Not two minutes into “The Big Wedding,” we know what its primary purpose is: to allow Robert De Niro to earn a paycheck for minimal work. The film begins with lackadaisical voiceover from the legend-turned-professional-phoner-iner that’s reminiscent of most of the other roles he’s collected on lately, in “New Year’s Eve” and “Little Fockers” and […]
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“Oblivion” is a movie certain to give you déjà vu, and not because that peculiar sensation is a plot point. This Tom Cruise vehicle sports a narrative that’s a blatant composite of countless other films, including but not limited to “WALL-E,” “The Matrix,” “Independence Day,” “Total Recall,” “Planet of the Apes,” and even director Joseph
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Critics and casual moviegoers alike frequently complain of a lack of originality in the output of Hollywood and the broader film industry, the implication being that we see the same half-dozen stories rehashed over and over again. But what if the gratingly familiar nature of most new releases has less to do with story itself
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If we are to accept that “42,” a Hollywood-financed Jackie Robinson biopic, was going to be manipulative no matter the talent involved—which is to say, dramatized to the hilt, with constant reminders (swooning musical score, over-the-top dialogue) that the sociopolitical stakes of each scene are higher than Cheech and Chong—then this Brian Helgeland-directed film is
Didn’t the “Scary Movie” films used to be parodies? It has been 13 years since the first one came out, so my memory is admittedly a bit foggy, but I seem to remember the Wayans Brothers taking pointed jabs at “Scream,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Sixth Sense,” and other ‘90s horror staples. They made
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At the exact same time that “Evil Dead” first unspooled on over 3,000 screens across the country—last Thursday at 10 p.m.—NBC premiered another new spin on a horror staple, the series “Hannibal.” This was perhaps the most gruesome hour in the history of network television, complete with a murder re-enactment, the discovery of corpses, the
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Derek Cianfrance’s sprawling, epic “The Place Beyond the Pines” is Capital-A Ambitious filmmaking of proportions we haven’t encountered in a project with Hollywood stars since “The Tree of Life” a few years back. Well, perhaps that’s an overstatement—Cianfrance’s focus is smaller than Terrence Malick’s, which amounted to no less than the breadth of Creation—but still,
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There is no doubt that DreamWorks has established itself as a film-brand nearly as recognizable as Pixar, but the value of such is debatable, given that the brand is essentially “The Big Animation Studio That Isn’t As Good as Pixar.” That’s not to say that the animators at DreamWorks don’t execute a good idea well
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“G.I. Joe: Retaliation” has nary a single moment in its 110 minute runtime that doesn’t qualify as idiotic in some capacity. It’s yet another mega-budget film that serves as an assault on logic and realism, with each scene seemingly trying to top the previous one in terms of how ridiculous it can get. This process
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While Tyler Perry’s five previous “serious” movies (that is to say, those that do not star Madea) contained no shortage of melodramatic plot developments—each boasts an amount comparable to that of an entire season of the average soap opera—“Temptation” marks the filmmaker’s first attempt at an all-encompassing, big twist. He fails miserably. Any viewer with
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