrassing! And now we're on a camping trip with the kids, and the scout leader thinks my friend and I are gay, except we're too stupid to realize he thinks that, because somehow it's "funnier" if we don't know! Doh! We're on a collision course with wackiness!!

As voiced by Dwayne "the artist formerly known as The Rock" Johnson, astronaut Chuck Baker is the paragon of all-American achievement -- that is, until he conquers a far off world with an unexpected population, one inexplicably steeped in our '50s-era culture and terrified by the prospect of an alien invader in human form. More unfortunately for us, Chuck has landed smack-dab in the middle of Planet 51, a short-sighted assembly of sci-fi references and scatalogical humor that should nonetheless placate undemanding tots and, by extension, their undiscerning parents for ninety minutes or so.