The most awesome power of Will Smith’s comic-bookish dramedy Hancock is its ability to turn superhero clichés upside down. As John Hancock, Smith demonstrates talents comparable to Superman’s: incredible strength,...
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If Maxim magazine ever decides to branch out into filmmaking, Wanted is just the kind of ear-throttling nonsense it’s bound to produce. Based on Mark Millar’s ultra-violent comic-book miniseries of...
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For 700 years, WALL-E– a Waste Allocation Load Lifter robot, Earth Class– has been doing the job he was programmed to do. Left behind on an Earth no longer inhabitable...
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With all due respect to (yawn) Iron Man, the first great action movie of the summer has arrived, and it has nothing to do with superheroes– unless your idea of...
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(Not reviewed this issue.) After masterpieces including 1972's Aguirre: The Wrath of God and 2005's Grizzly Man, filmmaker Werner Herzog turns his camera to the eclectic human and animal residents of Antarctica in this documentary. Reviewed by ST.
Set in the present day, Get Smart casts Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart, a desk-jockey analyst for the now underground American espionage agency CONTROL. He longs to be a field agent like his suave idol Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson, the artist formerly known as The Rock), but his nerdy attention to detail makes him too valuable to the Chief (Alan Arkin) as a writer of reports. When CONTROL headquarters is infiltrated, however, compromising the identities of field agents everywhere, Smart is sent out with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to find out why the dark organization KAOS is accumulating materials for nuclear weapons. The premise is, of course, merely a thin excuse to send Smart into dangerous situations where he can make a mess of things. Reviewed by SR.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 11:55am; 2:35; 5:10; 7:50; 10:25
The most awesome power of Will Smith’s comic-bookish dramedy Hancock is its ability to turn superhero clichés upside down. Directed by Peter Berg, Hancock’s revisionist take on superheroes at first exudes confidence, offering an amusing metaphor for celebrity meltdowns and providing a reality check for the comic-book fantasies that dominate summer movies. Reviewed by CH.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 10:00am; 10:50am; 11:35am; 12:15; 1:05; 2:30; 2:55; 3:20: 4:55; 5:40; 6:20; 7:55; 8:40; 9:30; 10:10; 4:55; 5:40; 6:20; 7
There’s little point speculating what kind of response Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull might have inspired were it not carrying the expectations of a beloved franchise. It’s a contraption built almost entirely out of its own legacy, even more pointedly self-referential than Last Crusade. In the opening set-piece that finds Indy (Harrison Ford) in 1957 kidnapped by Russians seeking a mysterious artifact in a Nevada military base, a broken crate reveals the familiar profile of the Ark of the Covenant. Later, the plot details that have become an Internet cottage industry hardly seem to be the point. Spielberg and Lucas know why we’re here, and have no problem reminding us at regular intervals. As much as they seem to understand the formula they’re being asked to replicate, however, they don’t seem to take much joy in it. Action sequences clip along at a familiar pace—their preposterousness pushed to the edge of a cliff both figuratively and literally—and we get the requisite sequence involving massive quantities of some kind of creepy-crawly critter. Reviewed by SR.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 12:50; 3:50; 6:40
(Not reviewed this issue)Brenden Fraser stars in the remake of the classic 1959 film, playing visionary scientist Trevor Anderson who discovers a new world far below the surface of the earth. Trevor and his team combat dinosaurs, carnivorous plants, and a host of dangers to make it out alive. Reviewed by QE.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 7:00pm (Wed only)
(Not reviewed this issue.) Abigail Breslin stars as the titular character, a 10 year-old aspiring writer who hopes to get her byline in the local paper. Reviewed by ST.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 10:05am; 12:40; 3:05; 5:35; 7:55; 10:25
Kung Fu Panda walks some pretty familiar ground in its story of Po (Jack Black), a portly panda who works in his dad’s (James Hong) noodle shop in China. Po dreams (literally, and hilariously) about being a great martial arts hero like his idols the Furious Five, but doesn’t think there’s any way his lumbering body can become a feared weapon of awesomeness. That’s before he stumbles into a tournament at the legendary Jade Palace to determine the great Dragon Warrior, and finds the old master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) giving Po that high honor. The predictable complications ensue, as the Furious Five’s skeptical master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) tries to push Po to give up his training and surrender the honor to one of the more experienced students. Knock the shocked expression on your face when we suggest that Po might turn out to be a hero of sorts after all. It’s the journey towards that perhaps-inevitable resolution that provides so much simple satisfaction. Reviewed by SR.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 11:05am; 1:20; 3:35; 5:50 (except Wed); 8:05 (except Wed); 10:20
Russian director Sergei Bodrov spares no expense in re-creating the world of the 13th century Mongolian steppes, but Mongol is not, as some might hope, The Lord of the Rings: The Asian Edition. As Kazakhstan's Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, it is essentially the origin story of the near-mythical warrior who founded the Mongol empire. Mongol focuses almost entirely on the early years of the nomadic Temudgin (Genghis Khan's birth name), who, as played by Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano, was every bit as much a lover as he was a fighter. There are thudding, groaning, horse-mounted skirmishes galore (replete with lakes of arterial CGI gore), but by the time the film's abrupt conclusion arrives, you realize you've been watching a love story. Asano's Khan is a hero in the classic mold, and the portrayal is riveting. I think that other great lover and fighter, James Tiberius Kirk, said it best: "Kha-a-a-a-n!" Reviewed by MS.
This story has a sturdy backbone, which is fitting for a story about palentologists unearthing skeletons from a one-time massive inland sea that covered much of the U.S. 80 million years ago. In other words, it's not just about the bone-snapping 3D action that evolves when massive sharks, menacing crocodile-like lizards and creatures that look like pterodactyl-penguins roamed the sea (and the space between the screen and a rapt audience). It's about piecing together prehistoric clues—a shark tooth lodged in a fin is particularly important in this sage—to construct a facinating saga of life long ago. The only problem: the riveting centuries-long adventure only lasts 40 minutes.
Reviewed by MCA.
I’m not the first to make the comparison—that the women of Sex and the City make for a special kind of superhero in American pop-culture iconography. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha may be larger than life, their pocketbooks and professional highlights a distant fantasy for most of the fan base, but take away the tights, and they’re muddling through just like the rest of us. Longtime creative force Michael Patrick King (who wrote and directed) has crafted a feature that stands on its own (typically stilettoed) feet, while holding fast to the series’ singular mix of the giddily ribald and brutally confessional. We pick up several years after the series' finale, and the women, individually, have undergone seismic change. It goes without saying that any one woman’s triumph or sorrow is felt collectively, and keenly. That, of course, has been Sex and the City’s abiding m.o.: that this is a love affair, primarily, between women. Reviewed by KJ.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 10:20am; 3:45; 9:20
Director Roger Spottiswoode has acquitted himself admirably—if unremarkably—with The Children of Huang Shi, which tells the true story of young English journalist George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who saved the lives of dozens of Chinese orphans during the brutal Sino-Japanese War of the '30s and '40s. He teaches them English and basketball and other glorious pursuits, all the while keeping them safe from the atrocities of the Japanese army. Unfortunately, like so many movies that celebrate a historical hero, Children is plagued by an overblown sense of its own importance. Luckily, it comes with a built-in escape hatch by the name of Chen Hansheng (Chow Yun-Fat), a resistance fighter cut from the same swashbuckling-rebel cloth as T.E. Lawrence and Robin Hood and Han Solo. Though The Children of Huang Shi is an admirably solemn film, what the world could really use now is The Chen Hansheng Story. In glorious widescreen. Reviewed by JR.
Despite his ever more wiggy attempts to recapture the box-office sucker punch of The Sixth Sense, every M. Night Shyamalan film since 2000's underrated Unbreakable has smacked of increasingly formulaic filmmaking. Sadly if unsurprisingly, The Happening continues the director's downward spiral. The film's apocalyptic, Mother Nature-in-revolt scenario feels like something Al Gore might've cooked up during a mescaline-fueled all-nighter spent reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass. When an unexplained phenomena strikes the Eastern seaboard, causing everyone to walk backward and then kill themselves in a variety of nasty ways, it's up to high school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) to posit the possibilities, if not stave off the inevitable. Despite its queasy sort of escalating dread, The Happening ultimately never surpasses the timeless thrill of watching the grass grow and then mowing the hell out of it. Like Shyamalan's previous film, Lady in the Water, The Happening is both too incoherently weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good. Reviewed by MS.
In an effort, perhaps, to exorcise the sense of failure surrounding Ang Lee’s 2003 film version of Hulk—which did a monster opening weekend then promptly circled the box-office drain—most of the roles in The Incredible Hulk have been re-cast. Edward Norton has replaced Eric Bana as scientist Bruce Banner, whose experiments with gamma radiation left him with an uncontrollable internal id; Jennifer Connolly has given way to Liv Tyler as Banner’s true love, Betty Ross; and William Hurt has taken over for Sam Elliott as Gen. “Thunderbolt” Ross. As was the case in Lee’s 2003 version, this Hulk is a computer creation, and not a particularly convincing one. Oh, he looks Hulk-y enough—a rippling mass of muscles with feet like snowshoes—but he never quite interacts with the world around him in a realistic way, which partially explains the coy way he’s kept in the shadows throughout his first appearance. Reviewed by SR.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : Noon; 2:40; 5:15; 8:00
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A Hindu mystic travels from India to Toronto to act as spiritual adviser to an African-American hockey player whose obsession with his ex-wife’s goalie boyfriend is endangering his team’s chances of winning the Stanley Cup. This mystic—Mike Myers' Guru Pitka—is a creation of the same fevered sketch-comedy mind that gave us Austin Powers, Wayne Campbell, and (king of them all) Dr. Evil. Unlike those characters, however, Pitka isn’t funny. Not even a little bit. Pitka’s schtick is one giant cry for acceptance—eccentric but not challenging, therapeutic but not cathartic—which is absolute death to comedy. Myers surrounds himself with characters whose only responsibility is to laugh at Pitka’s jokes: the better to ensure that audiences don’t drift away and lose the thread of hilarity. In the end, this desperation for approval absolutely buries The Love Guru. Reviewed by JR.
In The Visitor, Richard Jenkins is Walter Vale, a professor who teaches economics at a Connecticut school who has found himself adrift following the death of his wife. Sent to New York to deliver a paper at an economics conference, Walter discovers a young Muslim couple, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira) living in the apartment he has kept for better than two decades. Tarek is an infectiously pleasant young man, making his living drumming in combos throughout the city. And after a couple of days, he shows the reluctant Walter how to play. And it's soon clear that Walter has found his inspiration. It's all he can do to leave the conference fast enough to get home and start playing, and eventually to follow Tarek to a jam session in Central Park. This is truly the happiest Walter has been in years, so it's a shame that on the way home, a mix-up about subway fares gets Tarek arrested. A huge shame, in fact, because he's here illegally, and it doesn't take long before this young Arab man is in a detention center under threat of deportation. What director Thomas McCarthy has done is to put a very personal face to immigration, especially once Mouna (Hiam Abbass) arrives in New York, seeking word of her son. No matter your politics, it's hard to feel that deporting Tarek is the right answer, but it's difficult to see how else it can play out. Reviewed by AW.
The always-evolving boys from Dublin hit another plateau with the first concert film shot entirely using 3-D technology. And it's a stunner. It captures a massive concert in Buenos Aires from their "Vertigo" tour, with swooping cameras, seas of cheering fans, next-generation lighting and backdrop, and, of course, music that soars with grandiosity and humanity. The 3-D atmosphere is so palpable you'll want to reach out and high-five the band, and give the peace sign to an Argentinean who isn't actually there. Reviewed by WR.
For 700 years, WALL-E—a Waste Allocation Load Lifter robot, Earth Class—has been doing the job he was programmed to do. Left behind on an earth no longer inhabitable by humans, the solar-powered WALL-E gathers and compacts garbage, stacking the cubes in skyscraper-sized towers, over and over, all day long. But he is not so single-minded that he’s unable to find wonder in the mountains of trash surrounding him. In his makeshift home, he has built a collection of artifacts that intrigue him: a Rubik’s Cube, a spork, the velvet case for a diamond ring and, most importantly, a single ancient VHS tape of the exuberant musical Hello, Dolly. One could get hung up, I suppose, on the potentially political content of its premise. WALL-E presents its 28th-century earth as a dust-blasted cityscape, the result of a consumer culture encouraged by the omnipresent Buy-N-Large corporation (it’s president, played by Fred Willard, appears to have become the country’s ever-grinning de facto ruler). When another robot called EVE (Elissa Knight) arrives on a mission to find any sign of life, WALL-E falls in love at first sight and follows her back to the massive spacecraft that has become the home-in-exile of surviving humanity. There people have evolved into obese slugs in chaise-lounge hoverchairs, cruising around not only apparently oblivious to the fact that they’ve ruined one world, but still blindly self-obsessed. When the ship’s captain (Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin) begins engaging with the history of a planet he barely understands, he finally demonstrates a humanity that previously had seemed recognizable only in the robots. Part of WALL-E’s genius is that director Andrew Stanton builds to this idea so patiently. For approximately the first 45 minutes of the film, the story emerges with almost no spoken dialogue, dependent on visual storytelling and the electronic blips of sound designer Ben Burtt—who also created R2-D2’s “language” 30 years ago—for WALL-E’s quirky personality. Reviewed by SR.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 10:00am; 11:15am; 12:30; 1:45; 3:00; 4:15; 5:30; 6:45; 8:00; 9:15; 10:30
If Maxim magazine ever decides to branch out into filmmaking, Wanted is just the kind of ear-throttling nonsense it’s bound to produce. Plot? Characters? Meaning? Who cares about those trifles when you’ve got Jolie easing herself languidly out of a bathtub after an evening spent killing perfect strangers? Wanted’s hero, Wesley (James McAvoy), who could've sworn he was just an ordinary nebbish, is apparently the son of the world’s greatest assassin and can make bullets bend in midflight. He’s snatched up by the mysterious Fox (Angelina Jolie) and taken to a man named Sloan (Morgan Freeman), who informs our hero that it’s his destiny to join a group of assassins called the Fraternity (perfect!), who are descended from medieval weavers. I know what you’re thinking: Why, exactly, would weavers become assassins? And why is Wesley capable of throwing curveballs with bullets? And what the hell is Freeman doing in this movie? The answer to these questions is simple: There is no answer. Reviewed by JR.
Movie Times:
Century Cinemas Del Monte Center : 10:25am; 11:30am; 1:00; 2:10; 3:40; 4:50; 6:15; 7:35; 9:10; 10:15
Colin Firth stars in this memoir based on Blake Morrison's book about his complicated relationship with his dying father. Blake (Firth) has never been close with his father, Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent), but he nevertheless revisits his hometown upon hearing news that his father will soon be dead. During Arthur's last days alive, Blake contemplates the resent he has always had towards his father's hatred of writers and poets--Blake became a successful poet in his adult life--and wonders whether it outweighs unconditional familial love. As the film progresses, Blake eventually comes to terms with his conflicting feelings. Reviewed by .
This 3D IMAX film looks at the way migrating shoals of sardines and other small fish affect marine and terrestrial species on South Africa's Wild Coast. When the spinning bundles of fish reach the region every year, it drives the small fish's predators into ecstatic feeding frenzies: tiger sharks bullet after the prey, seabirds streak through the sea like fireworks hoping to catch one of the creatures. The film also cautions that global warming and unsustainable fishing practices could destroy the migrating fish's numbers, which would have repercussions farther up the food chain. Reviewed by ST.
You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Adam Sandler's first collaboration with co-writer Judd Apatow, is a crazed, delightfully bizarre return to form for the star. As Israel's top dawg in the secret intelligence agency Mossad, the Zohan (Sandler) is the ultimate über-mensch, both Nietzsche's and Hezbollah's worst nightmares. But (in an inspired comic riff on Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer) what the Zohan really wants to do is cut and style hair for Paul Mitchell. After faking his demise in an inspired waterborne battle with his Palestinian archenemy, the Phantom (John Turturro, comically holding his own), the Zohan moves to New York City to pursue his dream, and (some very clever) comedy ensues. As far as I know, this is the first Hollywood-made Jewish/Palestinian/immigrant comedy that also doubles as a surprisingly trenchant analysis of the Middle East's perpetual bloodbath. Would that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ehud Olmert had Sandler and Apatow's sensibilities, we'd be seeing pie fights on the Gaza Strip. Reviewed by MS.