Film

It's soul crushing to see great comedians on cruise control. Can we reconcile Steve Martin in The Jerk with Steve Martin in Cheaper By The Dozen? Or Richard Pryor's transition from Stir Crazy to Another You. Or Gene Wilder doing the same? How about the Eddie Murphy of Beverly Hills Cop becoming the Eddie Murphy of The Adventures of Pluto Nash?
So it seems with Tina Fey in Date Night. The best ever “Weekend Update” anchor on Saturday Night Live, Fey rose to scripting excellence with Mean Girls before arriving at the genius that is 30 Rock. Yet the disappointing Date Night finds Tina Fey on autopilot. She leaves the writing to Josh Klausner of Shrek the Third (and-only-Shrek the Third) fame and the directing to the sub-mediocre Shawn Levy (Cheaper By The Dozen again).

A Prophet is a French prison/mob film that sucks you in from the first scene. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture, I guarantee this movie will inspire you to recommend it to others a) because it's that good and b) because… it's just that good.
Prophet is the story of the transformation of an impoverished young Frenchman of Arab descent, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), and his Machiavellian rise to power within the prison system. Learning the ropes as he goes, Malik is a quick study. From the Muslim gangs to the Corsican mob led by César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), he constantly absorbs knowledge.

I was never a big fan of the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans. Believe it or not, a painfully tired Laurence Olivier as Zeus, and mini-skirt-wearing Harry Hamlin with flowers in his hair just didn't do it for me. But the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion special effects were cool. For decades, Harryhausen was the go-to guy for all things monsters — – Three Sinbad Voyage movies, Jason and the Argonauts and Mysterious Island to name a few. Faithfully, this Clash of the Titans includes all of Harryhausen's monsters from the original with pumped-up technology and CGI. Unfortunately, Clash tried to cash in on the Avatar-inspired 3D craze as an afterthought, adding it in later in production, and suffers for it.

I went to see this movie with my mother-in-law. Her main complaint was that she had to watch her favorite actor, Greg Kinnear, die.
“If it wasn't Greg Kinnear who died, it wouldn't be so sad,” she explained.
I have to agree – there are many other less-talented actors who I wouldn't have minded watching succumb to cancer on a windswept Georgia beach in the specially formulated Nicholas Sparks copyrighted “death montage,” in which Kinnear leans heavily on his 16-year-old daughter as he climbs the stairs to his house, a dark-eye-circled Kinnear sitting in a deckchair with a plaid blanket over his knees… and so on.

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan has garnered respect over the years for his long list of eclectic and stylish movies, including The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica and Felicia's Journey. Now with Chloe, his newest entry into the erotically charged pseudo-thriller genre, Egoyan cannot rest on his laurels, as his reputation will certainly backpedal as a result of Chloe, one of the most tedious movies I've had the displeasure of seeing.
Chloe begins promising enough, with Amanda Seyfried adorning black stockings and garters in soft-focused photography resembling a Penthouse magazine cover. While we listen to her monologue rationalizing why it's perfectly acceptable to be a prostitute because it's rewarding to be someone's dream girl, we stop and think, “How farfetched is this going to be?”

Since writer-director Noah Baumbach came out with The Squid and the Whale five years ago, imitators have have tried to emulate his style. Yet each copy was lighter and smudgier than the last until we finally got handed the hateful Smart People. Not his fault, of course, but it's been annoying nonetheless. With Greenberg, Baumbach picked Ben Stiller, an actor best known lately for the Night at the Museum franchise, to play Roger Greenberg, his self-absorbed slacker protagonist. It's reasonable enough then to be suspicious of how this pairing might pan out given the familiarity we all have with Baumbach's formula.

Sharing nothing in common with Alex Cox's 1984 punk-rock-crazy Repo Man yet more aligned with Darren Lynn Bousman's 2008 film Repo!: The Genetic Opera, this Repo Men has some wit, violence and gore, but also some problems. Like Saw VI, this film provides commentary (albeit only at surface level) on the current health care debate.
Repo Men introduces us to the future with a news voiceover montage of how things came to be: global recession, fifth stage of war in Nigeria, technological breakthroughs. A corporation called The Union manufactures technologically sophisticated artificial organs, or “artiforgs” marketed and sold to gullible customers at exorbitant prices. The downside lies in the fine print that tells patients that if payments aren't made, hotshot repo men are sent to cut them open and yank out the bionic organ. Then, of course, you die.

Funny Games director Michael Haneke's loudly lauded black-and-white drama, The White Ribbon, isn't a film to be enjoyed. It's not exactly a film to be endured, but it is closer to that end of the entertainment spectrum. Bob Dylan once said to a Time magazine reporter who asked if the audience at the concert was entertained by his performance, “Who wants to go get whipped? And if you don't want to go get whipped, then aren't you really being entertained?”
In Funny Games, Haneke questioned the use of violence in films for entertainment, but here he theorizes on the origins of the violence committed by the Nazis. With Funny Games, the director was vocal about how he expected his audience to react – he wanted them to walk out once the child gets shot by the intruders. I read this in an interview after seeing the film, of which I did walk out. I didn't want to be entertained, and he didn't want to entertain me.

The Green Zone is what action movies are supposed to look like. A suspenseful, high-voltage, in-your-face action drama with a plausible scenario, this may be the best action flick I've ever seen. And if film editor Christopher Rouse doesn't get an Academy Award for his work, there is no justice in this world.
With a premise inspired by the real-life events found in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2006 book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Green Zone is the story of a U.S. Army officer who went rogue after discovering faulty intelligence and was instrumental in blowing the lid off the truth behind WMDs during the same year the Pentagon and the White House were declaring “mission accomplished.” The movie takes its cues from the ignorance and objectives that came from inside the Green Zone, a safety area including the old Republican Palace where American decision-makers were cut off from Iraqi reality.

How to describe Remember Me? It's this decade's Cruel Intentions. There's the snappy, self-conscious dialogue and the ambitious plotting and the self-important ending. And, oh, what a self-important ending there is. However, it's not as crass as other reviewers will have you believe and certainly not as tasteless as they are righteously suggesting. It's actually darn creatively executed, and if only it had finished just two or three brief scenes earlier it would be just fine, and interesting.
Robert Pattinson plays Tyler, a New-York-bohemian-apartment-dwelling, chain-smoking, wittily verbose, terribly well-read, 21-year-old Strand bookstore employee who scribbles endlessly in dirty notebooks and rides a bike. Emilie de Ravin plays Ally, the daughter of the cop who arrests Tyler during a drunken brawl, and who Tyler decides to date on a dare. She has a patchy personality, mostly hanging on two points: That she likes to eat her dessert before her main course in restaurants, and that she witnessed the murder of her mother on a subway platform. Tyler has a mean, distant dad played by Pierce Brosnan, a very likeably precocious little sister and a brother who committed suicide. The pair are brought closer when Ally's father flips out and hits her, and yet closer by the mutual mess that ensues.