Deliver us from this anemic spook story

Horror, like porno, can be judged only by its effect on your pulse: If you jerked in your seat, it served its function. Biology requires us to react to jump scares, just as it urges a lonely man to thrill to a great set of tits. But triggering a coronary…

Earth to Echo is E.T. for the hyper-digital age

Earth to Echo is a slender kiddie flick about a quartet of preteens and their palm-sized alien pal that’s at once bland, well-intentioned, and utterly terrifying regarding the mental development of modern children. As in the most honest kids films, our five-foot heroes admit to being isolated, unhappy, and cowed…

They Came Together cranks romantic comedy up to eleven

Romances are Hollywood’s most anxiety-inducing fantasy. Like superhero flicks or horror films, they exist in a phony world of big scenes and breathtaking climaxes. But while audiences know that geeks can’t meld with spiders and that the bogeyman isn’t real, they still hope to fall in love, and, boy, it’d…

Pattinson and Pearce battle through The Rover

The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s followup to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a post-apocalyptic Western from the Outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world’s been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the events…

Obvious Child is not your mother’s rom-com

For all of Fox News’s fear-mongering about Hollywood being out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident or carries it to term. Abortion, an option…

Tom Cruise comes full circle in Edge of Tomorrow

In 1986, peaceniks were mad at Tom Cruise. That year, the Navy thanked Top Gun for boosting enlistment with another 20,000 recruits. Since then, Cruise has made more critiques of the military than advertisements for it, most of which (Lions for Lambs, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last…

Jolie the Great and Powerful

Boil Maleficent down to one newt’s nose-sized piece of advice and you’d get this: Don’t dump Angelina Jolie. It’s not a problem most mortals will face, but as seen through director Robert Stromberg’s lens, the antlered arch-villain of Sleeping Beauty is a sympathetic scorned woman, equal parts Gloria Gaynor, Princess…

Seth MacFarlane proves there are A Million Ways to Die in the West

We’re still adjusting to Seth MacFarlane as a big-screen star. Not just because his breakneck absurdist humor often demands that viewers pause and rewind, but because the man himself looks like a hand-inked cartoon, with his black, pupil-less eyes and an alabaster baby face that appears to reflect light like…

James McAvoy Loved Wallowing for Filth

James McAvoy knows not to trust the British tabloids. While flogging his grotty drama Filth, based on the Irvine Welsh novel about a coke-addicted, double-crossing cop, they breathlessly reported that the Scottish actor had dived so deep into method acting that he’d convinced a German hooker to punch him in…

Sandler and Barrymore Hurt Us in Blended

A romance ripped from the pages of Deuteronomy, Frank Coraci’s Blended posits that the best reason for a woman with sons and a man with daughters to get married is that they can take care of each other’s kids. Quel pragmatisme! In the world of this sitcom love story, men…

X-Men: Days of Future Past is earnest but clever

America’s sweetheart, Jennifer Lawrence, truly can do anything. In the course of three months, she’s managed to graciously lose an Oscar (her third nomination in four years), swan above the mansplaining condescension of a male pundit who tsk-tsked her for getting drunk in public, and burst into the summer blockbuster…

How YouTube and Internet journalism destroyed Tom Cruise

It was Jason Tugman’s first day of work. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams. A former circus fire-eater, he’d taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he…

Jon Favreau’s Chef is a foodie’s delight

Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture what his own Swingers was to the ’90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist, and divorced father with a chef’s-knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and “El Jefe”…

Tom Hiddleston: The God Who Wanted Jeans

Tom Hiddleston can pull off extreme looks. In The Avengers, he strutted around in Loki’s two-foot horned helmet. For Midnight in Paris, he finessed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prim finger waves. And in his latest, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance, Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston lounges bare-chested in velvet-cuffed robes. The only…

Director Wally Pfister Doesn’t Want Immortality

When Wally Pfister won an Oscar for Inception, his sixth film with Christopher Nolan, he went home and put the statuette on his mantel. “And then it moved to the corner, and then my office, and then the closet because you go away for a few months, and then it…

The riveting Blue Ruin is a nail-biter of a revenge drama

Everything in the opening scenes of Jeremy Saulnier’s nerve-racking revenge drama Blue Ruin is the color of a bruise, from the ocean to the bullet-hole-pocked Pontiac Bonneville that homeless near-mute Dwight (Macon Blair) calls home. Dwight has never overcome the pain of his parents’ murder when he was a boy…

Kristen Wiig shows another side in Hateship Loveship

Liza Johnson’s proudly frustrating Hateship Loveship is a film you’ll long to like. As middle-aged virgin Johanna, buttoned-up, buttoned-lipped Kristen Wiig seems to have landed in the Midwest from Mars — she could be The Maid Who Fell to Earth. In real life, Johanna would be wearing mom jeans and…

Jude Law’s Dom Hemingway is all highs and lows

Going bald is the best thing that ever happened to Jude Law. Britain’s prettiest export did the best he could with his burden of good looks. He played a genetic ideal in Gattaca and a robotic ideal in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his golden-god perfection…

The Raid 2 is bigger and bloodier than its predecessor

A grave has been freshly dug in the opening shot of director Gareth Evans’s ultra-violent Indonesian flick The Raid 2. It’s a start, but Evans is going to need 400 more. In the first few minutes, Evans dispenses with three-quarters of the survivors of 2012’s The Raid: Redemption, the writer-director’s…