- Film critic
Ty Burr
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They're 80-something, in love, and almost too cute
In a youth-obsessed culture, a movie about old people in love should be a welcome kick in the pants - a reminder that hormones don't stop firing until the heart stops beating. Unfortunately, "Elsa & Fred," a 2005 Spanish-Argentine coproduction just now appearing in US theaters, toddles along with mild, happy inconsequence. If ever a movie needed Dentu-Grip, this one ...
Liftoff is a challenge for 'Space Chimps'
"Space Chimps" isn't just the title of the new computer-animated film opening today. It's a generic product description. You - or rather your very young children - understand that those functional two words promise monkeyshines and rocketry, and that's all they need to know. A critic's job is harder. Reviewing this thing is like reviewing a waffle iron.
A darker 'Knight'
Two hours and 32 minutes long, "The Dark Knight" is grimly magisterial. It's a summer blockbuster that contemplates near-total civic disaster: Crowds surge, tractor-trailers flip, and buildings explode, but the pop violence feels heavy, mournful. Light barely escapes the film's gravitational pull.
Comic-book 'Hellboy II' packs plenty of punch
Of all the comic book movies that have spun out of theaters this long and pulpy summer, Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" is the most unapologetically comic book-y.
In 'The Wackness,' a boy and his shrink come of age
If you don't have kids, you probably haven't seen the Nickelodeon sitcom "Drake & Josh." It's a reasonably clever imitation "Odd Couple" about mismatched stepbrothers, and, as the fatter, dorkier of the two, Josh Peck is surprisingly fast on his feet. Over the course of the show's four-year run, though, the actor has thinned out and bulked up, and there's ...
His is a funky, funny 'Winnipeg'
I'd hazard a guess that the hometowns we carry around in our heads bear little resemblance to the official Chamber of Commerce versions. Instead, they're built up from regrets and memories, frozen childhood snapshots, and fervid adolescent longings. Sometimes all it takes is sunlight on a street corner, or a smell on the wind, and we're on the express train ...
In 3-D, 'Journey' has proper effects
For a harmless "Indiana Jones" knock-off, "Journey to the Center of the Earth" has an awful lot riding on it. The new film - the umpteenth screen iteration of the 1864 Jules Verne sci-fi novel - is also the latest movie to try to take 3-D technology mainstream.
Herzog explores world's end in all its splendor
In "Encounters at the End of the World," Werner Herzog heads down to Antarctica to chat with the scientists, free spirits, and lost souls who make their living there. The movie's not a global warming lecture, though. For one thing, Herzog is far too pessimistic to wag his finger at us, Al Gore-style. He'd rather peer over the edge of ...
'Girl' power overcomes tough times
Set in 1934, "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" hearkens back to a time when pop standards like "Paper Moon" burbled on the radio, people used manual typewriters, and a child could actually envision a viable career in newspapers. It's a soothing fantasy in 2008 - except for the home foreclosures and the parents losing their jobs. Maybe things haven't changed ...
Six early Herzogs
Back in the mid-1970s, if you'd tapped one of the directors of the New German Cinema to still be around in 30 years, odds are you wouldn't have bet on Werner Herzog. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was cranking out four movies a year and Wim Wenders was gathering strength, but the former worked himself to an early death in 1982, and ...
George Carlin was as good as his words
It's 1972 in a bedroom somewhere in the endless flatness of suburbia. A phonograph needle drops on the last track of a much-played vinyl album, and a teenage boy cranes his ears once more, waiting for the voice to come through the crackle:
Angelina Jolie is rough, tough, and out to kill in 'Wanted'
In the preposterous, luridly entertaining "Wanted," we have this year's model of the Angry Young Man Power Fantasy. 1999's "Fight Club," which had some ideas, was the progenitor; 2007's "300," which didn't, was a recent entry. "Wanted" plays it down the middle, being neither too stupid to entirely discount nor smart enough to take seriously. Fortunately, the movie's onto the ...
A moving inquest into faith and family
The Israeli film "My Father My Lord" packs a wallop far out of proportion to its running time (brief), its pace (poetically slow), and the events it depicts (minor, for the most part). Out of the slenderest of materials, writer-director David Volach has created a drama that, in retrospect, feels positively biblical.
'WALL-E' is out of this world
With "WALL-E," Pixar at last takes the great leap forward many of us knew the company had in it. A "family movie" in name and MPAA rating only, it's a major visionary work, a sci-fi parable of astonishing scope and depth that is anchored by an adorable bucket of bolts and yoked to a sensibility that is - there's no ...
Betting it all on lost causes in 'Finding Amanda'
When two characters are as fundamentally dislikable as the gambling-addict TV writer and his prostitute niece in "Finding Amanda," a movie had better find ways to make us care. Insight or a spark of wit would be nice, as would performances that go beneath the surface to cast light on any underlying psychology.
Out of this world
With "WALL-E," Pixar at last takes the great leap forward many of us knew the company had in it. A "family movie" in name and MPAA rating only, it's a major visionary work, a sci-fi parable of astonishing scope and depth that is anchored by an adorable bucket of bolts and yoked to a sensibility that is - there's no ...
