“Words and Pictures” opens Friday at Point and Star Cinemas. PG-13, 1:51, three stars out of four.
The danger of trying to make a smart movie is that when you do something truly dumb, it really sticks out like a sore thumb. Fred Schepisi’s comedy-drama “Words and Pictures” has a couple of truly dumb moments, the worst being when the screenplay has Clive Owen say the name of the movie. That’s corny enough, but he says it with a shameless “See what I did there?” grin. Oh, Clive. Continue reading
“Citizen Koch” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated, 1:50, two and a half stars out of four. Co-director Tia Lessin will be at the 7 p.m. screenings Friday through Sunday.
The documentary “Citizen Koch” is uneven and scattershot at times, but when you’re target is as big and fat as corporate money in politics, you can afford to be a little scattersot and still hit your mark.
“Edge of Tomorrow” opens Friday at Point, Eastgate, Star Cinema and Sundance. PG-13, 1:53, three stars out of four.
If you like Tom Cruise, then you will like “Edge of Tomorrow,” and if you don’t like Tom Cruise, then you will like it even more. Cruise gets shot, smashed, drowned, run over by a truck, burned with acid, and ripped apart by whirling calamari aliens over and over again. Somewhere, Brooke Shields is smiling.
“A Million Ways to Die in the West” opens Friday at Point, Eastgate, Star Cinema and Sundance. R, 1:56, two and a half stars out of four.
“I’m not a hero,” Albert Stark (Seth MacFarlane) says at one point in “A Million Ways to Die in the West.” “I’m the guy in the crowd who makes fun of the hero’s shirt.”
Nailed it in one, Seth. “West” is at its best when MacFarlane, in his first lead acting role after creating shows like “Family Guy” and the movie “Ted,” has his character standing on the sidelines, riffing. The central joke of MacFarlane’s Western spoof (which he also directed, co-wrote and produced) is that Albert is a hapless sheep farmer who hates the Old West, and the best parts of the film are Albert’s hilariously foul-mouthed rants on how lethal everything is around him, from rattlesnakes to cholera to frontier doctors.
“Jodorowsky’s Dune” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. PG-13, 1:25, three and a half stars out of four.
“Jodorowsky’s Dune” is a documentary about failure, and “the greatest movie ever made.” So why did it leave me so oddly happy, this story of a beautiful dream that never came true? Perhaps because there’s beauty in the dreaming itself. Continue reading
“X-Men: Days of Future Past” is now playing at Point, Eastgate, Star Cinema and Sundance. 2:11, PG-13, three stars out of four.
“All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles,” Magneto (Ian McKellen) intones to Professor X (Patrick Stewart) at one point during “X-Men: Days of Future Past.” “To have a precious few back.”
I’m guessing he’s referring to around 2006, when Marvel handed the keys to the franchise to Brett Ratner and he promptly drove it into the ditch with the careless (in every sense) “X-Men: The Last Stand.” But the reboot “X-Men: First Class,” which cleverly followed the mutants’ younger selves in the early 1960s’, got the series back online.
“Palo Alto” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:38, two and a half stars out of four.
In the opening scene of “Palo Alto,” two teenage boys sit in an idling car in a parking lot, getting drunk, talking about whatever. Then the driver hits the accelerator and drives the car into a wall. Just to see what would happen.
“Fed Up” is now playing at Point Cinemas. PG, 1:36, three stars out of four.
It’s a common saying that parents want to give their children more than they had. Usually it refers to material goods or opportunities. As parents, we never thought we’d have to work to give our children longer lives than we had.
“God’s Pocket” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:28, three stars out of four.
I’ve seen “God’s Pocket” twice now — the first time at the Sundance Film Festival, a couple of weeks before its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman, died of a drug overdose, and again three months later. The first time I thought it was a good movie. Now I think it’s essential.
“Fading Gigolo” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:38, two stars out of four.
There ought to be some kind of asterisk required on reviews of movies shot in New York City in autumn. Even the worst movie can seem pleasant enough when you see those leaves dappling the stoops of a row of brownstones, or people in expensive coats walking through a golden Central Park. There’s one scene in “Fading Gigolo” set in a glade in Central Park, the trees every gorgeous shade of red, yellow and orange imaginable, that looks like a CGI painting from “The Hobbit.”
Madison Movie 