Brad Pitt reunites with writer/director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), playing a hit man called in by the local crime lords after two young kids take down a big card game that collapses the underground economy. The parallels to the US economy are blatant, complete with recurring clips of Barack Obama and George W. Bush talking about the financial collapse of 2008. But if you ignore the pointed comparison, Killing Them Softly offers a compelling portrait of characters who do anything to get by. They aren’t quite the tough guys of so many other mob and gangster movies — Dominik’s character’s don’t enjoy hurting people, they just want to get paid — and they fear the consequences of their actions. It’s a refreshing spin on familiar ‘tough guy’ tropes, but don’t expect a Scorsese or Tarantino movie here. This one favors conversation and performance well over action. There are a couple of visceral moments in the film (both involving the brutal misfortunes of Ray Liotta’s character), but the real reason to see Killing Them Softly is for the performances.
Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd star as two 40-year-olds struggling to balance the demands of their marriage, children, parents, and jobs. This Is 40 is billed as a ‘sort of’ sequel to Knocked Up, where Mann and Rudd originated the roles. Both films were directed by Judd Apatow, and both take a more pastiche approach to their narratives. On one hand, I like the fly-on-the-wall approach. It favors character over formulaic story structure. On the other hand, without that trusted structure, Apatow’s movies just seem to go on forever and ever and ever. This one is two hours and fifteen minutes, and I stand by my rule that no comedy should exceed an hour forty five.
Director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) takes on the web-slinging superhero in this hasty reboot of the franchise (just five years after Sam Raimi finished his trilogy). Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, Never Let Me Go) stars as Peter Parker, a high schooler who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and… you know the rest. The approach here is more realistic than Raimi’s, which provides Garfield (one of the finest actors of his generation) the opportunity to sink his teeth into a surprisingly angsty role. I can’t think of another time when a superhero role provided an actor more dramatic range. Emma Stone (Easy A, Zombieland) is given far less to do as Parker’s love interest, Gwen Stacy, but she makes the most of it. Martin Sheen and Sally Field bring gravitas in the roles of Parker’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May, while Denis Leary plays the police chief who doesn’t appreciate Spider-Man’s vigilante antics. Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill) picks up the mantle of super-villain, playing Curt Connors, a sympathetic scientist who’s desire to rid the world of disease leads to risky, gene-splicing self-experimentation. He becomes Parker’s third-act adversary — a raging Lizard monster.
Writer/director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) serves up a blunt class struggle allegory set in a future where the filthy rich live on Elysium, a nice orbiting space station, while the rest of us live on the wastelands of planet Earth. Matt Damon stars as the working-class hero who risks it all to break into the floating utopia where he can cure himself and a friend’s child of their fatal illnesses and facilitate a coup. His mission threatens Elysium’s security czar, played by an icy cold Jodie Foster, who is plotting a coup of her own. She summons a crazed secret agent (Sharlto Copley) to stop Damon before her plans are foiled.
The Conjuring, written by twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes and directed by James Wan (Dead Silence, Saw), is an old-fashioned haunted house story that morphs into one of demonic possession. After some clunky exposition, the first half of the film is a solid tension-filled spook fest. Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston play parents of four young girls who unwittingly move their family into an old house where some pretty serious shit went down. With the help of husband and wife paranormal investigators (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) and the superfluous involvement of several horror tropes (a nasty doll, a witch, a music box, etc.), you start to figure out what’s going on and who’s behind it all. Unfortunately, the more you learn, the less interesting the movie gets. By the time Lili Taylor steps into pea soup-spewing territory, the movie’s stock starts to plummet.
This ultra-gitchy flick is probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and that’s normally cause for celebration. But if you’re not into playing video games (like me), the film’s rapid pacing and excessively kinetic style may just leave you plain bewildered. On the other hand, the narrative is so simple that without the quick rhythm and psychedelic interludes, the film wouldn’t be very interesting. Director Edgar Wright is consistently clever and inventive in his execution, and does a spectacular job keeping you interested throughout a plot line that could easily have been a snooze.
Director Chris Columbus hacks his own Harry Potter films with this knockoff that substitutes wizards with Greek Gods, Quidditch with swordplay, and Hogwarts for a corny renaissance festival in the woods. Young star Logan Lerman, the illegitimate son of Justin Bieber and Zac Efron, strikes a nice pose but lacks charisma. The only actors who leave an impression are Brandon T. Jackson as Percy’s half-goat sidekick and Uma Thurman as a Gloria Swanson-esque Medusa. The script moves at a punishing pace, attempting (and failing) to short-shrift its first act and opting to steer clear of any and all grace notes, even when Percy’s mother is seemingly killed before his eyes. The second act is stuck in an episodic quest for magic pearls, and the third act spirals into a cloying, emotionally hollow father/son moment.
