Movie Reviews

Happy Ever Afters

This Irish comedy is two dire weddings and a funereal pace as a desperate single mother (Sally Hawkins) marries a black immigrant in exchange for £8,000, and a neurotic middle-class beneficiary of the tiger economy re-marries the well-off bride he deserted. After the fraught ceremonies the two parties find they're double-booked for their receptions at a fancy hotel in fashionable Bray, south of Dublin. Predictable imbroglios ensue as the champagne, whiskey and Guinness flow, and feuding families intermingle with dumb immigration investigators. Nearly as bad as last month's Irish comedy, Leap Year.

The Bounty Hunter

Cast: Christine Baranski, Gerard Butler, Gerard Butler , Jennifer Aniston, Natalie Morales, Neal Moritz

Dirty Oil

This convincing, no-nonsense Canadian-financed documentary draws attention to the Florida-size area of northern Alberta that has been devastated by open pit mines to provide oil for the North American market. It's directed by a specialist in documentaries about the movie business, in which she was reared as the granddaughter of Disney animator Ub Iwerks, creator of Mickey Mouse. TV is its natural home.

The Spy Next Door

In this tedious family entertainment, the still sprightly Jackie Chan looks a little old for romance, writes Philip French

Sons of Cuba

Reminiscent of the epic basketball documentary Hoop Dreams, this British movie takes a close, affectionate look at the Havana Boxing Academy, where black working-class kids are trained day and night by devoted coaches to fight for the greater glory of Cuba and El Comandante, especially in the Olympics. They also learn to hate the United States and despise any of their seniors who defect to capitalist countries to fight as professionals. We see the intense competition with other Cuban boxing academies, and along the way many tears are shed and (as in Hoop Dreams) many hearts broken. We also note that these lads are better off than most of their contemporaries in Latin America and a fair number of those in the States.

Repo Men

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Greenberg

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid

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Bounty Hunter

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Repo Men

You just gotta know how to break it down.” Seated before a soundboard, T-Bone (RZA) is explaining how to make a song, His guest, Remy (Jude Law), is visibly moved by the process, “thrilled” to be invited to sit down and adjust a fader. He leans his head back, eyes closed as he moves to the beat, his pale face lit to indicate his appreciation.

Repo Men

Sci-fi/Thriller: In the future where artificial body parts are repossessed if their recipients can no longer pay for them, a repo man goes on the run when he becomes one of those people.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Comedy: A preteen boy tries to make a name for himself while maneuvering through the preadolescent social minefield that is middle school.

The Bounty Hunter

Action-comedy: A bounty hunter is assigned to track down his ex-wife, a newspaper reporter who has skipped bail to try to solve a murder she is reporting on.

Mother (Madeo)

This won’t hurt or I won’t charge you for it.” As she begins her treatment, the acupuncturist (Kim Hye-ja) appears intent and also sensitive, her attentive face revealed in close-up, gazing on her client’s buttocks. Though her business is not precisely legitimate, the acupuncturist has been practicing for decades, along with selling herbs in a back alley shop. After a prick, the needles slide in, bringing relief, maybe even resolution, for what ails.

The Bounty Hunter

The Bounty Hunter is lazy. It offers little in the way of romance or comedy, as if expecting us to overlook paltry storytelling and be satisfied with ogling Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler. Frankly, even that gets irksome pretty quickly.

Greenberg

Noah Baumbach’s films haven’t evolved much since his 1995 debut, Kicking and Screaming. Released just past the slacker-chic curve, it would have been more accurately titled Shuffling and Whining. Those characters were privileged 20somethings. Baumbach’s subsequent movies tend to tap this same vein, watching privileged, increasingly older people wonder why they feel so sad.

Another 80s classic being remade

Hot on the heels of the nauseating news that JLo's set to headline a remake of the silly but sweet '80s gem, "Overboard" comes reports of another impending travesty...

Final Destination 5 is a go!

Despite the last one sucking worse than a $2 store vacuum cleaner, Warner Bros are preparing to grease the wheels on a fifth "Final Destination".

Tim Burton directing Thing!

Having now squeezed the fun sponge dry on Lewis Carroll's exceedingly disappointing "Alice in Wonderland", Tim Burton has turned his attention to grubbing up Charles Adams' "The Addams Family".

A Hands-On Approach to Health Care Reform

To audiences starved for quasi-medical gore, the gruesome “Repo Men” should help fill the void left by “Nip/Tuck,” the recently concluded FX series whose weekly ritual centerpiece showed the slicing of flesh (with perky musical accompaniment) in the cause of beauty . The blood count is higher in “Repo Men,” a dystopic satire, adapted from Eric Garcia’s novel “The Repossession Mambo” (Mr. Garcia wrote the screenplay with Garrett Lerner) and set 20 years in the future in a generically grungy megalopolis.

In a Battle of the Exes, the Punches Are Pulled

At the beginning of “The Bounty Hunter,” Nicole and Milo — she’s a reporter for The Daily News, played by Jennifer Aniston; he’s a former New York City police officer, played by Gerard Butler, who now plies the unglamorous trade that gives the movie its name — are divorced. It is obvious enough that this condition will reverse itself by the end, but it would have been better for everybody concerned, the audience most of all, if they had just stayed split.

II Duce as Young Lover: The Making of a Dictator

The mass loves strong men,” Benito Mussolini once said. “The mass is female.” In “Vincere,” a sustained, alternatingly exhausting and aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film, the veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio brilliantly personalizes Mussolini’s rise to power through a fictional retelling of his seduction and catastrophically violent betrayal of his reputed first wife, Ida Dalser. Like much of Italy, Dalser abandoned herself to him body and soul. The film’s title — a reference to a popular Italian Fascist song — means to win, as in to defeat, vanquish, surpass. “Win, win, win!” Fascist soldiers would sing, as Il Duce aroused the populace. “At any cost!”

Why Even Bother Trying to Connect?

Hurt people hurt people.” This nugget of therapy talk is passed from one character to another in Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” offered as an explanation, an excuse and a sort-of apology. While those four words don’t quite sum up the whole of the human condition, they might stand as a concise summary of Mr. Baumbach’s recent movies. The battling pair of married (and then divorced) writers in “The Squid and the Whale,” the warring sisters in “Margot at the Wedding” — they and their loved ones walk through life nursing psychic wounds and brandishing metaphorical knives.

The Scouting Book for Boys

Summary: A boy and a girl growing up on a caravan park come up with a plan to stay together when her mother loses custody of her

I Love You Phillip Morris

Details: 2009, France, Rest of the world, USA, Cert 15, 102 mins, Comedy / Drama, Dir: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa