Nanny McPhee Returns (or Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang as it was originally known in the United Kingdom) is a personal project for Emma Thompson, starring and writing both the 2005 original and this sequel. She has an obvious love for this children’s franchise and the novels of Christianna Brand. Nanny McPhee Returns was met with almost universal critical acclaim upon its initial release in the UK.
The average age of a badass in The Expendables is 51.3 years. It would initially be easy to scoff at an attempt to make an action film featuring a cast of such folk, but any attempt to do so would fall flat under the viewing of any one of the incredibly well-directed scenes of carnage and chaos that Sylvester Stallone presents us with. He himself, 64 years young, can still whoop some wholesale ass, and this combined with the likes of Randy Couture, Jet Li, and Jason Statham equals many, many, many, many bad guys dying.
“Scott Pilgrim,” based on the comics by Bryan Lee O’Malley, marks the third major feature for director and co-writer Edgar Wright, whose Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz practically turned the definition of the word “genre” on its head. “Scott Pilgrim” is five times as ambitious, a psychedelic montage of hyper-pop culture, fusing together romance, three decades of video games, fantasy and alternative rock. Are Wright and Universal crazy or dead-on?
Julia Roberts is one of Hollywood’s most gifted actresses, as she can play just about any role with ease. Well, how about playing a writer who is solving her midlife crisis in an unorthodox way? Consider it done, as she leads the melodramatic film Eat Pray Love, based on the memoir of the same name.
Dance movies are a curious little subgenre. The category doesn’t exactly spin out huge hits, but Hollywood finds a reason to make them for the niche of people who enjoy them. They’re light on storyline, rough on acting, and solid on dance. That’s the dance flick formula and Step Up 3-D doesn’t deviate one iota. The actors are terrible and the plot is as worn out as the Macarena but the dance sequences are awesome in 3-D and that’s all the core fans ever wanted.
Adam McKay’s latest partnership with Will Ferrell centers around Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell) a forensic accountant overjoyed at completing paperwork for muscle cops Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Danson (Dwane Johnson). Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) spends his days playing solitaire on his police computer due to being demoted to desk duty for a shooting incident. Gamble stumbles upon a crime that takes the buddy cops on an adventure they aren’t ready to handle.
With a large number of awards including 9 Cesers, awards from the Cannas and London Film Festivals, a BAFTA and a Oscar nod for Best Foreign Language film, A Prophet is being released onto DVD and Blu-ray this week. Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is a 19-year-old French-Algerian man sent to prison for six years. He tries to stay out of trouble, but he is forced to commit the murder of a Muslim prisoner after Cesar (Niels Arestrup) and the Unione Corse (Corsican Mafia) threaten his life.
I wouldn’t say The Ghost Writer, new on DVD and Blu-ray today, deserves comparison to Polanski’s masterpiece Chinatown, but it’s very much in that tradition, only substitute private investigator for biographer. It’s the story of the man who doesn’t know what he’s gotten into until he’s into it and the audience never saw it coming but strangely we knew it all along.
As of late, Hollywood seems to be stuck in a hot mess. Films just aren’t the same anymore. Action films aren’t thrilling, horror films aren’t scary, drama films aren’t passionate, and, perhaps most importantly, comedies are no longer funny. Throw a popular actor and a few crude sight gags together, and unfortunately, that’s what is sometimes referred to as a comedy. It’s safe to say that we are stuck in a rut of unfunny comedies. However, Jay Roach’s Dinner for Schmucks has come to save the day, at least for the time being.
Lisa Cholodenko’s most recent film The Kids Are All Right is the perfect comedy-drama, with its phenomenal acting and simple yet profound writing.
Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a happy couple living with their two children Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson). Joni has just graduated from high school and is getting ready to head off to college. However, Laser wants to know who their biological father is, and Joni is the only one who can legally contact him. They decide to meet up with their father one day for lunch. It turns out that their father is a carefree restaurant owner named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). All goes smoothly, but when Nic and Jules find out about it, they decide that they want to meet him. This sets the entire family off on a hilarious and heartwarming journey.
