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Movie Review

By Rex Reed 2/08 10:17am

movies

Cardellini and Slattery can't quite make themselves at home.

Return Won’t Have Audiences Doing the Same

Return is a bargain-budget bore by writer-director Liza Johnson about a female soldier back from a tour of active duty in Iraq who cannot adjust to life at home. Better movies have been made about the subject of veterans trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives on a home front that has changed in their absence and moved on without them. I am thinking of the classic The Best Years of Our Lives, of course, but that was another kind of war, and the last one that made any universal sense. Recently, channeling Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been Neil Burger’s The Lucky Ones and Oren Moverman’s The Messenger. Indifferent audiences stayed away in droves. They are almost certain to avoid Return as well. People just do not seem to be able to summon the proper compassion for people who fought in what many consider to be pointless wars created by the whims of politicians and the military without knowing why they went there in the first place. Read More

By Rex Reed 2/08 10:11am

movies

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Private Romeo?

Private Romeo: Every Soldier is a Lover

From a World War II Macbeth in an Alan Ladd trench coat to a drug-dealing Shylock in an all-black Merchant of Venice set in Harlem, Shakespeare has been boldly “opened up” before. (A rock ’n’ roll Hamlet, anyone?) But a gay Romeo and Juliet, both played by military school cadets on their way to West Point, is a new one on me. It’s Private Romeo, a brave, controversial, not always successful, but hugely adventurous and highly liberated movie that offers a fresh take on the Bard in the age of same-sex marriage. Like it or not, you will not go away yawning. Read More

9 By Rex Reed 2/08 10:03am

movies

Radcliffe sans lightening bolt scar, recently introduced to hair product.

The Woman in Black is Frighteningly Mediocre

Harry Potter is six feet under and Daniel Radcliffe is understandably looking for ways to move his career in new directions. Full frontal nudity all over the Internet and singing and dancing his way through a recent Broadway revival of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying broadened his fan base beyond the teenybopper rut. Now he’s trying something else: a creepy haunted-house thriller crawling with ghosts from the spirit world called The Woman in Black. It’s not exactly a setback, but it won’t break new ground, either. I’ve had bigger scares from a fish tank. Boring and sedentary, not to mention only occasionally coherent, this creaking-door mystery is not much of a vehicle to display young Mr. Radcliffe’s range and charm. Read More

3 By Rex Reed 1/31 8:01pm

movies

Ms. Channing: All smiles, all the time.

Hello, Carol! Larger Than Life Ms. Channing’s Happy-Go-Lucky Lookbook of Photo Ops

I’ve always regarded Carol Channing as a walking alarm clock—tall, cherry-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed with a head as big and yellow as a sunflower—tick tock, tick tock. But according to director Dori Berinstein’s new documentary, Carol Channing: Larger Than Life, the frazzled dodo captured best in legendary caricatures by her friend Al Hirschfeld was a superficial image she cultivated for the entirety of her professional life, aided enormously in the effort by the only two famous and important roles of her career—gold digger Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and meddling matchmaker Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! She invented them both, but her greatest invention has always been herself. Offstage, out of makeup and eyelashes and wigs like 20-pound piles of white farmhouse insulation, she was about as dumb as a brain surgeon turned rocket scientist, with a roaring IQ and a humanitarian heart as big as her bustier. Real life, as it turns out, was not always a turkey dinner. Like Judy Garland, she was no stranger to tears. Director Berinstein is too much of a fan to reveal it all. The result is cinematic Botox—a puff piece masquerading as a biopic, designed and edited for fans, drag queens and loyal chorus boys she always treated like family members because in reality she had none of her own. As a serious documentary, it is charming, sycophantic, peppy, endearing and, it must be admitted in all honesty, ultimately one-dimensional.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Carol Channing. Read More

3 By Rex Reed 1/31 7:53pm

movies

Green and McGregor.

Perfect Sense? Unexplained and Altogether Vague, The Film Never Showed a Sign of Having Any

You sense an instant prognosis of pretentiousness with the opening words of soundtrack narration in a horror called Perfect Sense: “There is darkness. And there is light. There are men and there are women. There is fruit. There are restaurants. Disease. There is work. Traffic.” And there is Ewan McGregor, who makes entirely too many movies and only occasionally makes an effort to speak the kind of English anyone can understand. Read More

By Rex Reed 1/31 7:30pm

movies

Paxton and Healy.

The Innkeepers is a Yankee Doodle Dud

The Yankee Pedlar Inn is a real hotel in Torrington, Conn., that is rumored to be haunted. The Innkeepers, a desultory indie-prod poorly written and lamely directed by Ti West, and filmed on the cheap at the actual location, is a poor-man’s rip-off of Stanley Kubrick’s hotel spookfest, The Shining, promising paranormal horrors to all who dare to enter. Where is Jack Nicholson when we need him? Read More

By Rex Reed 1/24 8:00pm

movies

Close.

Albert Nobbs is Ms. Butler

Albert Nobbs, a lumbering saga about the pitfalls of a woman posing as a man to hold down employment as a butler in 19th-century Dublin, opened for one week in December to qualify for Oscar nominations. It is now expanding to commercial marquees for public scrutiny. Thanks to a quirky performance by Glenn Close featuring enough prosthetics, wrinkles, painfully binding corsets and pinched diction to generate critical acclaim and give Meryl Streep a run for her money, attention must be paid. But not too much. As a period piece, Albert Nobbs is slower than Proust, and nothing of any consequence ever happens to write home about. In her bowler hat and high starched collars, Glenn Close looks like Conan O’Brien playing Oscar Wilde.

Awkwardly directed by Rodrigo Garcia (son of acclaimed novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez) from a novella by George Moore that was turned into a play Ms. Close performed off-Broadway 30 years ago, it’s a dull little fugue in a minor key Read More

By Rex Reed 1/24 7:56pm

movies

Elkaim and Donzelli.

Declaration of War: For Never Was a Story of More Woe

From France, a gentle, uneven, but touching and true chronicle of the fight to save the life of a child with brain cancer called Declaration of War is doubly notable because the baby’s real-life mother is the film’s director, Valérie Donzelli, who also costars and coauthored the screenplay with the baby’s father, actor Jérémie Elkaïm. Although they are no longer together and are living their own separate personal lives, their story, fictionalized but still autobiographical, bonded them for life. Apparently, they are best friends whose dedicated collaboration was the only way they could tell this harrowing story. It’s a brave effort any way you slice it. Read More

8 By Rex Reed 1/24 7:47pm

movies

Liam Neeson

The Grey Sees Unlikely Brothers Band Together ‘Neath Darkness of Primordial Instincts

Prepare to be devastated. Films of hair-raising terror about people doing unspeakable things to each other are a dime a dozen, usually with a built-in hole in their armor (people can always outsmart people). But movies about helpless humans versus uncontrollable nature are rare. A new one called The Grey, about the survivors of an airplane crash in the frozen wastes of Alaska at the mercy of carnivorous wolves, is the movie equivalent of a wet finger in a hot socket.

This is the scariest wilderness survival movie about men stalked by animals since Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins landed on the menu of a bloodthirsty, 10-ton grizzly in Lee Tamahori’s 1997 thriller The Edge, written by David Mamet. Read More

5 By Rex Reed 1/17 7:45pm

movies

Bale and Ni Ni.

From The Withered Tree, Flowers of War Bloom

In the dark history of human atrocity, one savage, inhuman chapter that is always missing from the textbooks in courses about the Pacific conflict in World War II is the Rape of Nanking. Except for the occasional documentary, this harrowing event has gone largely unexplored by filmmakers, yet it surges with historic value and the elements of heartbreaking drama. Ask history majors about what the Japanese did to freedom-loving civilians to alter the world and all they know is Pearl Harbor, Bataan and the Death March. Now the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou has made a valiant and compassionate effort to enlighten the ignorant. The Flowers of War is his best film since Raise the Red Lantern. It is emotionally shattering. Read More

23 By Rex Reed 1/17 7:39pm

movies

Carano. (Claudette Barius/Five Continents Imports, LLC)

Haywire? Relax Steven, It’s Worse Than You Think

Just what we need — another violent comic-book fantasy about another covert government operative (a catch-phrase that describes just about everybody in escapist-action franchise movies from incoherent Tom Cruise Mission Impossible flicks to Jason Bourne cinematic Xeroxes with Matt Damon). This one is called Haywire. The only difference is that this time the battering ram doing all the kickboxing, slicing and killing is a woman, more or less played, since she cannot act, by kung fu expert, karate specialist, martial arts star and Angelina Jolie wannabe Gina Carano. She’s a female boxer who was defeated in 2009 by Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos in the Strikeforce Women’s Championship, whatever that is. The men she beats the crap out of are an all-star bevy of camera-ready hunks baring their pecs in faceless roles to sell tickets. They are wasting their time, but, boy, do we need them. It is doubtful that the box-office flame exuded by Ms. Carano on her own could draw moths.

Haywire makes no sense whatsoever, which should come as no surprise. It’s the latest brainless exercise in self-indulgence from Steven Soderbergh, whose films rarely make any sense anyway. Read More

2 By Rex Reed 1/10 8:39pm

movies

Parton and Latifah.

Joyful Noise Has Them Singin’ for the Weekend

In the overripe candy floss musical Joyful Noise, Kris Kristofferson plays the down-home choral director of the Georgia Sacred Divinity Church in rural Pacashau who dies during the opening credits, leaving behind a spunky widow named G.G. Sparrow (Dolly Parton), an exuberant choir headed for the church-sponsored Joyful Noise Gospel Competition in Los Angeles, and a big void from which the movie never recovers. But the gravel-voiced Mr. Kristofferson does return from the dead long enough to sing a duet with Dolly and punch things up considerably. This is the kind of country-flavored banana pudding of a movie where you are grateful for small blessings.  Read More

By Rex Reed 1/10 8:30pm

movies

Biehn.

In The Divide, The End Is(n’t) Near (Enough)

Doomsday is out of the vaults and back on the screen, proving once again that January is the worst month for tacky retreads. All you get is the junk that wasn’t good enough to be released at the end of the previous year. Expect the dregs for weeks to come, but I can safely say with absolutely no trepidation that it is unlikely to get worse than a lurid, lewd and loathsome shockfest called The Divide. Read More

1 By Rex Reed 1/10 8:22pm

movies

Quaid.

Beneath the Darkness: Run Run Run Run Run Run Run Away From This Psycho Killer Nonsense

Nagging question of the day: What heinous sin could the otherwise gifted, versatile and generally underappreciated Dennis Quad have committed to deserve a submental punishment called Beneath the Darkness? This sorry rip-off of every horror flick that turns up on late-night cable programming is a major head-scratcher. Filmed in two Texas highway speed bumps called Smithville and Bastrop, and boasting 61 final thank-you credits and endorsements for everything from the Hula Hoops Diner & Soda Shop to the Wells Fargo Bank of Bastrop, it is, from the picture, very much a community effort. God knows no professional appears to have come within a 500-mile radius. Except, of course, Mr. Quaid, who has a lot of explaining to do. Read More

2 By Rex Reed 1/10 8:15pm

movies

Facinelli.

Tightly Rolled Loosies

As indie-prods go, I applaud a modest little pleasure called Loosies and its writer-star Peter Facinelli, the handsome, charismatic actor whose work as a regular in the Twilight vampire franchise and the Nurse Jackie TV series in no way prepared me for his considerable accomplishments here. Read More