One of these days, Sam Rockwell, pow! To the Moon!

Or, you know, you can get there on a slow boat of movie magic.

Moon is the feature-length debut of Duncan Jones, son of a certain Davie Jones who is better known as David Bowie--a fact Jones the younger is probably tired of nerds like me thinking is cool. But I'm sorry, the offspring of Ziggy Stardust has made a haunting mystery story set on Earth's orbiting satellite, and that's just too rad. I guess the lunar lunacy runs in the family.

Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the lone attendant of a mining base harvesting moon rocks for their stored solar energy, which in an unspecified future has become the Earth's clean and efficient solution to our power problem. Sam is at the tail end of a three-year contract, and he's go...Read the entire review

The Japanese film Departures was one of the few surprises at the Oscars this year, both for it taking victory from the more touted competition in the Best Foreign Language category and for the amusing speech given by its director, Yojiro Takita. Given the man's humorous thank you, one might assume that Departures is a light-hearted film, not a serious rumination on death and the afterlife. And yet, that is exactly what Departures is, proving once again that the greatest wisdom often comes from the comedians among us.

Masahiro Motoki (Rampo) stars as Daigo Kobayashi, a cello player whose dream to be part of a symphony orchestra ends when the group he's joined dissolves. Despondent and broke, he and his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue, Wasabi) move ...Read the entire review

A movie that begins with Larry David talking directly to me pretty much has me at the proverbial "hello." It's the director's game to lose at that point, I'm prepared to hand out the trophy.

The Curb Your Enthusiasm star has stepped into Woody Allen's latest, playing what is essentially the Woody Allen role in Whatever Works. The breaking of the fourth wall that starts the picture is all part of its easy charm, a sly smile in the audience's direction to let them know that they are expected to be a part of this fluff. You're there to hear a story, and a story you will get.

David plays Boris Yellnikoff, a physicist who is not afraid to point out his own genius. The man once had the ideal life: a gig as a professor, possible odds on the Nobel prize, and a wife ...Read the entire review

Ahh, yes, there's no better time of year to issue a film titled "I Hate Valentine's Day" than the weekend celebrating the Fourth of July holiday. I suppose you could label it clever counterprogramming, but I'm more inclined to consider the release date as the latest in a long series of bad ideas when it comes to this bland, winded motion picture.

A florist with severe, long-simmering relationship issues, Genevieve (Nia Vardalos) holds to a strict rule of five dates before she casts off potential boyfriends, protecting herself from the inevitable decline of passion. Into her life comes Greg (John Corbett), a single guy who doesn't understand women, hoping to channel his focus into his own tapas bar. Immediatley attracted to each other, Genevieve and Greg decide to ride out the ...Read the entire review

"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" isn't an ambitious, event movie sequel in the same fashion as perhaps "Ice Age: The Meltdown" was softly gunning for. It's more of an agreeable installment of television than a magnificent animated effort. This is not a criticism. In fact, it's perhaps the reason why "Dawn" is such a charming film. With a relaxed mood, a playful cast, and a plot that doesn't sweat itself into a pointless sense of importance, "Dawn" is mild sauce but tremendously entertaining, with an easy-peasy celebratory attitude that extends to the picture's lively 3-D visual scheme.

Now an improbable herd, Sid (voiced by John Leguizamo), Diego (Denis Leary), Crash (Seann William Scott), and Eddie (Josh Peck) are getting ready to settle down as they await the birth of Manny...Read the entire review

It started with "Ali." There, revered director Michael Mann cautiously backed away from the stiff mechanics of traditional storytelling to form his own cinematic language, armed with a marathon script and liberating HD cameras. The John Dillinger gangster tale "Public Enemies" represents the implosion of Mann's balloon of progress. In chasing his own insufferable visual punctuation and distancing performance needs, Mann swings and misses hard with "Enemies," gathering an enviable platter of cold stares, blasting Tommy Guns, and lustful smirks, but losing himself in the deafening filmmaking affectation. Rarely has a wonderland of hardened gangsters, flighty dames, and widescreen bank robbing been rendered this lifeless.

With a nation in the throes of the Great Depression, John ...Read the entire review

Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) is having a panic attack. "It's four in the morning!", yells Boris' future ex-wife Jessica (Carolyn McCormick). "I married you for all the wrong reasons," replies Boris. "We looked so good on paper. But life isn't on paper." The same could be said about Whatever Works. Larry David and Woody Allen certainly seem like a match made in neurotic Jewish comedy heaven, and I'm sure the idea of dusting off a decades-old script, written for Zero Mostel way back in the 70's, was also appealing. Sadly, neither of these things pay off: the movie just sits there, mostly inert, on the screen, as some unexpected cosmic, comic element about David and Allen fails to mesh.

Boris is a genius, having been nominated for a Nobel Prize in quantum mechanics, and he sees the big picture, literally: he breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to us, the audience. I'm not sure why. It almo...Read the entire review

Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro is a film of startlingly beautiful photography and design; it's an incredibly pleasurable film just to look at. Shot in crisp, textured, glorious black and white that luminously fills the wide 2.35:1 frame, it is packed with shots that are simply stunning. And Coppola doesn't just make pretty pictures; his entire technical presentation is flawless. I've seldom, in recent years anyway, seen a film that so skillfully utilizes composition, sound, hard cutting, and visual tricks to tell its story.

The problem is that it's a story that's barely worth telling. Tetro is a great-looking picture, but there's a void at its center--it's about two characters we don't really care about, played by two actors who aren't terribly interested in meeting us halfway. Those characters are Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), a 17-year-old kid who runs off to Buenos Aires to...Read the entire review

The prospect of another laborious Iraq War film is perhaps about as welcome as a sharp stick in the eye. While a vital subject for discussion, Hollywood has managed to homogenize the lengthy Middle East affair, expelling too much effort to register as concerned rather than determined. Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" looks to amp up the Iraq experience through a foot-long, rusty-edged needle shot of adrenaline, assuming a vigorous action movie mentality to cover global affairs. "Hurt Locker" is a superb achievement that not only constructs some of the finest suspense set pieces of the year, but manages to find compelling, innovative wartime psychological threads to pull at as well.

After losing a member of their team to a roadside bomb, a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Dispos...Read the entire review

Remember 1993's "Boxing Helena?" Unless you happen to be Kim Basinger's accountant, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't. The new thriller "Surveillance" marks the return of Jennifer Lynch to the director's chair, and the extended break from the industry hasn't quite tempered the filmmaker's sweet tooth for performance oddity, but it has simplified her storytelling ambition. A cool, creepy chiller, "Surveillance" doesn't exactly leap off the screen as a diamond example of procedural crime busting cinema, but taken as the next professional step for Lynch, it's an efficient mood piece, setting out to unnerve and baffle, and achieving most of its goals.

A gruesome murder has occurred in a small town. Called in to lead the investigation are FBI Agents Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and ...Read the entire review

A searing indictment of Islamic "Sharia" laws and rural Middle Eastern barbarism, "The Stoning of Soraya M." is a surefire sock-in-the-gut motion picture that's grueling to watch, yet perhaps impossible to ignore. I'm sure the prospect of sitting down with a movie concerning the painstaking ritual of stoning comes across as a gigantic NEGATORY on the average "Movies to See" list of multiplex adventures, yet this picture is worth a viewing, if only to be allowed entrance into the darker nuances of unspoken Islamic law.

Freidoune (James Caviezel, buried under a giant fake nose) is an Iranian-born, French-based journalist driving through his homeland sometime during the mid-1980s. On his way to the border, Freidoune is hit with an overheated radiator, forced to tow to the ...Read the entire review

In 1988, director Stephen Frears, writer Christopher Hampton, and actress Michelle Pfeiffer teamed up to run through a myriad of period games of deception and lust in the classic picture, "Dangerous Liaisons." Two decades later, the trio has reformed to plunge further into the bleak heart of obsession in the acidic dramedy "Cheri," adapted from the novel (and its sequel) by celebrated French author Colette. It's sexy, pithy, and enchantingly cutting, making the best use of Pfeiffer in a long time.

During the La Belle Epoque era in Paris, courtesans Europe-wide found themselves elevated to near-royalty status, flush with cash from various affairs, living lives of extreme comfort. For middle-aged Lea de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer), time is catching up to her legacy as a hotly de...Read the entire review

I think "My Sister's Keeper" has been robotically engineered to makes audiences weep uncontrollably. It's a tear-jerking Terminator, an unstoppable force that beats the screen with tragedies of all shapes and sizes, looking to wear down the viewer until they're a puddle of tears and snotty tissue. It's a hostile approach to storytelling that director Nick Cassavetes manipulated to finely tuned results with the 2004 sleeper smash, "The Notebook." For "Keeper," the effort is much more transparent, and for every instant of genuine tragic ache within this dubious feature, there are two served up right behind it that drip with obnoxious manipulation and creaky execution.

Born for a sole purpose of providing her cancer-stricken teen sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) with organs and blo...Read the entire review

Ch ri opens with a jocular recounting of the history of courtesans, using a slick presentation to detail some of the more famous kept women of history complete with vintage photographs and Toulouse Lautrec artwork. It's a fun sequence, lively and full of cheeky humor. Director Stephen Frears supplies his own voiceover, and he sets the stage for the last lady of the evening on the list, Lea de Lonval, as played by Michelle Pfeiifer. It's an entertaining beginning, and it announces a movie that I would really like to see; unfortunately, the movie it announces is not the one that follows.

The basic story of Ch ri is that Lea is a high-priced prostitute who is getting on in years, and having just lost her latest long-term client, is finding her prospects have chang...Read the entire review

In 1995, director Michael Bay, untested and hungry, helmed his first feature, the action comedy "Bad Boys." It was a lean, stylish production desperate to please. In 2003, after years fattening himself on blockbuster box office returns and industry deification, Bay directed "Bad Boys II," and it was a vast facial blast of overconfident overkill -- a joyless, humorless, bloated carcass of an event movie. After the domestic financial crumbling of his 2005 picture, "The Island," Bay was again in a difficult position where he needed to prove his worth. Out of the ashes came "Transformers." While hardly a mid-budget, no-expectation gamble like the original "Bad Boys," the film nevertheless relied on Bay's capacity to temper his proclivity for grotesque visual disorder, putting the n...Read the entire review

Seldom has a filmmaker done so complete a 180-turn, in terms of subject matter and tone, as quickly as Sam Mendes has with Away We Go. His previous film, the studied, difficult suburban drama Revolutionary Road, was no doubt a tough picture to make; some would argue it is an equally tough picture to watch. I admired the film without buying all the way into it--it is, for the most part, immaculately done (the cinematography and production design are stunning), with moments of great power. But there's something overwrought about the entire endeavor, as if everything onscreen has been so carefully prepared and composed that the genuine passion and life has been sucked out of the frame.

There's none of that in Away We Go, a loose, freewheelingly intimate seriocomic drama penned by novelist Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and his wife Vendela Vid...Read the entire review

You're not supposed to let outside information influence your impressions of a new film, but let's be honest: no movie exists in a vacuum, and our experiences are informed by not only our preconceived notions but the little tidbits we might have picked up on our way into theater. For example, my feelings on the latest Woody Allen film, Whatever Works (the title sounds oddly like a response to the title of his 2003 picture Anything Else), are not only swayed by my general regard for the filmmaker himself, but by a crucial bit of behind-the-scenes information.

It seems that Allen first wrote the screenplay in the mid-1970s, intending it as a vehicle for Zero Mostel. When Mostel died, Allen tossed it in a drawer. But when his one-movie-a-year output was jeopardized by a threatened actor's strike and he needed to get a script ready to go sooner than usual, he dusted off the old scri...Read the entire review

With only a couple of films, Bent Hamer has become a "must see" director for me. The Norwegian filmmaker first charmed me with the delightfully oddball Kitchen Stories, then he made me believe that Matt Dillon was Charles Bukowski in Factotum, and now he returns to more quirk-laden emotional landscapes for his latest, O' Horten.

The big O of the title is Odd Horten (Bard Owe), a 67-year-old train engineer who is about to drive his last route before retirement. A stoic, taciturn mama's boy, Odd has come to the realization that, like his train, he has stuck to familiar paths in his existence, regularly going back and forth but never quite being a part of the life he's been passing throug...Read the entire review

Easy Virtue is a pretty bauble, I'll give it that. It's shiny and it has lovely people saying lovely things, and yet it is merely an average movie. Based on a play by Noel Coward, Easy Virtue was directed by Australian filmmaker Stephen Elliott, the man who brought us Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. You'd have thought the lesson he sewed into that movie would have stuck with him: just because you make everything look good up front, it doesn't mean that it's all okay in the back.

The story is set on a fading country estate in rural England sometime between the two world wars. The young son of the Whittaker family, John (Ben Barnes, Prince Caspian), has been on a wanton holiday in Europe, where he has picked himself up a wife. This wife, the lovel...Read the entire review

"Grace" is a pungent horror film that embraces the fine art of psychological intrusion. It's a crafty bit of dementia that doesn't play by standard genre rules, instead weaving its own diseased design of torment pointed directly at the most sacred of subjects: motherhood. "Grace" is sick, twisted, provoking, and just wrong all over; it's everything a low-budget horror feature should be, especially to zombified audiences force-fed the same diet of spooky nonsense on a weekly basis.

Eager to start a family, Madeline (Jordan Ladd) is pregnant with her first child, trying to land a suitable birthing method for her baby, much to the chagrin of her controlling mother-in-law, Vivian (Gabrielle Rose), who demands traditional hospital attention only. Finding a place with midwife Dr. P...Read the entire review

"Dead Snow" walks and talks much like any other self-referential '80s throwback horror picture, with two laudable distinctions: its Norwegian roots and its snow-blasted mountain locations. Oh, and possibly the appearance of Nazi zombies. What should've been a rollicking, kick-the-air horror bonanza is instead reduced to a weirdly fruitless genre romp that looks to amuse and frighten, but only achieves a baffling, slightly mean-spirited tone that serves as the antithesis to the genre its working so diligently to celebrate.

On an eagerly anticipated Easter vacation trip to a remote mountain cabin, a group of medical students are impatient to let loose with a weekend of beer, snow antics, conversation, and love connections. Instead, the gang meets a stranger who warns them of a ...Read the entire review

Sandra Bullock has been making movies like "The Proposal" for quite some time now. The romantic comedy is her Jedi power, and while the majority of her output has been either strained or downright intolerable ("Two Weeks Notice," "While You Were Sleeping"), Bullock deserves some credit for her refusal to give up on the genre. "The Proposal" is harmless fluff, but it's a dull routine, somehow lassoing the jumping bean charisma of co-star Ryan Reynolds to help liven up a confused screenplay. Regardless of the changes in setting and leading men, this is still Bullock running off the same old battery, and the fatigue is becoming increasingly difficult to cover up.

A book publishing executive, Margaret Tate (Sandra Bullock) is a frosty corporate tightwad, running her executive assi...Read the entire review

Teenagers. They do the darnedest things.

Shot four years ago, "All the Boys Love Mandy Lane" has been trapped in theatrical release stasis and it's pretty easy to see why: the picture is dreadful. Cluttered with obnoxious CW-scented teen characterizations, cartoonish parades of clumsy adolescent lust, and fruitless stabs of suspense, "Mandy Lane" is a rotten idea all around, sluggishly executed by director Jonathan Levine, who went on to infuse his dismal 2008 feature "The Wackness" with the same hot flashes of irritatingly exaggerated behaviors and self-conscious filmmaking accouterments.

Returning to her junior year of high school, Mandy Lane (Amber Heard, "Pineapple Express") has blossomed into a gorgeous young woman, leaving the majority of the student body in heat when...Read the entire review

"Year One" is an immense farce, reminiscent of a time not too long ago when silliness was best served as an endless buffet, dished up by the finest comic minds of the era. "Year One" is not quite the death of comedy, but it tries for a cartwheeling tone of irreverence and buffoonery that doesn't quite fit in with today's presentations of irony and sarcasm, and lacks the crisp, filling writing of yesteryear. There's barely more than a few laughs during the entire film, but I suppose there should be some appreciation offered for even attempting an expansive giggle melee such as this. And then a character decides to eat a piece of poop. And then "Year One" becomes an inexcusable misfire from a group of professionals who really should've known better.

Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Mich...Read the entire review

Wow, that was embarrassing. Finally, David Cross has a movie to be more ashamed of than Alvin & the Chipmunks.

Year One should have been called Year Zero or even Year None, because that's how many stars I'm going to give it and that's how many laughs it got out of me. If there is a worse movie this year, I don't want to see it, as this is as low as I care to go. Criticizing what is wrong with a movie as awful as this is a difficult task, because there is very little to hang it on. It's just not funny, plain and simple. Not at all.

The idea here was that Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) and his pair of writers would shamelessly revisit the sketch-comedy concept of Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I, but limiting the m...Read the entire review

I so badly wanted to be wrong about The Proposal. When you see the trailer, it's clearly a dopey formulaic romantic comedy in which every plot point and minor story progression can be accurately predicted, sight unseen. But then they posted this really amusing thing on Funny or Die, and I reconsidered. Maybe they were up to something slyer than that.

The opening scenes are hopeful; the story begins in New York City, where Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds) works tirelessly and diligently as the executive assistant to book publisher Margaret Tate (Sandra Bullock). Margaret is a feared psychotic dragon lady in the Meryl Streep/Devil Wears Prada mode; Andrew, the faithful assistant, tolerates her impossible moods and ridiculous demands in hopes of a...Read the entire review

You might want to make a trip to the grocery store before you go and see Food, Inc., because when you leave the theatre, you may find it rather difficult to go and pick out food to buy until you have wrapped your head around all the information. Then again, you might also want to go home and throw out everything in your kitchen.

Food, Inc. is a new documentary by Robert Kenner, a frequent contributor to PBS' "The American Experience," and as the title suggests, it's about how the farming industry has gone from being a business of people making an essential, quality product for other people and become a corporate concern. In this transformation, it has all but destroyed the concept of the small farmer and increasingly distanced the consumer from the produ...Read the entire review

Well, the first thing that we have to decide, in approaching Tony Scott's new remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, is that the 1974 original was what it was, and no reimagining is going to touch it. It was, first and foremost, of its time and place--it captured the gritty, trashy, dangerous hellhole of 1970s New York in much the same manner as The French Connection and Klute and Born to Win before it, Dog Day Afternoon and The Warriors and (to the nth degree) Taxi Driver after. It looks and feels and even (thanks to David Shire's brassy, pounding score) sounds like The City, right then. But it was also way ahead of its time; fourteen years before Die Hard, here was the story of a brilliant, accented baddie who took hostages in a public place and whose plans to exchange them for a large sum of cash is thwarted by a dogged, determined publi...Read the entire review

After helming last year's weighty emotional drama Revolutionary Road, no one can really blame director Sam Mendes for wanting to tackle something a tad bit lighter. For his fifth theatrical feature, Mendes has chosen to make an indie road comedy. Away We Go is the story of two intelligent people facing the life-changing experience of having a baby and the journey they take to find out just how extensive that change will be.

Burt Farlander (John Krasinski of The Office) is an insurance salesman content with the little things, while his significant other Verona (SNL's Maya Rudolph) is an illustrator who paints detailed portraits of injuries (though we never know why or for whom)...Read the entire review

The word "classic" is thrown around a bit too carelessly these day when it comes to films, making it some sort of magical adjective used to describe movies that by some arbitrary set of sensibilities have been deemed worthy of being classical. Unfortunately, not every film that is called a classic really is a classic, as some films, while being great are simply just that, great. For any film to truly be a classic, it needs to reach a level of excellence that all movies strive for, but few ever achieve. And then decades later, if the film in question still holds up--if the writing is still finely crafted, the acting still solid and capable, and the direction still effectively evokes the sort of emotional response it was intended to evoke--then and only then can it be considered as possibly being a classic. Understanding this is crucial to understanding why the original 1974 version of The Taking of P...Read the entire review

Taking inspiration from screen giants "2001," "Solaris," and perhaps even "Outland" (if you squint hard enough) comes Duncan Jones's "Moon," a cerebral potion of killer science fiction that deftly toys with futuristic worry to construct a terrifically understated nightmare. Evocative, riveting, and ultimately contemporary in a roundabout way, "Moon" is a superb mood piece, sublimely cradled by Jones, filtered through tireless work from star Sam Rockwell.

In the future, Earth's energy needs will be filled by Helium-3, a substance harvested through lunar rocks at an off-world facility overseen by Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) and his robot assistant Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Nearing the end of his contract with his Earth employers, Sam looks forward to rejoining his wife and dau...Read the entire review

The opening sequence of Ducan Jones' Moon sucks you right in; this is how you start a movie. The exposition is handled, quickly and efficiently, with a slick commercial for "Lunar Industries," which has solved the energy crisis by harvesting an energy resource from the moon. We then go to their lunar base, manned by a single astronaut: Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who is at the tail-end of a three-year contract and counting the days. This opening is stylishly shot and powered by an intense, driving Clint Mansell score; I was all but bouncing in my seat with giddy enthusiasm.

Thankfully, the film lives up to its promise. Moon is a rare sci-fi flick with a brain and a heart, and while some of it is clearly inspired by other material, director Jones spins this yarn into something unique and fresh and new and exhilarating. You give yourself over to it as it hurls intriguingly from one s...Read the entire review

Food. What was once an abundant, cherished source of nutrition and spirit has been turned into a cold, destructive big business by those looking to profit wildly by exploiting a necessity. The ambitious documentary "Food, Inc." seeks to cover the wide range of food ills and agrarian perversions, hopeful to showcase a growing corporate movement that's removed the purity of consumption to turn a fast buck, using abusive attitudes, fallible safety precautions, and unhealthy ingredients to keep the food flowing.

The inspiration for "Food, Inc." comes from Eric Schlosser's landmark investigative book "Fast Food Nation" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan (both men are interviewed in the film). The ultimate question raised by the authors and director Robert Kenner is this...Read the entire review

"Imagine That" is a benevolent enough family dramedy, but it does a better job solidifying Eddie Murphy's obsolescence as a big screen superstar. To watch Murphy drown his cracking comedic instincts in lousy kiddie comedies over the last 10 years has been a depressing experience, but "Imagine That" goes one step further and renders Murphy boring. A painfully exaggerated concept trapped inside an especially bland movie, "Imagine That" removes the desire to see Eddie Murphy act onscreen ever again. I'd rather not watch him at all than see the man continue to torch his once imposing legacy of cinematic achievements.

An ambitious financial executive, Evan (Eddie Murphy) is fighting to maintain superiority at his firm, up against the encroaching talents of shady colleague Whitefea...Read the entire review

I hold severe reservations with "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," and it's not tied to the fact that this story has now been dragged in front of the cameras on three separate occasions. No, my objection is reserved for director Tony Scott, who once again submerges the hope of thundering screen tension under a thick layer of meaningless cinematographic bells and whistles. Over the last fifteen years, Scott has sacrificed his mojo to pursue an eruption of visual noise and "Pelham," with its promise of delectable conflict and gritty New York locales, is another wasted effort from the ineffectual filmmaker, who's become one of the most disturbingly inept stylists working in Hollywood today.

At a subway dispatch desk nursing his wounds after allegations of bribery took away his positio...Read the entire review