Reign Over Me is an astute, adult dramedy
that grapples with issues of intervention and familial communication, and asks
what is the socially acceptable shelf life of grief. A smart, thoughtful and
gracefully pitched film, it’s anchored by moving work from Adam Sandler, who
delivers a potentially career-remaking performance. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

Premonition is slapdash and nonsensical, and easily
represents Sandra Bullock’s worst starring vehicle in more than a decade.

The film falls loosely (very loosely) in the tradition of
single-star thrillers that an ascendant starlet uses to gauge box
office pull and trade her way up the Hollywood ladder. J-Lo worked this
trick with dreary, pay-cable-type thrillers like Angel Eyes and Enough. After the breakout success of Speed, a movie like this would have been almost understandable, and certainly excusable.
But I thought this is type of soulless movie that Bullock said she had sworn off, post-Crash; I guess her own powers of Premonition need some fine-tuning. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

300 offers up a stirring tale of battlefield sacrifice that’s tailor-made for MTV-generation glorification. It’s bloody, it has nudity and a wicked streak of darkly humorous fatalism that seems suitable for these times; it pops off the screen with the same sort of in-your-face quality of Sin City, mixing fantastical visual affectation with skull-cracking action. Young males are going to eat this movie up. I’ve talked about it before, but for the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Wild Hogs is a curious movie. On the one hand, the comedy — about a quartet of friends who hit the
road in a rather vaguely defined attempt to reclaim their youthful,
masculine spirits — is driven by overly demonstrative sitcom-type
acting, anchored by a number of flat, desultory set pieces, and set to
all the music cues (Foghat’s “Slow Ride,” George Thorogood & The
Destroyers’ “Who Do You Love,” AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” The Allman
Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider”) you wholly expect. For Chrissakes, it even has an
atrocious sequence in which
someone on a computer inadvertently stumbles across a deviant sex web
site only to then be unable to shut
it down, despite their mad pressing of buttons and checking of cables.
(We’re just over two months into 2007, and, alongside Diane Keaton’s Because I Said So,
we’ve already had two such idiotic scenes unleashed upon audiences;
current Vegas over-under odds place the year’s cumulative,
sigh-inducing tally at seven.)

On the other hand, if a movie can ever be described as, say, a single notch greater than the expected sum of
its disingenuous parts, that might be the best way to explain the
fleeting entertainment that Wild Hogs provides. There definitely isn’t much in the way of insight into the “weekend warrior” mentality that purportedly serves as Wild Hogs‘ narrative lynchpin, and the film certainly won’t provide memorable
laughs that will stick with you much beyond the day of viewing. Still,
through pure contrast of character, some nice contributions from bit
players (thank you, Marisa Tomei!), a very few unexpected avenues of brief exploration and a
couple of comedic showcases which allow Martin Lawrence and Tim Allen to flaunt their demonstrative, small screen-fed personas, Wild Hogs plays as a pleasingly broad diversion, provided one’s level of anticipation is properly adjusted a good bit downwards. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Zodiac is part brooding investigative ensemble, part journalistic procedural in the vein of All the President’s Men. Fincher’s least stylistically ambitious work to date, as well as his most mature, Zodiac is a strikingly well stitched together vivisection of crime and obsession, marked by a painstaking, novelistic richness that showcases the heavy existential toll of the pursuit of punishment.

The film’s actual violence is relatively minimal, but frontloaded and grimly depicted. Fincher captures the sudden and arbitrary nastiness of these acts, and they carry an awful wallop and enduring influence that hang menacingly over the rest of the film, which exhaustively but thrillingly chronicles the official efforts of two San Francisco homicide detectives, Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo, above) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), as well as the amateur investigations of reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) and San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, R, 158 minutes)

The Number 23, a stylish if definitely murky thriller about one
man’s downward descent into geometric fixation and madness. The film
intriguingly flits around the edges of loopy susceptibility that go hand in
hand with obsession and compulsion, but ultimately delivers more on mood than
satisfying substance. Debut screenwriter Fernley Phillips creates an effectively colorful
and suspicion-tinged framework for one man’s frenzied quest, but poorly
delineates the specifics of the script’s investigative aspects. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

Ghost Rider is not very good seems like a
fool’s exercise, especially now. After all, it’s easy to decry the
messenger, especially when a movie’s Presidents’ Day weekend release
generates a record-setting gross of $51.5 million. Still, the subgenre
of comic book adaptations needn’t automatically lend itself to critical
derision, as the warm critical embrace of the Spider-Man films, Christopher Nolan’s Batman reboot or even the more mixed but passionate critics’ defenses of graphic novel flicks like V For Vendetta and Sin City fittingly demonstrate.

Ghost Rider, though, is a glossy, big-budget affair that in almost every significant way behind
the camera — and in more than a few ways in front of it — feels like
both a fatally compromised and hopelessly amateurish production. This
is the type of film which the actors involved carefully describe in press junkets and interviews as “a lot of fun” rather than good. They talk about how much they enjoyed making it instead of how they’re proud of it. For the full review from FilmStew, including reactions of a paying general audience, click here.

Based on Katherine Paterson’s popular Newbery Award-winning novel of the same name,
Bridge to Terabithia is part family drama, part adolescent fantasy — a
wonderful little movie about friendship, as well as about the power and exhilaration of
a blossoming imagination.

Zathura’s Josh Hutcherson (above, right) stars as Jess, a reserved 11-year-old who’s a bit
of an outsider at school and home as well. When he strikes up a
friendship with the quirky new girl in town (AnnaSophia Robb, of
Because of Winn-Dixie), together they create a secret, magical kingdom that serves as their joint escape. There they play-act a series of fantastical escapades
against figurative representations of school bullies and, in the
process, change each other for the better. The movie mines a deep reservoir of genuine feeling that’s often missing
in adolescent entertainment, combining it with just the right amount of
sensory pleasures. For a short review of the film, from CityBeat, click here. Alternately, for a longer look at the movie and Walden Media’s new lock on kids’ lit, in a piece from FilmStew, click here.

Norbit, which finds Eddie Murphy grotesquely humping the same two piano keys
for its entire running time, less on its own dubious merits and more as
a piece of agitable propaganda against his Academy Award odds.

That Norbit isn’t built on subtlety should be obvious from its
har-har posters and advertising campaign, but broad needn’t necessarily equate
with shrill and desperate, which it certainly does here. If the awards
community wind in Hollywood picks up that scent, it may well help blow
Murphy’s Oscar chances right away. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

actress Sienna Miller took a decidedly
backwards-plotted course to the limelight, and has had to suffer the effects of
that path ever since. Director George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl, then, represents both the
perfect career elixir for a young starlet looking for respect — a
based-on-a-scandalous-true-story filmic vehicle almost doggedly formulaic in its
tonic properties — as well as Miller’s most fully realized performance to date.
It’s a movie that establishes her as a legitimate actress, in other words, even
as it somewhat pigeonholes her as insouciant, flippant and spunky.

Eminently watchable throughout, Miller plays Edie with a blend of thumb-chewing
impishness and quietly wounded, flamboyant bravado, but the film is one of sexy surfaces whose true revelation may actually be Guy Pearce, who goes beyond the
other skilled mimicries we’ve seen on the big screen to locate the vanity and insecurity in Andy Warhol’s pettiness and cruelty. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Hannibal Rising, a tony revenge prequel which charts the adolescent trauma Lecter suffered at the end of World War II, the sexually-tinged awakening of his first violent impulses and a campaign of meticulously plotted retribution against the swarthy no-good Nazis who killed his family. It’s a somewhat awkward mash-up of formula that would feel like the pat playing out of a string if not for the leonine menace a watchable Gaspard Ulliel (above) brings to the role of young Lecter. For the full review, from CityBeat, click here.

Because I Said So is seeing release on
Super Bowl weekend is a no-brainer, naturally. This is a chick flick
through and through, an air-quote wacky showcase of over-demonstrative maternal caring
for the Williams-Sonoma set. Still, all of its intrinsic “rightness” in demographic pandering doesn’t necessarily make Because I Said So
a good movie, even if it is studded with a few brief moments of
flighty humor. Mostly, the film feels forced (you’ll probably notice this just before the second of three dropped cakes), and its manic pacing
artificially induced. Daughters, meanwhile, will recoil in ghastly recognition and/or
irritation at Diane Keaton’s harping, voluble matriarch. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Catch and Release, the directorial debut of Erin Brokovich screenwriter Susannah Grant, opened last week, to $7.6 million, and a fifth place weekend slotting. Starring Jennifer Garner, the movie unfolds in a rustic state of monotonously pitched pining, and centers around Gray Wheeler, who after the sudden death of her fiancé, seeks solace in the company of his ex-roommates (Kevin Smith and Sam Jaeger).
As more details about her boyfriend emerge — information involving a
healthy secret bank account, a Los Angeles massage therapist (Juliette
Lewis) and her son — Gray comes to see new sides of the man she thought she
knew, and at the same time finds herself drawn to his childhood pal Fritz
(Timothy Olyphant).

You feel trace elements of a
fuller ensemble character study about grief, but the characters herein — the
inveterate playboy with the hardened heart, the stoic secret crush, the ditzy single
mother — are reduced to thinly sketched functionaries, and behavioral
rationalizations big and small consistently feel a step off.
For the full review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

Miss Potter star Renée Zellweger might have helped drag her modest, turn-of-the-century biopic to wider commendation.
However, Helen Mirren’s towering turn as Elizabeth I in the HBO film of the same name and as Elizabeth II in The Queen
effectively
cornered the 2006 market on real-life British figures, sucking the
awards circuit oxygen out of the room.

Miss Potter, then, remains a story of bucolic idyll — a dainty-literary piece in the mold of Finding Neverland, but one with no profound or stirring rumination on imagination, or loss, or any of the other themes that the movie putatively touches upon. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Smokin’ Aces, which melds Tarantino’s penchant for
chatty-cool characters to the sort of stylized mayhem and balletic
action that keeps the Squib Manufacturers of America quite happy. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Venus, a rich, bawdy and yet ultimately moving tale of an aging actor’s infatuation with an irascible friend’s much younger niece. It’s in essence a movie about life’s indignities, and how they visit
and prey upon both young and old, frequently in indiscriminate fashion.
Yet Venus never succumbs to mopey dramatic tropes, or indeed, even much melancholy; it’s spry, and a heck of a lot of fun. What you so strongly feel while watching the film — even if
you’re unfamiliar with the rest of O’Toole’s filmography, or him as a
personality — is the force and weight of a life lived with full-tilt
passion. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. For a feature piece on the film, meanwhile, click here.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is in the very loosest sense a science-fiction film, in that it takes place in the future, and is driven by a quandary both biological and scientific. Its bleak palettes, meanwhile, mark it as a dystopian drama. It’s also a political thriller, if a decidedly free-flowing and ramshackle one. Some of its action sequences, finally, rank among the year’s best, and certainly most flamboyantly staged.

After raking in just under $1 million during its limited Christmas holiday release, the film has enjoyed wide weekend frames of $10.1, $6.3 and $7.4 million — certainly nothing to sneeze at, but perhaps not quite the sort of breakout performance hoped for in the shadows of runaway family hit Night at the Museum and Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness. The good news is that with something approaching critical consensus (the film currently has an aggregate score of 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to the 80 percent of this weekend’s number one advance ticket seller, the resurgent Dreamgirls), Children of Men has clearly lured a sizeable horde of filmgoers to the multiplexes. Once there, though, have they and will they be similarly wooed and moved by a movie that is a stylistic gem, but also one of deep thought, reflection and even denunciation? For the full, original review of the film, from FilmStew, click here. (Universal R, 109 minutes)

Justin Timberlake) and pliable women (Olivia Wilde). When strung-out acquaintance Jake (Ben Foster) welshes on a debt, Johnny impulsively snatches Jake’s younger stepbrother Zack (Anton Yelchin) to force his hand.

Cassavetes has attracted a notable ensemble cast and, in encouraging the enthusiastically unhinged performances of his often shirtless, tattooed actors, he does a good job of capturing the charged, hormonal aggressiveness of youth. The result is stylish, adrenaline-charged and quite insistent, qualities that initially serve it well in holding one’s attention. Still, the movie unfolds at only one pitch, and the heightened tone eventually reveals itself as more of a default position than a clever gambit. There’s no particular depth to the “pack of wolves” metaphor, no cautionary lessons to be gleaned — just broad, colorful strokes and a sugar rush of sweaty, nicely photographed delinquency. (Universal, R, 122 minutes)

Dreamgirls’ appeal. It’s a dressed-up, showbiz-set, flamboyantly theatrical, macro-sized version of the same slings and arrows of occupational and personal indignity we all at some point suffer — the type of redemptive dream performance artists everywhere must have. Its embrace speaks to the fact that there’s a bit of a secret entertainer in all of us. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Freedom Writers is based on the true story of
Long Beach gangbanger teenagers who were encouraged to put their angst
to paper in the charged years following the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Writer-director Richard LaGravenese leans heavily on the grooves of audience expectation
established by the estimable screen canon of insistent mentors butting heads with
cynical and otherwise hardened urban teens — movies like Stand and
Deliver, Lean on Me, and, yes, 1995’s Dangerous Minds. Still, a
critic’s heart isn’t automatically a hardened one, and on balance
there’s more good than bad here. For the full review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

It was Shrek, of course, that most colorfully laid low fairy-tale
conventions: now, into the valley between its highly lucrative sequels
steps the like-minded animated offering Happily N’Ever After, ostensibly a satirical
retelling of the Cinderella story. The two films share a producer, and
perhaps that’s why this colorful and clamorous but hardly inspired
effort seems predominantly made up of recycled concepts and jokes from
that franchise. Its story, a stop-and-start farrago of half-baked
ideas, finds lowly servant Rick (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) wooing Ella (Sarah Michelle Gellar) away from a vapid Prince Charming and saving Fairy Tale Land from Ella’s wicked stepmother, Frieda (Sigourney Weaver). For the full review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.