It lays bare that the franchise’s most radical asset is also its most conservative: an overriding emphasis on, above all else, the on-screen family.
Only the very charitable would characterize this strain of providence as anything other than dumb, or at least incredibly forgetful.
Hours isn’t based on a true story, but it makes a considerable effort to convince us that it could have been.
Wayne Kramer thankfully refuses to cloak his excessiveness in hedge-betting self-consciousness and the result is a gratifyingly disreputable B-movie blow out.
As one incoherent action scene follows another, we stare at a film with nothing to respond to, waiting for it all to be over.
Justin Lin strives to approximate something like Ocean’s Eleven for petrosexuals.
Fast Five and I have something in common: We both have no use for the first four Fast and the Furious films.
The film’s plot is more or less Heat crossed with the corporate-fratboy hijinks of Entourage.
Films aren’t built on sexy motors alone.
It’s not beer, it’s not drugs, it’s just a film, and yet we leave elated, having been taken for a ride.
Whereas John Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious had fun indulging in incessant auto-erotica, there’s little sexiness here.
The film trembles in the shadow of Letters from Iwo Jima but the quality of its image and sound elements is almost unrivaled.
Clint Eastwood’s creaky history-class lecture Flags of Our Fathers makes the nature of heroism its primary point of concern.
Leonardo DiCaprio, like Natalie Portman and Kirsten Dunst, seems less complicated and charismatic the older he gets.
As a shameless stab at kid-friendly uplift, Eight Below, at least during its Animal Planet-ish segments, nonetheless has a benignly cheesy, big-emotive charm.
Amid this shallow, vulgar morass of cultural stereotypes and racial epithets, Paul Walker reconfirms his status as filmdom’s preeminent hunky cipher.
Somewhere, some frat guy is turning this PG-13 underwater porn into a screensaver.
Without Jessica Alba’s bootylicious presence, the shallow Into the Blue would sink like a stone.
Chazz Palminteri’s romantic dramedy Noel is predicated on all sorts of chance encounters.
When it comes to the cinematic translation of his pulpy adventures, a little dash of “unlikeliness” never hurts.