Dan in Real Life (Oct. 12), the new dramedy from Peter Hedges (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Pieces of April). Steve Carell (pictured) plays a single father-of-three-girls who falls for the girlfriend (Juliette Binoche) of his brother (Dane Cook), and the whole thing appears to take place in a family-stuffed, catalog-ready autumn New England dreamscape. (Hopefully, [...]
The Kite Runner (Nov. 2) Okay, so this adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller just has to be good, right? I mean, not even Hollywood execs could mess up a book this riveting, right? Relative unknown Khalid Abdalla takes the pivotal role of Amir, while Finding Neverland’s Marc Forster directs, and while I’m pre-programmed to love [...]
Things We Lost in the Fire (Oct. 26) Halle Berry needs a good movie like I need my early-morning Diet Coke. Which is to say, desperately. Will this drama about a widow who invites her late hubby’s long-time friend (fellow Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro) to move in with her (and her kids) provide the [...]
National Treasure: Book of Secrets is actually still in production, so it’s not like director Jon Turteltaub was all with the time to help shape this trailer into something less, er, clunky. And the flick’s plot-starting device — the discovery of one of the 18 missing pages from John Wilkes Booth’s diary — is a [...]
Lions for Lambs (Nov. 9) It doesn’t get much more Oscar-bait-y than Meryl Streep starring in a Robert Redford-directed political drama about the war in Afghanistan and its implications in Washington and the world of academia. So how come the trailer plays so stiff and turgid? Lines like, “What is relevant is the implementation of [...]
Rendition about an Egyptian-American family man who’s nabbed by the U.S. for being a suspected terrorist and flown to a friendly Arab country where he can be interrogated outside the bounds of American law. Reese Witherspoon plays the man’s American wife, Jake Gyllenhaal’s the CIA agent observing her husband’s foreign minders, Meryl Streep’s the government [...]
Check out the trailer for Wes Anderson’s upcoming film The Darjeeling Limited, which stars Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, and a possibly post-op (nose-jobbed?) Owen Wilson as brothers who hope to reconnect by taking a train trip across India. I can’t shake the feeling that without the face brace, Owen Wilson would seem really out of [...]
Get Smart’s teaser keeps its gifts slightly more guarded — perhaps because it doesn’t have many? All we see of the film — based on the 1960’s TV satire of secret agent genre — is three examples of the uncouth Maxwell Smart (Carell) doing a bumbling James Bond impression and then standing around looking silly. [...]
Do we really need another bawdy reimagining of the classic Santa tale? In my mind Ernest Saves Christmas put the genre to bed back in 1988, but since then the procession has been endless: Bad Santa, Elf, Jingle All the Way, The Santa Clause, etc. Some of those movies were pretty funny, but even Mozart [...]
One thing I really liked about the original 1998 Elizabeth was how much it resembled The Godfather, even down to the Coppola-style cross-cut editing. In director Shekhar Kapur’s hands, Cate Blanchett’s Tudor queen became a Michael Corleone figure, moving from naivete to ruthless consolidation of power, at the cost of isolating herself from all close [...]