[8] Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) leads an all-star ensemble in this surreal, satiric look at the breakdown of suburban existence. The Chumscrubber is an ambitious conceptual piece, not unlike American Beauty in tone and style. But where American Beauty centered on one character’s shaky morality and lost me, The Chumscrubber stems more confidently from one of my favorite thematic tropes — human beings’ desperate need …
[6] Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, and Cliff Robertson star as scientists who discover how to record and transmit memories and sensory experiences from one person to another, a direct transference from brain to brain. When their technology is given over to the military, they work to sabotage their creation before it can be put to deadly use. Brainstorm is directed by visual effects …
[7] Robert Redford leads an all-star ensemble cast under the direction of Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams). Redford plays a high-tech security professional who works with a team of specialists to test security systems. When government agents blackmail him into stealing a mysterious new piece of technology from the Russians, Redford and his team find themselves in over their heads — especially when he …
[6] Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent star in this true but tragic love story about lovers of 40 years who are torn apart by Alzheimer’s Disease. Dench is portraying novelist Iris Murdoch, a lover of language who begins losing her ability to communicate, becoming more and more lost in her own inner world. Broadbent plays her devoted husband, desperately trying to understand her and keep …
[7] Ron Howard (Splash, A Beautiful Mind) directs this sweet story about a group of nursing home residents who discover a ‘fountain of youth’ in a nearby pool. Turns out, though, that the pool’s power is extra-terrestrial. Soon the old folks become friends with aliens and an interesting proposition is made: Would you like to leave Earth and live forever on an alien planet? Wilford …
[5] While I’d rather Terrence Malick make a live-action Pocahontas movie than Disney, the results are still far from amazing… and a wee bit boring. Malick focuses on a love triangle between our girl Poca (Q’orianka Kilcher), John Smith (Colin Farrell), and John Rolfe (Christian Bale). The first half of the movie is like Malick’s Days of Heaven, with Kilcher and Farrell running around in …
[5] Mutant sea creatures attack a coastal community in this schlocky flick from producer Roger Corman. It’s pretty standard, passable, monster movie fare. The requisite boobage and gore were filmed by one director, while another handled the pesky plot and character development. Like many Corman features, this one features early work from emerging talents, including makeup effects by Rob Bottin (Legend, RoboCop) and music by …
[6] Brad Pitt simply isn’t very convincing outside his own time and place. This limitation was used to intentional comedic effect in Inglourious Basterds, and to unintentional effect in Troy. It doesn’t help that his character isn’t the most interesting — that would be Eric Bana’s. It also doesn’t help to have Orlando Bloom in your movie. Pretty much ever (Lord of the Rings being …
[6] Jennifer Connelly plays a woman wrongfully evicted from her home. Before she can go through the proper channels to get it back, Ben Kingsley and his family have already moved in. That’s when The House of Sand and Fog turns into a tug of war between the characters that spirals quickly and tragically out of control. At first, I thought this was going to …
[7] A mysterious carnival rolls into town, granting wishes at a sinister cost in Disney’s adaptation of the Ray Bradbury story. I wish the film were more strongly from the perspective of the two leading boys and that their parts were better written. But this is still a pretty entertaining fable that achieves some genuinely spooky moments. Jonathan Pryce steals the show as the carnival’s …
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