Weekend Film Reviews
667 episodes - English - Latest episode: 16 days ago - ★★★★ - 149 ratingsThe best film reviewers in the business give you recommendations on what to see and what to skip each week.
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Episodes
RED; Hereafter
October 16, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesOnly in Hollywood is someone seriously old at 55, but this is the underlying notion of RED, and it works like a well-worm charm... Matt Damon is a spiritualist in spite of himself in Hereafter. He's one of three people in the film who have haunting connections with the afterlife...
Nowhere Boy; Secretariat
October 09, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesNowhere Boy is a dramatized account of the young John Lennon -- who would have turned 70 tomorrow. It's a modest film, and an enjoyable one... Disney's Secretariat is a family film about one of the fastest racehorses in history, but it stumbles along beneath the weight of leaden life lessons...
The Social Network
October 02, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesThe Social Network is all about Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who's played by Jesse Eisenberg.... It's dazzling as contemporary cultural history, and devastating as biography -- an unfriending of epic proportions...
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; Waiting for Superman
September 25, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesMichael Douglas' Gordon Gekko leaves prison at the beginning of Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- he served eight years for crimes committed in the course of the previous film... The real movie news this week is Waiting for Superman. The movie puts five tender young faces on a national scandal that's all too often described with depressing statistics -- the state of public education in the United States...
Easy A; The Town
September 18, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesWhy am I so pleased with the new high school comedy Easy A? Because the movie, in spite of a few flaws, seems to have been made by higher intelligence, and because it catapults Emma Stone into a higher place reserved for American actors who can handle elevated language with casually dazzling aplomb... Ben Afleck works both sides of the camera in The Town. As the director, he showcases a number of fine performances and illuminates character without losing a beat of the throbbing pace. As ...
Telluride Film Festival
September 11, 2010 01:44 - 4 minutesEvery year I go to the Telluride Film Festival with the same fervent hope -- to put the summer's junk behind me and recharge my enthusiasm for the fall and winter. This year I got supercharged. It was a wonderful program, with all sorts of treats that will be showing up in the weeks and months to come...
The Tillman Story; Soul Kitchen
August 28, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesA new documentary called The Tillman Story is actually three stories in one... Soul Kitchen, made by the German-born Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, is a delirious farce, in subtitled German and Greek, that doesn't flag for a single one of its 99 minutes...
Mao's Last Dancer
August 21, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesSometimes the best way to see a movie is knowing nothing about the plot. At other times, a sense of what's to come increases the pleasure of watching the story unfold. Mao's Last Dancer is one of those other times...
Cairo Time; The Other Guys
August 07, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesFor quite a lot of time, the new film Cairo Time seems to be just a pretext for the camera to follow Patricia Clarkson around the Egyptian cpital and its spectacular surroundings... Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are hapless cops and mismatched buddies in The Other Guys, a summer movie that honors summer-movie conventions with a vengence...
The Kids Are All Right
July 10, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesThe Kids Are All Right is a thrillingly funny and casually profound film that Lisa Cholodenko directed from a script she wrote with Stuart Blumberg. Near the beginning, a teenage brother and sister talk about whether to make a fateful phone call. They're the suburban California children of lesbian mothers, and the brother has decided to seek out the sperm donor who was instrumental in bringing them into the world...
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse; The Last Airbender
July 03, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesYou'd never guess what the best part of the new Twilight saga turns out to be. It isn't blood-sucking monsters doing their thing, though there's some of that to feed the franchise... Never mind that the little kid flapping his arms to whip up the waves looks like a pouty-faced version of Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, or that The Last Airbender looks no worse if you take off your 3-D glasses...
Toy Story 3
June 19, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesWhile the entertainment conglomerates have been churning out ever cheesier sequels, Pixar has been the Fort Knox of honest feelings, and so it remains. Fifteen years after Toy Story burst upon the scene, Toy Story 3, the third film of the trilogy turns out to be gorgeously joyous and deeply felt…
Winter's Bone
June 12, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesInstead of belaboring this week's pseudo-spectacular offerings from the studios -- a mediocre remake of The Karate Kid and a benumbing big-screen version of the A Team -- let me tell you about a movie that's really worth watching. It's called Winter's Bone...a classic, and spectacular for its humanity, austere beauty and heart-stopping urgency...
Splice; Ondine
June 05, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesJoe Morgenstern, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, reviews Splice and Ondine.
Sex and the City 2; Father of My Children
May 29, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesIn previous installments of Sex and the City the ancient mystery of what women want was basically solved -- they want love, sex and designer clothes, not necessarily in that order. Now Sex and the City 2 reveals what Islamic women want... I don't want to tell you too much about Father of My Children, which is playing at the Landmark -- you really should discover this French-language drama for yourself. It isn't saying too much, though, to cal lit beautiful, profound and phenomenally full of...
Shrek Forever After
May 22, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesAt one point in "Shrek Forever After" the hero sees his face on a poster nailed to a tree and says, "Sure is great to be wanted again." Wanted, yes, but needed? Not on the strength of this fourth and presumably last installment. Now it jogs and lurches but mostly meanders though a story that tests the limits of true love (Shrek's, and ours.)
Robin Hood
May 15, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesOf all the Robin Hoods that have come and gone, at least one of them wondrously zestful -- that's Errol Flynn's -- and one of them was woefully zonked -- that's Kevin Costner's. Up to now, the only absurd one has been Mel Brooks's send-up, "Robin Hood: Men in Tights." Yet Ridley Scott's new version achieves an absurdity all its own. It's an ersatz epic about men in fights -- grim fights, grinding battles, clanking combats that are repetitive and, in a movie that runs 140 minutes, almost endl...
Iron Man 2
May 08, 2010 01:44 - 3 minutesTony Stark creates a new element in "Iron Man 2," though it's no big deal. Robert Downey Jr.'s zillionaire genius, who was revealed to be Iron Man at the end of the previous film, simply builds himself an in-home particle accelerator, fires it up and then bango, he's got a...new element. This sequel, unfortunately, settles for a new alloy of old elements - less iron, lots more lead and tin.
Date Night; After Life
April 10, 2010 01:30 - 3 minutesDuring the superbly absurd adventures of a suburban couple in Date Night, a pair of thugs contemplates the husband and wife with slow-burning bafflement. One thug says to the other, "These two are not at all what they seem." And that is true... Then there's the case of After Life, a pretty dreadful and particularly squirmful horror flick. Women often wear their hearts on their sleeve, and even hatless men can go hat in hand. But one of the many repellent first in this film is a woman with h...
Clash of the Titans
April 03, 2010 01:30 - 4 minutesA few more 3-D spectacles like Clash of the Titans and audiences will be clamoring for 2-D...
Hubble 3D; Eclipse
March 27, 2010 01:30 - 4 minutesThe Hubble Space Telescope, one of the crowning glories of our scientific age and it's the subject of the latest IMAX documentary, Hubble 3D. The movie's playing downtown at the California Science Museum. Shortly after the Hubble was launched in 1993 it was diagnosed with, and subsequently cured of, an extremely inconvenient case of astigmatism... Everyone is haunted by something in Conor McPherson's The Eclipse. This leisurely and quite lovely drama honors the conventions of Gothic ghost s...
Greenberg
March 20, 2010 01:30 - 4 minutesOne of the most touching lines in Noah Baumbach's remarkable new movie Greenberg is an announcement by the wistful young heroine, Florence Marr: "I've gotta stop doing things just because they fell good..."
Green Zone
March 13, 2010 02:30 - 3 minutesDuring the exciting but eventually wayward course of Green Zone, Jason Bourne discovers the truth about weapons of mass destruction, then teaches a sloppy reporter from the Wall Street Journal how to be a good journalist...
Alice in Wonderland
March 06, 2010 02:30 - 3 minutesThe Cheshire Cat brags about his evaporating skills in Tim Burton's 3-D Alice in Wonderland, and the movie has its own way of evaporating before your polarized eyes. Every scene brings something new and remarkable to look at, yet every scene sweeps away specific recollections of the previous one...
Extraordinary Measures; Creation
January 23, 2010 02:44 - 3 minutesExtraordinary Measures requires extraordinary tolerance for bathos, bombast and plain old unpleasantness. It’s a fictionalized – and sadly trivialized – adaptation of a non-fiction book, The Cure, which was written by my Wall Street Journal colleague Geeta Anand... Creation is a fancier botch, blissed out on its own cleverness. Paul Bettany is Charles Darwin, struggling to finish The Origin of the Species while he grieves the loss of his beloved daughter Annie, who died at the age of ten.
The Last Station
January 16, 2010 02:44 - 4 minutesThe Last Station is Michael Hoffman's evocation of the last years of writer Leo Tolstoy. It's a "seduction that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, countess Sofya come to life in a match pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren."
Youth in Revolt; Daybreakers
January 09, 2010 02:44 - 4 minutesYouth in Revolt is an endearing coming-of-age comedy that stars Michael Cera. In one way, only, but in a significant way, Cera reminds me of Billie Holiday, who achieved subtle marvels within a severely limited vocal range... The German filmmaker brothers Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig have come up with a new twist on vampires in an English-language movie called Daybreakers. The year is 2019, and vampires have taken over the world...
Avatar
December 19, 2009 02:43 - 4 minutesJames Camerion's Avatar takes place on a planet called Pandora, where American corporations and their military mercenaries have set up bases to mine a surpassingly precious mineral called unobtanium. The vein of awe mined by the movie is nothing short of unbelievium...
Invictus; The Lovely Bones
December 12, 2009 02:43 - 4 minutesUntil now, America's curiosity about rugby has been on a par with its knowledge, but this could change with the advent of Invictus... Clint Eastwood's new movie is an inspirational game played by Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, and Matt Damon as the captain of a South African rugby team... Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones was adapted from Alice Sebold's widely admired novel. The movie, like the book, is party set in an Inbetween that occupies an ethereal space between heaven and earth; it...
Up in the Air
December 05, 2009 02:43 - 3 minutesThe best of Up in the Air -- meaning most of it -- is right up there with the fresh and sophisticated comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age…
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans; Red Cliff
November 21, 2009 02:44 - 3 minutesThis year's prize for clumsiest title goes to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. I wanted to get that out of the way so I could talk about a defining moment in the movie, set in post-Katrina New Orleans -- it's when Nicholas Cage's rogue cop pulls up to a seedy building to make an arrest... Red Cliff, set in China in the twilight of the Han Dynasty, lends new meaning to the notion of Baby on Board when a fearless swordsman plunges into battle with an infant strapped on his back...
2012; Pirate Radio
November 14, 2009 02:44 - 4 minutes2012 is Roland Emmerich's latest assault on planet Earth and its moviegoers, and it isn't the end of the world: it only feels that way... Pirate Radio follows the form -- when it chooses to follow any form -- of a cat-and-mouse game between the British government, circa 1966, and a crew of deejays beaming round-the-clock rock and roll from a decrepit tanker anchored in the North Sea just outside Britain's territorial waters...
A Christmas Carol; Precious
November 07, 2009 02:44 - 4 minutesTo put it bluntly, and Scroogely, Disney's 3-D animated version of A Christmas Carol is a calamity... In a shockingly beautiful new film called Precious, one of the most telling moments comes toward the end, and it's hardly more than a throwaway -- the heroine glances at a mirror and sees herself...
This Is It; Cirque du Soleil
October 31, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesAfter all the media madness about Michael Jackson over all the years and decades, it comes as bittersweet news that he lives vividly in This Is It... I've checked out two Cirques recently, a movie called Cirque du Freaks and the Cirque du Soleil, which is back in town and playing under a big blue-and-yellow tent next to the Santa Monica Pier...
Amelia
October 24, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesI've seen the movie Amelia, and I can tell you that Amelia Earhart is still missing...
Where the Wild Things Are
October 17, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesThe movie version of Where the Wild Things Are honors the book in every imaginable way...and in ways no one could have imagined until Spike Jonze and his crew came long...
An Education
October 10, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesThis week brings a thrilling new film called An Education. It's a tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom, and it's thrilling for all sorts of reasons...
The Invention of Lying; Zombieland
October 03, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesNobody doesn't like Ricky Gervais, and his new comedy soars for a while on the wings of a clever premise: it's set in a world where everyone tells the truth. In the spirit of that world, I cannot tell a lie: The Invention of Lying... Zombieland teems with wild-eyed chewers and spewers. They're only lurid wallpaper, though, in an improbably delicious comedy about a quartet of human survivors crossing an America that's been taken over by ravenous hordes...
Capitalism: A Love Story; Coco Before Chanel
September 26, 2009 01:44 - 4 minutesMichael Moore starts Capitalism: A Love Story with a sequence of secuirty-camera videos showing holdups in progress, and ends it by showing himself, like some vigilante version of the environmental artist Christo, stringing great lengths of yellow crime-scene tape around banks and brokerage houses in Lower Manhattan... Clothes may make the man, but the woman makes the clothes in Coco before Chanel, Anne Fontaine's smart and sumptuous French-language account of the legendary designer during ...
Bright Star
September 19, 2009 01:44 - 4 minutesBright Star is Jane Campion's dramatization of the love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (aside from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress.) But the effect is exhilarating and deeply pleasurable...
Telluride Film Festival Picks
September 12, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesLove at first sight can be as dangerous as it is exciting, and the sme goes for love at first screening. I fell hard and heedlessly for a film called An Education, which happened to be the first of 14 films I managed to see in the course of three movie-besotted days at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend... (Joe also reviews A Prophet, The Last Station, Bright Star and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.)
Funny People; Flame and Citron
August 01, 2009 01:44 - 4 minutesThe people in Judd Apatow's Funny People are painfully unfunny, and remarkable off-putting... In Flame & Citron, two melancholy Danes share center stage in the movie, but neither one of them is Hamlet...
(500) Days of Summer; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
July 18, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesIn the preface of (500) Days of Summer, a narrator says, "You should know right up front this is not a love story..." I wrote a mixed revue in the Wall Street Journal for the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince...
Bruno; Soul Power
July 11, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesWell, here's the bad news: Brüno is no Borat. Here's the worse news: Brüno crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously awful to genuinely awful... Period pieces can be marvelous or musty, depending on the period, as well as the piece. Soul Power is marvelous, and no wonder -- among the performers in this concert film are James Brown, B.B> King, Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba and Celia Cruz, all at the peak of their powers...
Public Enemies
July 04, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesMichael Mann's Public Enemies never lacks for interest, or interesting info. Back in the 1930's, for instance, the FBI was simply called the Bureau of Investigation before being formally federalized...
The Hurt Locker; Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
June 27, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesThe Hurt Locker starts with a quote from the journalist Chris Hedges -- "War is a drug" – then makes that case with masterful clarity and phenomenal force… In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a National Security Adviser confronts the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime – he's a good robot, trying to help us foolish humans defend ourselves against an army of bad Decepticons – and says, angrily, "Who are you to pass judgment on us?"
Whatever Works; The Proposal
June 20, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesBoris Yellnikoff is the prolix geezer played by Larry David in Woody Allen's Whatever Works. He was once a world-class physicist teaching string theory at Columbia, but the only string he strums now is misanthropy... At one point in The Proposal Sandra Bullock shakes the handlebars of her runaway bicycle and says frantically, "Why are you not stopping? Stop! Stop!" At more than one point in this wheeze of a romantic comedy I wanted to shake her and say...
Imagine That; The Taking of Pelham 123
June 13, 2009 01:44 - 4 minutesRaise those lowered expectations a bit before you see Eddie Murphy in Imagine That... The Taking of Pelham 123 is Tony Scott's fevered remake of the 1974 thriller about a hijacked subway train...
Land of the Lost; 24 City
June 06, 2009 01:44 - 4 minutesGeneral Motors may be in a class by itself when it comes to bankruptcy, but so is Land of the Lost. This dramatically, thematically and artistically bankrupt fantasy cost something in the neighborhood of $100 million to make and isn't worth the celluloid it's printed on... Studs Terkel, the late chronicler of American workers and their work, would have loved 24 City. I certainly did, and I hadn't expected to be stirred by an account of Chinese workers and their labors over the course of dec...
Drag Me to Hell; Departures
May 30, 2009 01:44 - 3 minutesThe good news -- and there's no bad news -- is that Sam Raimi's horror flick Drag Me to Hell is smart, funny and cringe-worthy for all the right reasons, and up to speed on the mortgage crisis too... Most of the events in Departures flow from a comical misunderstanding. After a Tokyo orchestra is disbanded, a discouraged young cellist, Daigo, looks for a new line or work...