It’s always a really awesome moviegoing experience when you get to see a star-making performance right before your eyes. It happens once, maybe twice a year. We are so inundated in most mainstream movies with stars we know and love (or hate), but there’s no magic. When we go see The Brave One, we know to expect from Jodie Foster. We’ve been there before. It can be really fun, therefore, to experience something fresh and new, even in a movie that’s a little bit rough around the edges. The new live-action family film Enchanted, certainly the best Disney has made in the last few years, features a wonderful performance from its main star Amy Adams. She’s the big reason to go check out the movie.

The premise is a cute one. The movie opens in animated form, in a kind of land that incorporates seemingly every classic Disney environment and character ever (more…)

Since the movie Awake keeps it short (and I mean really short) at a staggering 77 minutes, I am going to keep this review short. Really short. A paragraph in fact. Since the studio behind this didn’t bother releasing what I’m sure is a longer and better director’s cut, I’ll bring it to the studio’s attention that a generally putrid editing job, advertisement campaign, and release pattern does not a good movie make. The most surprising aspect of Awake is just how tolerable it is. It stars Hayden Christenson, who can be really good in films outside of the Star Wars saga (Life as a House and especially Shattered Glass), is OK here as Clay Beresford, who undergoes a heart surgery transplant and experiences anesthetic awareness, where a person finds himself alert and awake during surgery, but physically paralyzed. The premise of the film bodes for a potentially terrifying thriller. The movie isn’t really about this dilemma so much as it is about a group of people’s plan to make a lot of money and do everything in their power to get it. A plot twist occurs about half-way through that most anyone can see coming concerning one of the film’s major character. There is another plot twist, however, that occurs well into the third act, that I didn’t see coming, that actually worked pretty well. One out of two ain’t bad. Jessica Alba (more…)

Another week, another four-star Philip Seymour Hoffman movie. It was only a month or so ago I was completely floored by Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, an exhilarating entertainment about a jewelry robbery that goes wrong. Hoffman plays the worst of two brothers, a man who’s high level of greed ultimately gets the best of him. He is great fun to watch in the film, almost scary at times. And now, in The Savages, which premiered at Sundance last January, he plays a much more dopey but equally fascinating character, in a film that may be even better than Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. This is a fascinating character study, with not one but two of the year’s best performances, one by Hoffman, and one by the incomparable Laura Linney.

Hoffman and Linney play brother and sister (see the resemblance)? He, Jon, is a writer and teacher, and she, Wendy, is struggling to get a grant for her playwriting. They’re both busy with their own lives, never keeping in touch that often. They both, however, need to meet up when she gets a call about their father, who seems to be losing his marbles at his home in Arizona. They meet with him and discover he is living with (more…)

Hallelujah! Just when I thought I was going to get through 2007 without seeing a single excellent horror film, a superb movie like The Mist jumps out of nowhere and grabs me by the throat. This is not a non-stop frightfest or an action-packed thriller. Instead, it’s an eerie exercise in suspense that builds and builds for its first hour and actually gets better as it goes along, leading toward a handful of gruesome and memorable scenes, all the way to its jaw-dropping, ironic, and surprisingly downbeat finale. This is the first great horror movie based on a Stephen King story in seventeen years, and that sure is saying something!

The set-up is classic Stephen King. David (The Punisher’s Thomas Jane) and his son go into town to buy some groceries on a day that started off with odd weather. First, a seemingly heavy wind has blown down his trees, one slamming into the front of his house, and second, a thick mist has started to cover part of the lake. Impossible, right? David’s not sure. In line at the grocery store, the mist resurfaces (more…)

This was meant to just be a favor to a friend. I didn’t actually expect to really like this movie. My friend Katie is obsessed with a certain someone with the initials of JP (and we’re not talking Joe Pantoliano), and we’ve been trying to find time in the last five weeks to go out and see his two movies We Own the Night and Reservation Road. I was more interested in Reservation Road because of its family-in-crisis storyline and director, who made the terrific Hotel Rwanda in 2004. We Own the Night looked a little banal, but I still wanted to give it a chance when Katie and I finally went and saw it yesterday, its very last day at the Landmark Theatres. While it’s not a great film, We Own the Night is involving and very entertaining, with some terrific moments. And it features an astounding performance by, yes, that JP guy.

The film has a pretty solid premise, involving two brothers, each living in his own world. Joaquin Phoenix is Bobby, a nighclub manager, and Mark Wahlberg is Joseph, a New York City cop. They are not the closest of brothers, but their lives become entangled when (more…)

Nicole Kidman can’t catch a break. Ever since her Oscar-winning turn in The Hours five years ago, she’s been in one disappointment after another. It’s heart-breaking because I like her a lot and want her to be in a great movie again. Her stand-out movies of the last decade (plus a couple years) include Moulin Rouge, To Die For, and Eyes Wide Shut, with The Others and The Hours not far behind. Cold Mountain, released in 2003, was a decent movie, but she followed that up with The Stepford Wives (awful), Birth (weird), The Interpreter (didn’t see it), Bewitched (really really didn’t want to see it), and Fur (critically panned). This year she has three films. The Invasion came and went last August without anyone blinking, The Golden Compass (which looks questionable) opens in December, and now there’s Margot at the Wedding, opening November 21 in limited release.

I thought Margot at the Wedding could be the movie to finally lift her out of this funk, mostly due to the fact that it’s directed by Noah Baumbach, who made the near-perfect, absolutely wonderful 2005 comedy The Squid and the Whale (more…)

I’ve never gone back and forth on how I felt about a movie than I have on Southland Tales. It’s been over a week since I’ve seen it, I still can’t get it out of my head, and I still don’t know exactly how I feel about it. My first instinct was to give this a favorable review (although not an excited one), given that even though this is one of the most flawed movie in the history of the cinema, I actually enjoyed myself pretty thoroughly for the majority of the running time. But then just minutes after I saw it, I realized just how terrible the movie was, and for days I thought about giving the film a really negative review, given that I never actually cared at any moment during the movie what was happening and why. But this movie is far too entertaining to just vomit all over it. I’ve decided that I’m mixed, completely mixed, about how I feel about this film. I’m not going to tell you to avoid it, and I’m not going to tell you to see it. This movie’s as tricky as they come.

Next I could try to sum up the plot of the movie, which is literally impossible. If someone were holding a gun to my head right now, forcing me to write a paragraph about what this movie is about, my brains would be splattered on the floor in a mere two seconds (more…)

Last year, actress Ellen Page delivered one of the scariest, most intense, and most memorable performance in years in the thriller Hard Candy, about a pedophile who gets what’s coming to him from a little girl he’s praying on, a 14-year-old who is much more intelligent and aware than the man thinks she is. And here we are, just a year later, and Ellen Page once again delivers a unique, superb, and just as memorable performance in the wonderful comedy Juno, written by first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking). It’s easily one of the best comedies of the year.

Your enjoyment of the movie relies heavily on what you think of the character of Juno. She’s a specific kind of creation, and she may not be to everyone’s liking. But I fell in love with her. She’s a wise-cracking 16-year-old girl who (more…)

It’s nothing short of inspiring when an 83-year-old director makes one of the most entertaining and energetic movies of the year, and that’s the case here with Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. I only heard of this film in recent weeks, and it’s definitely stayed under the radar. I didn’t know what to expect walking into this one, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. The movie feels like the work of a young up-and-coming filmmaker, with its fast pace, time-jumping editing, and never-ending plot twists. What this movie proves more than anything, just like Clint Eastwood and Million Dollar Baby did a few years ago, is that a director, even in his 70’s and 80’s, can always be learning and experimenting and constantly honing his craft.

The movie reminded me a lot of Sam Raimi’s 1998 chiller A Simple Plan, about a group of people who find a sack of money beside a small fallen airplane, money that destroys the lives of everyone involved. Characters going after a huge sum of cash in the wrong ways always makes for riveting storylines, and that goes for the involving narrative of Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. Two brothers, Andrew and Hank (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke), are both strapped for cash (more…)

Ahhh, how I needed this movie. After a couple months of seeing seemingly nothing but dramas and epics, seeing Dan in Real Life last night at the beautiful Landmark Theatres in West Hollywood was a welcome surprise. Not that I was all that surprised, really. The movie comes from the gifted comedic mind of Peter Hedges, who wrote and directed the quirky 2003 indie Pieces of April, starring Katie Holmes and the Oscar-nominated Patricia Clarkson, and who co-wrote the wonderful 2002 Hugh Grant comedy About a Boy, my favorite film of that year. Dan in Real Life is a fairly straightforward movie, mostly taking place at one location, and it never fails to entertain throughout its entire running time.

Dan (Steve Carell) has had it rough the last few years. His newspaper column is still not syndicated. His wife died of a tragic illness. He has three daughters who all seem to hate him with various degrees. And now he’s going on his annual trip to the country to spend time with his family. Along the way, however, he meets a woman named Marie (the gorgeous Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore, and the two have an immediate connection. He gets her number and feels like he might’ve finally met somebody worth pursuing. When he gets to the family home, however, he discovers (more…)