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Ty Burr
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  • Ty Burr

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  • McCarthy, Bullock put life into buddy cop boys club in 'The Heat'

    If you're going to make a dopey, foul-mouthed, predictable lady-buddy-cop movie, you might as well make it funny. And until it overstays its welcome in the final half hour, "The Heat" is shamefully funny. Also: If you're inclined to consider any movie that stars both Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy -- you already know where you stand -- you should see this in a theater, surrounded by a game and tickled crowd. The two stars do their things (prissy klutz and splattery slob. respectively), but they have real chemistry and enjoy each other's company immensely. If the movie's a retread, at least "Bridesmaids" director Paul Feig has gone to the trouble of filling it with fresh dirty air. Some nice Boston locations, too, to offset the Bahstan clichés.(   06/27/2013 4:46 PM )

  • Movie review: 'A Hijacking' is a business drama with human lives as leverage

    A coolly assured nail-biter from Denmark, "A Hijacking" takes a story we're familiar with from international headlines -- Somali pirates storming commercial vessels and holding their crews for ransom -- and turns it into high-stakes human poker. It's the second feature from the young writer-director Tobias Lindholm, and it showcases his gift for tightly focused stories told without an ounce of fat. After a Danish ship is boarded, a young galley cook (Pilou Asbaek, immensely appealing) is forced to become the liaison between the pirates' negotiator (Abdihakin Asgar) and the shipping company's cool shark of a CEO (Soren Malling). The movie spreads over 134 days but is never less than riveting, and Lindholm lets the larger political implications rise naturally from the suspense.(   06/27/2013 4:34 PM )

  • A documentary to sing about

    Morgan Neville's lovely documentary "20 Feet From Stardom" celebrates the back-up singers, those women whose voices are all over classic rock and '60s pop but whose names never made it to the liner notes. Merry Clayton (that's her wailing on the Stones' "Gimme Shelter"), ex-Ikette Claudia Lennear (who backed up everyone from Bowie to George Harrison), founding mother Darlene Love (whose career arc went from "Da-Doo-Ron-Ron" to cleaning houses to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), and others finally get their chance to speak and, transcendently, sing in a film that may be the happiest time you'll have at the movies all summer. With interview appearances by Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Sting, and Bette Midler -- for once, they're the ones providing backup.(   06/27/2013 4:00 PM )

  • Movie review: There's much ado about quite a bit, actually, as Joss Whedon takes on Shakespeare

    Joss Whedon's "Much Ado About Nothing" is just about the sloppiest Shakespeare ever put on the screen, but it may also be the most exhilarating -- a profound, crowd-pleasing trifle that reminds you how close Shakespeare's comedies verge on darkness before pirouetting back into the light. Shot in 12 days at the director's home, it's a modern-dress version that goes heavy on the whimsy, but it has in Alexis Denisof and especially Amy Acker a Benedick and Beatrice who are both funny and tremendously moving. As Dogberry, Nathan Fillion lets the character's pompous mangling of the English language carry the comedy -- he's Michael Scott of "The Office" lost in Shakespeare-land. The film sidles up to the abyss, looks over, and dances gratefully away.(   06/20/2013 4:00 PM )

  • Movie review: 'The Bling Ring' shows what it's like to live and steal in LA

    In "The Bling Ring," Sofia Coppola builds a beautiful zoo and invites us over to look at the animals. Based closely on a Vanity Fair article about a group of jaded Los Angeles teens who robbed celebrity homes for brand-name clothes and thrills, it bears some resemblance to the recent "Spring Breakers" but without the go-for-broke craziness. What does Coppola want us to think about these beautiful young idiots? What does she think? She's too cool or too wary or too close to her subject to engage. Gorgeously shot (partly by the late Harris Savides) and with a terrific, nasty performance by Emma Watson, the film turns monotonous over the long haul.(   06/20/2013 2:37 PM )

  • Movie review: Pixar gives it the old college try in 'Monsters University'

    "Monsters University" is better than "Cars 2" but not by enough, and along with last year's inspired but cluttered "Brave," it offers unsettling evidence that Pixar's Golden Age may be in the past. It's a prequel: The story of how cheery green eyeball Mike Wakowski (voiced once more by Billy Crystal), met big, blue, fuzzy Sully (John Goodman) at college. Visually dazzling and flatly scripted, it trundles along on predictable storytelling tracks; what's missing is the Pixar double-punch of elegant concept and fresh surprise. This is not a bad movie, and to small children it will be a very good one, but it's closer to average than one would wish from the company that gave us "Up," "Wall-E," "The Incredibles," and the "Toy Story" series.(   06/20/2013 11:11 AM )

  • Movie review: 'World War Z'

    A heroic UN field operative played by Brad Pitt saves the planet from a global zombie pandemic? What part of that sentence doesn't make you snort milk out your nose? But the surprise of the absorbing, frightening "World War Z" is that what sounds ridiculous on paper turns out be a gripper on the screen. Despite a troubled production, Marc Forster has made an epic genre entertainment that feeds on our fears of apocalypse, but the movie's just fast enough and smart enough -- and, more importantly, human enough -- to keep an audience on edge from start to finish. You can (and probably should) pick it apart when it's over, but while it's playing, this represents the better instincts of blockbuster Hollywood filmmaking.(   06/20/2013 11:09 AM )

  • Odd woman out

    In a summer of apocalyptic movie behemoths, it's almost shocking to stumble on a modest treat like "Shadow Dancer," a drama set during the Irish Troubles of the early 1990s. As directed by James Marsh, a very good documentarian ("Man on Wire," "Project Nim") making one of his occasional sallies into fiction, the movie's a tautly minimalist, occasionally generic study of betrayal and family ties. The talented up-and-comer Andrea Riseborough ("Oblivion") plays a Belfast woman forced by British intelligence to spy on her brothers' IRA cell; a dour Clive Owen is her agency handler. Marsh directs the drama as a series of small, sharp gestures, and in Riseborough he has an actress who knows how to do more with less. (   06/13/2013 7:11 PM )

  • Going undercover in 'The East'

    "The East" is a watchably confused eco-thriller that's never sure who its heroes are. The villains are easy enough to spot: Oil company CEOs, pharmaceutical corporations, toxic power companies. Against them, the film envisions a band of anarcho-idealists who call themselves "The East" and strike back with "jams" like filling the oil company CEO's house with his own crude. And against them is Jane Owen (Brit Marling), a dewy young operative for a private consulting company who is sent to infiltrate the group. The movie's torn between depicting its characters as Truth Warriors and confused children of privilege, and the ambiguity seems only partly intentional. Because Zal Batmanglij is a skilled director, you don't fully realize "The East" is nonsense until it's over. With Alexander Skarsgård and Ellen Page.(   06/13/2013 4:00 PM )

  • Saving the world is serious business in 'Man of Steel'

    With "Man of Steel," director Zack Snyder ("300") has made a superhero blockbuster that carries the weight of its fraught times -- at least until the movie gives in to the urge to just smash things in the last half hour. The script by David S. Goyer, from a story by Christopher Nolan, imports the dramatic agonies of the pair's "Dark Knight" trilogy, and it's not always a comfortable fit. "Man of Steel" has a scope that's hard to resist, but what's missing is a sense of lightness, of pop joy. This is about a guy who can fly, for Pete's sake. As Superman, Henry Cavill is very good without quite convincing us he's a star. With Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Russell Crowe as Jor-El, and crazy-eyed Michael Shannon as General Zod.(   06/12/2013 12:42 PM )

  • 'End' is Armageddon in Hollywood

    Finally, a movie that both godless hedonists and fundamentalist Bible-thumpers can get behind! "This Is the End," a comedy in which the apocalypse comes to Hollywood and takes most of the A-list with it, sends up the new rules of celebrity engagement. There's a party at James Franco's house, and Franco's playing himself -- as are Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Rihanna, and many other names. Then the earth opens up, the Hollywood Hills burst into flame, and the end times are upon us. (Sadly, we don't get to see what happens to the agents.) The opening scenes are inspired, but then the movie still has an hour and a half of crass, patchy, occasionally hilarious farce to go.(   06/11/2013 4:53 PM )

  • Study of a couple stresses maturity in 'Before Midnight'

    "Before Midnight" is the third installment in director Richard Linklater's saga of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), begun in 1995's "Before Sunrise" and continued in 2004's "Before Sunset." If the first two films belong with the greatest (if talkiest) movie romances of all time, the new film is richer, riskier, and more bleakly perceptive about what it takes for love to endure (or not) over the long haul. It isn't a scorched-earth special like "Scenes From a Marriage" -- Linklater and his stars acknowledge the comforts of intimacy and the great fun of teasing. Like Michael Apted's "Up" documentaries, the "Before" series offers a time-lapse study of human nature that's possible only in the movies, and the more you think about it, the more humbling it becomes. (   06/07/2013 3:15 PM )

  • A treehouse declaration of independence

    What if Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden not to get away from civilization but to get away from his parents? That's the conceit, more or less, behind "The Kings of Summer," a stylish and very funny teenage coming-of-age story graced with surreal fringes and a mysteriously hushed core. A disaffected Ohio 15-year-old (Nick Robinson) drops off the suburban grid and, with two friends (Gabriel Basso, Moises Arias), builds his own house in the woods. The dialogue is often explosively funny and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts finds an easy niche between naturalism and style. It's small human comedy that touches on bigger things, but then has the good sense to back away. With Nick Offerman and Megan Mulally, both in fine farcical fettle. (   06/06/2013 6:20 PM )

  • The Kid With a Bike movie review -- The Kid With a Bike showtimes

    **** The Kid with a Bike A young boy (Thomas Doret) is abandoned by his father. It sounds tragic in outline, and Belgium's Dardenne brothers film it in their usual minimalist style, but this Cannes prizewinner is, remarkably, about hope - about the connections people forge when the ones they've been given desert them. With Cécile de France. In French, with English subtitles. (87 min., unrated) (Ty Burr) (   06/06/2013 5:01 PM )

  • Vaughn and Wilson are Silicon Valley crashers

    Here's why Google is so successful: It's figured out a way for Twentieth Century Fox to make a two-hour Google commercial disguised as a summer comedy. "The Internship" is nominally a vehicle for Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, but make no mistake: Every frame of this film testifies to the grand hipster chic of the world's largest Internet company. How's the movie as a movie? Obvious, predictable, dopey, sentimental -- and pretty entertaining for all that. Vaughn and Wilson play two unemployed appliance salesman -- chum for the economic downturn -- who fast-talk their way into a summer internship program. It's the kind of Hollywood formula product that proves why the formula's so hard to kill: simultaneously easy to like and impossible to respect. (   06/06/2013 10:57 AM )

  • Smith family is lost in 'After Earth'

    "After Earth" is Will Smith's version of Take Your Son to Work Day. Actually, he lets 14-year-old Jaden take over the whole office. Smiths Sr. and Jr. play a futuristic father and son who crash-land on an Earth that mankind long fled; the son has to cross 100 km of dangerous wilderness to save them both. It's sweet that a Hollywood superstar dad has given his son a movie of his own to prove his worth, and this one is a passably entertaining adventure best suited to 10-year-old boys. But to carry a movie, you need acting chops and basic screen presence, and I really regret to report that Jaden Smith has neither. Sshhh, M. Night Shyamalan directed, and it's (marginally) better than "The Last Airbender." (   05/31/2013 11:26 AM )

  • Movie review: 'We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks'

    Julian Assange: Silver-haired freedom fighter or creepy cyber-guru? Bradley Manning: Courageous whistle-blower or tormented info-traitor? Alex Gibney's overlong but fascinating "We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks" manages to convince you that both sides of the equation deserve consideration even as the film carefully separates the strands of a maddening snarl of event and accusation. This is the documentary that lets you grasp the 2010 WikiLeaks scandal in its entirety, even if the questions raised -- whether facts belong to a government or its people, whether any secrets deserve to remain so, whether diplomacy is possible in a world where all is known -- are left for us to resolve. The movie's especially deft at exposing spin, whether it's the US media's or Assange's. (   05/30/2013 11:18 PM )

  • 'Hangover Part III' review: Series is running on fumes

    "The Hangover Part III" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, it heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad. Ditching the morning-after-the-night-before gimmick, the new film sends the "Wolf Pack" -- Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis -- out to locate antic Asian gangsta Ken Jeong so he'll return crime kingpin John Goodman's stolen gold. Occasional chuckles leak out, almost all of them due to Galifianakis's man-from-Mars line readings, but far too much of "Hangover Part III" hangs on the notion that you find Jeong's pansy-pottymouth schtick funny, and that's asking a lot. With a cameo by Melissa McCarthy and Justin Bartha once more playing the crew's all-purpose Zeppo. (   05/24/2013 12:56 PM )

  • Movie review: 'What Maisie Knew'

    The multiplexes are jammed with movies for children, but how many great films about childhood are there? "What Maisie Knew," a modern-dress adaptation of an the 1897 Henry James novel, reverses the trend: It's told entirely from the point of view of a 6-year-old girl (the remarkable Onate Aprile) as she watches her parents' relationship fall apart. Can you imagine worse parents than Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan (or at least the characters these actors tend to play)? "What Maisie Knew" is about the erosion of innocence in the midst of plenty, yet it rarely feels heavy-handed, so serene is its own faith in its tiny heroine's strength. Joanna Vanderham and Alexander Skarsgård costar as two people who'd make better parents than the ones Maisie's stuck with. (   05/23/2013 7:12 PM )

  • Movie review: 'Frances Ha' an exercise in watching Greta Gerwig

    "Frances Ha" is a comedy about youthful haplessness trying to find its hap. The movie has been shot in lustrous black and white and it stars Greta Gerwig, with whom it is hoped you will be as enchanted as the film's director (and Gerwig's significant other), Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale," "Greenberg"). Frances is yet another of the actress's adorable ditherers, turning the corner of her late 20s and shocked that her friends have decided to grow up. There's only so long you can watch an amorphous blob, though, before you want her to get on with it. The movie's a love letter to an actress and her character, but by the end you may feel like an intervention is more in order. (   05/23/2013 7:11 PM )

  • Movie review: Dennis Quaid stars in 'At Any Price'

    With "At Any Price," director Ramin Bahrani ("Goodbye Solo") moves into the American heartland and closer to the Hollywood mainstream, with a starry cast and ambitious themes that strain for the Shakespearean. That he doesn't quite pull it off doesn't mean he shouldn't have tried. Besides, the movie's worth seeing for Dennis Quaid tearing into his most complex role in years: Henry Whipple, an Iowa farmer, seed salesman for an agribusiness giant, and a hollow man. (Zac Efron is very effective as his rebellious son.) Bahrani fills the frame with weathered faces and "At Any Price" feels like it unfolds in something close to the real America. But he wants to give us larger-than-life drama, and his strengths are life-sized. (   05/23/2013 7:11 PM )

  • Movie review: 'The Painting'

    Creative, colorful, and unexpectedly wise, "The Painting" is the latest offshore animation to show to kids burned out on computer-generated Hollywood toons. Most of the action takes place inside a dusty artwork hanging on a studio wall, a landscape full of squabbling painted people finished, half-finished, and sketchy. Three of these characters leave the frame to find the Painter and ask him why he left his work unfinished, and their adventure turns into a classic quest tale with large philosophical ideas hovering gracefully in the background. Director Jean-Francois Laguionie's film has been given a solid English dub, and the dazzling visuals recall the work of Chagall, Matisse, Munch, and other early Modernists. It's a story to stand next to children's classics like "The Phantom Tollbooth." (   05/23/2013 7:11 PM )

  • Director's story is also a family's story

    Is it possible to be anything but subjective when it comes to our families and their stories? This is the endlessly complicated subject of Sarah Polley's dazzling, multi-leveled documentary, an inquiry into her late mother, Diane, that widens in scope until director and audience stand at the edge of the abyss. Far from the latest in the How My Parents Screwed Me Up genre, it's a gathering of the tribe in which the director is determined to find out who her mother was -- and who her real father is. In the end, this rich meta-doc is concerned with how we carve events into fictions that answer our private needs. It's a process not unlike directing a movie, a fact of which Polley is well aware. (   05/16/2013 7:11 PM )

  • The cold-blooded killer inside the family man

    Michael Shannon is descended from a long line of actors -- Cagney, De Niro, Pacino -- primed to explode. "The Iceman" is the true story (more or less) of Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski, a New Jersey mob hit man who murdered anywhere from 100 to 250 people while building a suburban home life with a wife (Winona Ryder) and family. It's a fascinating subject -- the beast that lurks inside the family man -- but the movie blows it. It's a grimly passable crime drama in the sub-"Goodfellas"/"Sopranos" vein, and if you're looking for something to order up on a slow Saturday night, it'll do. But the real show here should be the many conflicted levels of a brutal man, and director/co-writer Ariel Vromen just doesn't have the chops. (   05/16/2013 7:11 PM )

  • Movie review: 'Sightseers'

    The thing about British serial killers is that they're so polite. "Sightseers" is a low-budget lark about a homicidal couple on vacation: Chris and Tina (Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, who co-wrote the script) have been dating for a few months when they head out on holiday in an RV and realize they share a taste for murdering litterbugs, snobs, and other unpleasant people. Darkly funny as it is, the movie has undercurrents of genuine and very British weirdness. The director is an up-and-comer named Ben Wheatley -- he made the unnerving "Kill List" in 2011 -- and beneath the whimsy is a class rage as heartfelt as it is warped. The movie doesn't add up to much, but it doesn't really need to. (   05/16/2013 6:00 PM )

  • Warp Speed: The latest 'Star Trek' delivers an exhilarating and satisfying ride

    "Star Trek Into Darkness" simply has to convince us that 2009's "Star Trek" wasn't a fluke, and that the rejuvenated crew of the USS Starship Enterprise has the iconic heft to go the distance. That the new movie does so -- expertly, exhilaratingly -- is a mark of director J.J. Abrams's uncanny ease with modern Hollywood formulas. There's a plot involving a past villain played by Benedict Cumberbatch, but it takes a back seat to the sheer energy of the storytelling -- the way the movie presses forward with a high-spirited wit and sense of purpose that makes other action extravaganzas look backward. All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters. (   05/14/2013 11:50 AM )

  • Baz Luhrmann's eye­popping vision of 'Gatsby'

    At its best -- which, sadly, isn't often enough -- Baz Luhrmann's version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel is a scandal. It's also, in event and emotion (if not period fidelity), the most faithful movie version of the book to date. The two are not unconnected. Leonardo DiCaprio gives us the full Gatsby, assured yet insecure, and he's magnificent, but the movie ends up romanticizing what Fitzgerald spent the book de-romanticizing. Anyone who has seen "Moulin Rouge" knows that Luhrmann lives for excess, and he delivers in the movie's opening hour, aided immeasurably by the eye-popping costumes and production design of wife Catherine Martin. But over-length, a swooningly indulged love story, and a fatuous Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway bring it low. In 3-D. (   05/10/2013 5:37 PM )

  • Movie review: 'Something in the Air'

    A clear-eyed memory play from writer-director Olivier Assayas ("Demonlover," "Summer Hours"), "Something in the Air" is deceptively calm for a movie about the death of the '60s. The year is 1971, and the hero, Gilles (Clément Métayer), is a lanky adolescent whose energies go almost completely into radical politics. Still, he's more of an observer than a talker: Gilles's are the eyes through which Assayas sees the gradual deflating of the revolution into empty gesture. With a minimum of melodrama, a fluid camera style, and a terrific period soundtrack, "Something in the Air" is attentive to the users and the used in this generation of supposed equals. There's no anger to the film, and what sometimes feels like passivity is really just the fond, unromantic gaze of an artist carefully considering his younger self. (   05/10/2013 12:06 PM )

  • Movie Review: For 'Reluctant Fundamentalist,' more is less

    Whether it's a case of life imitating art or art imitating life, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" makes for queasy but fairly worthy viewing less than a month after the Boston Marathon bombings. The new film by Mira Nair ("Monsoon Wedding"), based on the acclaimed 2007 novel by Mohsin Ahmed Hamid, concerns a young Pakistani man, Changez (Riz Ahmed), who has attained the American dream at 25 only to find it crumbling in his hands in the post-9/11 landscape. Ambiguity is at the heart of the novel, but Nair is never quite sure what to do with it. A quiet character study has been given a high-stakes political-thriller frame, and not for the best, although Ahmed is immensely appealing as a fundamentally compassionate man wrestling with conscience, dignity, and identity. With Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber, and Kiefer Sutherland. (   05/09/2013 7:10 PM )

  • 'Iron Man 3' review: Third time isn't quite the charm

    The "Iron Man" movies have become the thinking person's superhero franchise if for no other reason than that they feature the thinking person's movie star. Alone among his be-muscled and be-spandexed brethren, Robert Downey Jr. clearly considers the whole enterprise vaguely ridiculous. Still, he risks being trapped in that can. "Iron Man 3" is the weakest in the series, and it suffers from confused plotting, flat-footed exposition, and more pure, noisy nonsense than even a comic-book movie should have to put up with. Yet whenever Downey is being Downey, it's still the most subversive Marvel franchise around. There are bad guys who glow like nuclear briquettes, fireballs and detonations, collapsing mansions, crashing airplanes -- and the best scenes are when the star just cuts impatiently through the claptrap. (   05/03/2013 12:50 PM )

  • Movie review: 'Kon-Tiki'

    "Kon-Tiki," a movie that re-creates Thor Heyerdahl's famous 1947 crossing of the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft, is caught halfway between a Boy's Own Adventure and a character study of a charming monomaniac. Pål Sverre Hagen, who plays Heyerdahl, is tall, trim, and impossibly blond, and he has penetrating blue eyes that almost -- but not quite -- shade into madness. If they had, it might have made for a more interesting movie: "Tintin Goes Bananas." The movie we've got is rousing and beautiful to look at and undercut by compromises onscreen and off. The movie plays out as a rather less eventful "Life of Pi," lighter on the CGI but also on the drama, and the filmmakers hint at Heyerdahl's less salutary qualities without bothering to explore them. (   05/02/2013 5:26 PM )

  • 'Renoir' masters the look of great drama

    "Renoir" doesn't get much beneath the surface -- but, good God, what a surface. A leisurely-paced Great Artist drama about the last years of an Impressionist giant, this French import is set on the Cote D'Azur in the summer of 1915, when the palette of nature has run riot. The shots bloom with ochers and vermilions and siennas and cerulean, brushed onto the screen by master cinematographer Mark Ping Bing Lee ("In the Mood for Love"). There are camera pans across a row of freshly caught fish and gleaming ripe peppers chopped by women singing ancient peasant songs. Sensuality is the film's theory and practice, its subject and objective, and the result comes mightily close to synesthesia. This is a movie set on capturing the sound of the sunlight and the colors of the wind. (   05/02/2013 4:00 PM )

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