Inception is a chilling trip into the psyche…of writer-director Christopher Nolan, an Anglo-American action director who shattered the Tomatometer of mass consensus with The Dark Knight. Nolan’s followup offers more muted colors, gift-wrapped themes and GQ leading men with stockbroker comb-backs over the frowns carved in their brows —indicators of…

James Ivory and cast make every scene flutter with feeling in this adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel, The City of Your Final Destination, written for the screen by Ivory’s collaborator-of-fifty-years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Omar (Omar Metwally), an American Ph.D. student, shows up unannounced at a secluded Uruguayan country estate…

Like its predecessor, 2010’s Harald Zwart-directed The Karate Kid begins with an uprooting. Young Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother (Taraji P. Henson) are introduced in the Detroit apartment that he grew up in, now packed into boxes. Ralph Macchio shipped off to the Valley; Dre is going to…

The sixth installment in George A. Romero’s long-running horror serial (est. 1967), Survival of the Dead follows Sarge Crockett (Alan Van Sprang) as he leads his gone-rogue unit of National Guardsmen from the zombie-pestilent mainland to “Plum Island, Delaware.” There the returned departed are feuded over by two family-armies led…

As Iron Man 2 begins, Tony Stark — mechanical genius, Forbes 400 perennial, the pop-star CEO of Stark Industries — has dropped any pretense of a secret identity. Stark is garishly “out” as Iron Man, performing a one-man air show before touching down to host his Stark Expo, which transforms the…

Putatively a new romance starring Robert Pattinson, Remember Me begins like a vigilante movie: A Brooklyn subway platform, 1991; a racially charged stickup; an eleven-year-old girl watches her mother get shot. It’s the first sign that here is a film that won’t content itself with just charting the little measures…

Now a 305-minute triptych film, Red Riding originated in the novels of Ossett-bred David Peace, written in Tokyo and published 1999-2002. Looking back without nostalgia to the Yorkshire of his youth, the books summoned what Brit critic Simon Reynolds once called the “sheer crapness of England in the late ’70s,”…

Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby’s parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory…

As personal assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to France, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) can keep himself in well-tailored suits and keep his terrific-looking kittenish girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak) in a nice Paris apartment. This is the basis for director Pierre Morel’s delicate study in transatlantic manners, From Paris With Love,…

Did you shoot my daughtah?” is the question posed, in flat-voweled Bostonian, in the trailer for Edge of Darkness. And Mel Gibson, much-bereaved and much-vengeful, from Hamlet to Ransom to Revolutionary America, sets out to settle another score. Gibson is Thomas Craven: veteran, homicide detective, lonesome widower. His daughter, a…

Yesterday’s honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico, bowling alley. It’s another in a string of low-pay, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands half his age, grinding the greatest hits out of an old Fender Tremolux, including his breakout — with the chorus “Funny how falling feels like…

Directors Allen and Albert Hughes were raised by an Armenian mother and African-American father. With such a background, it would be difficult not to have feelings about the church. The Hugheses’ fourth film, The Book of Eli, centers on the Christianity that was at the margins of their previous films—hypocritically misused by Bokeem Woodbine’s bush-crazy marine turned pulpit-pounder…

Could Dave Foley prostitute his talent to amuse any further without actually becoming a prostitute? In a plunging step down from emceeing celebrity poker, Foley provides a recognizable face to Jameel Khan’s picked-over Goodwill bin of workplace comedy, The Strip. Foley’s Glenn is manager of a down-market Radio Shack-type store…

The Devil, apparently, lives in an out-of-the-way gingerbread Victorian, just past the cemetery, where college sophomore Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is lured for overnight housesitting by an elegant, forbidding couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, both queerly over-intimate). Though its poster and opening-title freeze frames threaten ’80s kitsch, House of the…

Eleven-year-old Anna Fitzgerald’s parents didn’t just plan for her — they customized her in utero, with the specific end of providing spare parts and infusions for her leukemia-sick older sister, Kate. From a 2004 Jodi Picoult bestseller, My Sister’s Keeper mashes Death Be Not Proud with Irreconcilable Differences. When Kate…

Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…

That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator. Such blanching is the reaction Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will be typical. Permissibility has…

Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex daycare as “Mo” Folchart, antiquarian-book-repairman-cum-adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts they’re reciting from. Mo has abstained from…

For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces. Often, this involves starlet Odette Yustman approaching some obscured, inevitably terrifying figure from behind, very…very…slowly. Yustman plays Casey,…

The Edge of Heaven disembarks stateside still flush from an award-reaping Eurasian tour. That the European Film Awards tossed Fatih Akin’s intercontinental, cross-cultural ensemble piece a Best Screenplay statuette makes perfect sense: It’s not brilliant, but it wears current events on its sleeve, feeling out the state of German-Turkish relationships…