In Theaters

In Theaters

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

by Bill Gibron on Feb 9 2012
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

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The Rock sings! The Rock runs! The Rock swims in the deepest waters around the fictional atoll in the title and manages to hold his breath for a very...long...time. Oh, and did we mention that he battles a massive lizard, a huge electric eel, and a glib Michael Caine along the way? In this weird mutant sequel of the Brendan Fraser-led Journey to the Center of the Earth, the wrestler formerly known for asking what's cooking is a stepdad trying to connect with his adventurer/Verne-ian (?) son Sean (a returning Josh Hutcherson). When the boy gets a message from his explorer grandpa (Caine), claiming to be from the mythic locale, it's up to the man of the hour to smirk, jump, and punch his way through another in a long, lumbering line of staid family films.

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In Theaters

Safe House

by Jesse Hassenger on Feb 9 2012
Safe House

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Few major movie stars are more consistent than Denzel Washington. Just as Will Smith usually plays the wisecracking charmer and Adam Sandler can be counted on to imitate his real-life wealth while wearing shorts, Washington has developed a repertoire of various cops, agents, and occasionally train operators. Sometimes he delivers a great performance as none of the above, like his work in Spike Lee's He Got Game, but for the better part of the last fifteen or twenty years, he's been doing mid-level thrillers, often with talented genre journeymen like Tony Scott or Carl Franklin.

He's maintained, perhaps even increased, his predilection for genre pulp since his Oscar win for Training Day, but Washington's showboating bad-guy performance in that movie also allowed some moral murkiness to set upon some of his subsequent characters. Maybe this, along with his inability to sleepwalk through rote parts, is why Washington's niche doesn't wear out as quickly as his movie-star peers'. Some stars become so accustomed to their established personae that they can only re-energize in roles that push against that familiarity and likability. Washington, on the other hand, has the old-fashioned star quality of always seeming alert and crafty, no matter the material. Even in a second-tier movie like Safe House, he burrows into his character and infuses the movie with charisma and confidence.

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In Theaters

The Vow

by Jason McKiernan on Feb 9 2012
The Vow

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It's quite telling that I walked into The Vow with absolute certainty that the film was based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. The fact that it's actually not serves as a reminder to the ubiquity of the Sparks brand, which consists of interminable weepies about impossible love story scenarios that either hinge on or lead to a heartbreaking tragedy. The Vow fits flushly into that mold, but the fact that it isn't even tangentially associated with Sparks eliminates any possible excuse the filmmakers could lean on regarding the end product.

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In Theaters

Scalene

by Norm Schrager on Feb 9 2012
Scalene

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Telling a story in reverse has its own inherent pitfalls. Too much confusion can alienate an audience unnecessarily. Not enough plot or character revelation along the way can be anti-climactic -- especially since the climax is already out there. So what makes this storytelling approach work? Filmmaker Zack Parker knows, if his indie feature Scalene is any indication. With co-writer Brandon Owens, Parker manages his tricky, three-character exercise with poise and stability, not only realizing when a backward narrative should surprise us, but also confidently knowing when the story should change direction for maximum effect.

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In Theaters

In Darkness

by Jules Brenner on Feb 9 2012
In Darkness

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In the dark days of World War II, who would have expected to find a source of illumination in the sewer of a Polish town?

Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz) is a relatively lucky man in Nazi-occupied Lvov, Poland, one of many cities with ghetto populations being annihilated by Hitler's Reich. In spite of his utterly cynical approach to life and survival, and his lowly occupation as a laborer and sewer worker, he enjoys a regular paycheck, a good if not excellent relationship with his wife Wanda (Kinga Preis), a political connection to an old friend who became a Nazi officer, and enough free time from his official duties for a side occupation as a scavenger and thief.

To him and faithful follower Szczepek (Krzysztof Skonieczny) the war is essentially a process that spawns abandoned apartments for looting -- the law and strict morality be damned.

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In Theaters

The Turin Horse

by Chris Cabin on Feb 9 2012
The Turin Horse

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If January and February remain something of a mythical "dumping ground" at the movies, littered with low-scale gambles, misguided embarrassments, and dime-a-dozen genre throwaways with little in the way of thrills, laughs, or any other brand of captivation, let alone genuine artistic oomph, I am moved to cry Apocrypha. Following a handful of early but nevertheless remarkable best-of-the-year contenders that dropped in January (Miss Bala, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Crazy Horse), February looks to match that with Jafar Panahi's This is Not a Film, Ti West's The Innkeepers and, most noteworthy, Bela Tarr's apocalyptic elegy, The Turin Horse, which may prove to be Tarr's last film, if his recent comments are to be taken seriously.

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In Theaters

Declaration of War

by Chris Cabin on Feb 9 2012
Declaration of War

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The revelations are minor but forceful in Valerie Donzelli's exuberant melodrama Declaration of War, which casts the director as the mother of a two-year-old who is diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. The father of the child, the literal Romeo to her Juliette, is played by Jeremie Elkaim, Donzelli's co-scripter and the father of their son, Gabriel, whose struggles with terminal illness were the antecedent of the film's narrative core. The personal weight of the story is abundant but as the title infers, Donzelli's film is not an ode to anguished soul-searching in the face of that most blunt notice of mortality.

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In Theaters

Chronicle

by Bill Gibron on Feb 2 2012
Chronicle

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When you hear that director Josh Trank and writer Max Landis (son of John) are out to reinvent the superhero origin story via Chronicle, their found footage sci-fi film effort, all kinds of warranted warning flags go up. After all, this is a genre that can't decide between making one anxious (via the whole 'you are there' narrative) or nauseous (thanks to all the shaky camera antics). Worse still, there's the nagging "why are you filming everything?" element that never seems to be addressed. Finally, many of these movies avoid big, lavish special effects in order to maintain a level of lo-fi "realism." Thankfully, Trank and Landis are prepared to address these concerns and then some. The result is one of the best uses of the filmmaking format since a trio of documentarians entered the Burkittsville Woods, looking for a certain witch.

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In Theaters

Big Miracle

by Jesse Hassenger on Feb 2 2012
Big Miracle

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Say this for director Ken Kwapis: he must know how to make actors comfortable. He's directed great episodes of some of the best TV shows ever made, including Freaks and Geeks, The Office, Parks and Recreation, and The Larry Sanders Show, while cultivating a side career making inferior big-screen vehicles for small-screen stars like Jason Alexander (Dunston Checks In), Fran Drescher (The Beautician and the Beast), and every young female on network TV in 2005 (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). Big Miracle is his second feature starring his Office-mate John Krasinski. That Krasinski came bounding back after their previous collaboration, License to Wed, which in addition to being terrible failed to boost the careers of anyone involved, must speak to Kwapis's professionalism, friendliness, and excellent work helming a dozen golden-age Office episodes, among other qualities that have little to do with License to Wed itself (again: just terrible).

To their credit, Big Miracle is a lot better than License to Wed; rather than waste its talented (and once again TV-heavy) cast's time, it merely kills it, honorably. Krasinski plays Adam Carlson, a local TV newsman out of Anchorage stuck doing human-interest stories in Point Barrow, Alaska, who stumbles across a family of California gray whales trapped underneath some ice. His report gets picked up nationally, and attracts the attention of Adam's ex-girlfriend Rachel (Drew Barrymore), a Greenpeace rep who flies in, determined to save the creatures.

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In Theaters

W.E.

by Sean O'Connell on Feb 2 2012
W.E.

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Near the middle of Madonna's aloof period romance W.E., King Edward VII (James D'Arcy) encourages his lover, American socialite Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), to stand up before a gathered crowd and entertain with a dance. A crunchy Sex Pistols guitar riff fills the back beat - never mind (the bollocks) that the band recorded a full four decades after Edward and Wallis married - and Johnny Rotten passionately screams his way through the punk staple "Pretty Vacant." Ironically, both words describe Madonna's feature to a tee.

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In Theaters

The Woman in Black (2012)

by Bill Gibron on Feb 2 2012
The Woman in Black

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As far back as the earliest days of cinematic macabre, the haunted house has been a staple of the scary movie. From ghosts roaming a spooky manor to unexplained noises that are often much more than "bumps" in the night, these places are creepshow classics. Up until recently, few films have delivered the entire paranormal package -- atmosphere, acting, mythology and menace. Enter The Woman in Black. Adapted from the novel by Susan Hill (which was also turned into a stage play and a 1989 British TV movie), it stars Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe as a young lawyer sent to the outskirts of England to clean up the messy estate of a recently deceased client. There, he learns of the area's terrible curse and the title figure, who seems to be behind a rash of unexplained killings.

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In Theaters

The Innkeepers

by Chris Cabin on Feb 2 2012
The Innkeepers

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There are certainly things that go bump in the night in Ti West's The Innkeepers, the young filmmaker's fourth feature following the nerve-singeing House of the Devil. Floors are creaking, doors are slamming, and pianos are playing inexplicably at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a small-town inn getting ready to close its doors for good. For the inn's two lone remaining on-site employees, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy), these spooky instances prove essential to distracting themselves from not only their impending unemployment but also the wasted days that have led them to the Yankee Pedlar.

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In Theaters

Windfall

by Chris Barsanti on Feb 2 2012
Windfall

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The law of unintended consequences gets a gentle working-over in Laura Israel's good-natured but dismayingly thin documentary about a windfarm project that divides the small town of Meredith in upstate New York. The controversy will strike many as patently absurd: Who would have a problem with wind power? "I was naïve," says Frank Bachler, the town supervisor, who starts the film off talking about what a good idea it seemed like. Money for the town, clean energy, etc. That was before people started realizing that the windmills would be 40 stories tall and emit a near-constant drone. Then people started going on the Internet, and if the modern age has proven anything, it's that the online research will provide reasons to be terrified of anything.

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In Theaters

One for the Money (2012)

by Bill Gibron on Jan 26 2012
One for the Money

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Fans of the former Grey's Anatomy star needn't worry -- Katherine Heigl's self-guided descent into career irrelevance continues unabated with the god-awful crime rom-com One for the Money. After equally appalling efforts like 27 Dresses, Life as We Know It, and The Ugly Truth, the Knocked Up beauty is here adapting mystery writer Janet Evanovich's popular character Stephanie Plum in a combination of uncouth Jersey Shore shrillness and overwritten narrative tripe.

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In Theaters

The Grey

by Sam Kressner on Jan 26 2012
The Grey

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John Ottway (Liam Neeson) awakens stretched out across a row of upholstered seats firmly planted in the wet ground. Unbuckling the seatbelt, Ottway carefully lifts himself and stands erect. He dazedly scans his surroundings: a never-ending horizon of white. This isn't some angelic purgatory. It's the unforgiving, Alaskan Arctic. Spotting an embankment, Ottway clumsily scampers to its summit and finds a disemboweled fuselage, separated from the wings of his charter plane.

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In Theaters

Man on a Ledge

by Jesse Hassenger on Jan 26 2012
Man on a Ledge

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It's only a few minutes into Man on a Ledge before the camera pans up to a ledge, prompting ominous thoughts like: there is a ledge. Will there be a man on it soon? Will this man be played by Sam Worthington, and will he harbor a dark secret and/or a mysterious agenda?

Yes, yes, many times yes. Worthington plays Nick Cassidy, and after he gets up on that ledge -- not long after that first pan, as if desperate to prove his efficiency bona fides -- we learn a little more about him. He's a former cop, framed for stealing a diamond from businessman David Englander (Ed Harris), and he's on the ledge to protest and/or prove his innocence. Nearby, his brother Joey (Jamie Bell) and Joey's girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) busy themselves with some sort of a break-in while the NYPD's Lydia Spencer (Elizabeth Banks) is called onto the scene to negotiator with Cassidy.

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In Theaters

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?

by Chris Barsanti on Jan 26 2012
How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?

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The ability to conjure art out of massive edifices has something to do with the reverence many hold for our world's top architects. It could also be that most of the buildings the average person walks past or finds themselves inside on a daily basis don't have much to recommend it. Whereas the moment that you come across a structure that cuts through the air in a way that snaps your head back or causes a flutter of awe is so rare that the people who made such a thing happen can seem like modern-day magicians. It's that sense of being in the presence of greatness which both animates and stultifies this glinting bauble of a documentary about architect Norman Foster.

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In Theaters

Domaine

by Chris Cabin on Jan 26 2012
Domaine

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Patric Chiha's Domaine begins with a seductive and cerebral sequence that unfolds with lovely, unstrained subtlety, from the first dim glimpses of a strawberry-red dress to a woozy bout of inebriated dancing between friends. In between, the group, led by Nadia (the incomparable Beatrice Dalle), muses on about mathematics, control, sexuality, and philosophy, but temptation is what is conveyed by Chiha's camera as it passes over the faces of the group. Pheromones drift in between all participants, but the palpitations of temptation in Nadia's nephew, Pierre (Isaie Sultan), are felt strongest. Like Pierre, we are enamored by Nadia's intellect and ability to be bound to nothing but her ferocious will and, yes, the bottle.

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In Theaters

Underworld: Awakening

by Bill Gibron on Jan 19 2012
Underworld: Awakening

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Kate Beckinsale is back...and ready to cash her paycheck. After skipping the third installment for bigger and brighter Tinseltown pastures (besides, Rise of the Lycans was a prequel), the rent has come due and the wannabe A-list actress has returned to the franchise that made her a skin tight leather clad fanboy fantasy. Again, she is playing preeminent paranormal Death Dealer Selene, a vampire huntress out to destroy her sworn enemy - werewolves...or lycans..or whatever the story is calling them now. Over the course of three flaccid films, we've seen familial tragedy, conspiratorial double crossing, something called 'The Elders,' gloomy Goth imagery, and enough slow motion action scenes to make The Matrix's bullet time seem like a revved up Benny Hill burlesque...complete with a futuristic cover of "Yakety Sax." Part four changes very little.


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In Theaters

Haywire

by Bill Gibron on Jan 19 2012
Haywire

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Haywire is missing something. It has a great cast, especially formidable newcomer (and former American Gladiator/current female MMA fighter) Gina Carano. It has a terrific director in cinematic chameleon Steven Soderbergh and enough traditional fight scenes to tantalize even the most shaky-cam weary action aficionado. So what, exactly, does this smart, traditional thriller lack? Energy. Or perhaps a better way to put it is internal drive. Whenever Ms. Carano and the company engage in hand to hand combat, the film flies off the screen. We are drawn into their world and never want to leave. The minute the wounds start to heal and the blood congeals, however, everything dries up and stagnates...including our attention span. 

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