Almost three days and I still feel like a python that hopes to digest some large creature wrapped up in a thick Turkish carpet. If “Eat Pray Love,” Ryan Murphy’s inert adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s beloved, best-selling memoir of spiritual exploration (adapted by himself and Jennifer Salt) could wring out the weight of tears that have stained its pages in thousands of copies, it will make a fine fortune. Reportedly, the book’s epiphanies of a fortysomething seeker with a moneyed life hitting the road evoke spiritual qualities that a raft of readers found moving. Unfortunately, Murphy’s movie is ethnographic tourism of a low order. Julia Roberts makes an ideal embodiment of an entitled narcissist—me me me—who learns almost nothing other than a couple of words in Italian that she lords over others. The extensive narration is a model of tell-don’t-show. Sound effects are Mickey-Moused: the line “everybody needs a husband” would be accompanied by the loud burst of a cock crowing. It’s the aural equivalent of the aphorisms narrating her life lessons. To make a satire-cum-pastiche of the latterday “women’s picture” this accomplished requires a cruel and uncommon sensibility, and you can only assume that the producer of “Nip/Tuck” and “Glee” is putting on. Right? Really. C’mon. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar (“The Others,” “Open Your Eyes”) and co-writer Mateo Gil present an empowering tale of Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), a teacher of Greek philosophy, mathematics and geometry in Alexandria who was dismembered and burned by a political mob of anti-pagan Christians in 415 A.D. Later saluted as a martyr, she inspired literary and feminist paens, as culled by Polish scholar Maria Dzielska. A key co-star in this educational entertainment is the city of Alexandria, as recreated on the island of Malta. “Agora” consultant Justin Pollard, co-author of “The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind,” hypes Alexandria as “the only modern city in the ancient world,” “the most cosmopolitan city on earth” and “the most extraordinary city on earth.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Surely someone on the internet has already given it up for “Knight and Day,” dubbing it “Top Fun!” At the very least, this is splendid, largely unpretentious bunkum that not only winks but intermittently leers at the audience. (But in a good way.) It’s James Mangold’s honorable attempt to emulate the jokey sweep of Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” as well as location-leaping features like “North by Northwest,” as well as the japery of Peter Stone’s script for “Charade.” (There may be a little bit of “Romancing the Stone” at the bottom of the frappe as well.) The lead characters have 1950s-style names: Cameron Diaz is June Havens to Cruise’s Roy Miller (a name shared by Matt Damon’s character in “Green Zone”). Mangold’s career veers: the man who made the painterly, near-silent “Heavy”; the snake pit of “Girl, Interrupted”; the performance-driven biopic, “Walk the Line” would want to apply the lessons of Hitchcock and Donen to a popcorn meta-movie that also works as not only a satire of already-satirical action movies, but making play with the public image of its superstar? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

An exponential increase in peril faces a community of toys who talk and walk when  people aren’t around. In 1995, the American boy Andy who owned the toys was only moving to a new house. In 1999, when Andy went off to summer camp, a collectibles dealer preyed upon toys destined for a Tokyo museum. Lee Unkrich directs the third Disney/Pixar G-rated animated adventure, and ratchets up the stakes for toy solidarity and survival. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

French director Michel Hazanavicius, writer Jean-François Halin and actor Jean Dujardin follow-up “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies” (2006) with another international spy movie comedy. Both are based on the pre-James Bond novels by Jean Bruce about Office of Strategic Services agent 117. Their last film, set in Cairo in 1956, ended with the debonair buffoon Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (Dujardin) learning his next assignment is in Iran. His boss briefs him: “Iran is beautiful. They really appreciate Westerners.” This more successfully paced and put-together film continues his misadventures with more chases, scenery and over-the-top faux pas. It’s 1967 and OSS 117 is off to Brazil to buy microfilm listing French WWII collaborators from Nazis scheming a Fifth Reich. The map places them in “Uberlandia.” Last time the scandalously unsavvy operative teamed up with a sexy Egyptian agent and insulted Islam. This time he teams up with a sexy Mossad agent and does Israel and Jews no favors with his insouciant idiocy. It’s almost too stupid to register as antisemitic. His full-flowered sexism, though, is slightly more thought-through due to all the females throwing themselves at him. Free love, women’s lib, long-haired hippies and an LSD-catalyzed orgy cannot knock this Cold War avatar off his game. “Change the world?” he guffaws. “The world is fine!” In Cairo, OSS 117 flashbacked to cavorting on the beach and laughing madly with his dearly missed male comrade. In Rio this one-time trapeze artist is tormented by the memory of his partner slipping from his grasp and falling to his death. That nod to “Vertigo” comes with another to “North By Northwest.” Disregard any alleged linkage to the spoofy films from the sixties where Dean Martin played spy Matt Helm, based on books by Donald Hamilton. The four I just watched were witless about the genre. Hazanavicius insists neither of his OSS 117 films are parodies of period films, but they are delectably risque exercises in political incorrectness. With Louise Monot, Rüdiger Vogler, Alex Lutz, Reem Kherici, Pierre Bellemare, Ken Samuels. 97m. (Bill Stamets)

“OSS 117: Lost in Rio” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Once upon a time a brave little girl with a good heart stopped the gods from obliterating humanity with a sandstorm. Once upon another time, a brave little orphan dared to yell “stop” at a soldier on horseback thrashing a boy in the bazaar who pilfered an apple. The king saw a “king in spirit” in the first boy and adopted him. Fifteen years later, he’s a scrappy prince named Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) who meets a sacred princess named Tamina (Gemma Arterton, “Clash of the Titans”). She’s descended from that girl who saved the world, and is destined to do more of the same when an evil royal careerist seeks to load the hilt of a magic dagger with magic sand that fuels backwards time travel. Beware: if you tap into the entire world supply of magic sand, the world will end. On the run from everyone, Dastan and Tamina trick and tease each other, destined to fall in love and to say they make their own destinies. Some of this may come from the “Prince of Persia” video games authored by Jordan Mechner, also an executive producer. The rest is written by Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, and directed with zest by Mike Newell (“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “Four Weddings And A Funeral”). Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films present an adventure in pillage: parkour chases riffing on “The Thief of Baghdad,” a plot line about faked intel on hidden weapons to justify an invasion as in “Green Zone,” a bad guy armed with super-whips like in “Iron Man 2,” security systems for ancient chambers from the same guild of engineers behind “Indiana Jones” and “National Treasure,” and extra-sensory assassins centuries ahead of “Men Who Stare at Goats.” For contemporizing comedy, Alfred Molina plays an ostrich race promoter and tax evader. Syncretism is on the call sheet for the art directors. Great CGI on the sixth century urban design. Really cool serpents. This is Orientalism for boys at all longitudes. With Ben Kingsley, Steve Toussaint, Toby Kebbell, Richard Coyle, Ronald Pickup, Gísli Örn Garoarsson. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

Robin Hood (Russell Crowe) is an archer with father issues. He lost his earthly father and his memory of him at age five, a repressed trauma that is revisited in flashback. (The print previewed had an ugly splice right when the word “beheading” is heard on the soundtrack to recount his dad’s ending.) Another flashback explains how Robin, crusader under King Richard the Lionhearted, lost his heavenly father and turned “godless” amidst the 1191  beheading of thousands of Muslim captives in Acre. Robin returns to England where he assumes a new identity, with the collusion of the blind father (Max von Sydow) and the able-bodied wife (Cate Blanchett) of a slain crusader. “I know little about the love between father and son,” laments Robin. He learns, as his new father tutors him to assume the mantle of his late father. Robin turns into an outlaw proto-democrat. Director Ridley Scott offers another political action film whose hero suffers faith and father deficits, like his earlier “Kingdom of Heaven.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

By Ray Pride

There’s no one-size-fits-all definition of modern-day documentary, but I’m partial to “stranger than fiction.”

And then there’s “too true to be good.” The highest per-screen average of any movie in the U.S. this past weekend was the anonymous but conceptually gifted street artist Banksy’s “Exit Through The Gift Shop,” an oft-riotous entertainment about perception and value in the art marketplace. Essentially self-distributed, “Exit” purports to be the story of the artist turning the camera on a would-be documentarian. While narrated by Rhys Ifans, a faceless figure in a black hoodie is identified as Banksy, with a distorted voice and an immaculate sense of comic timing. With pudgy English fingers and a bandaged middle one, Banksy turns his hands over and over as he outlines the game. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Akira Kurosawa’s savage, bold, elemental “Lear” must be seen. One of the most lavish celebrations of the centenary of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa is Criterion’s immense “AK100: 25 Films by Kurosawa,” a coffee-table fetish replete with books and shiny-shiny all kinds of stuff. But for those of us with a few hundred dollars less to spare, a fresh 35mm print of his epic “Ran,” (1986) a tale of history versus its sons, the feudal drawn as modernity, his twenty-seventh feature, is to see something almost unmoored from time, a singularity of man cast upon seas of madness. It’s almost as if the time spent in the years Kurosawa had been kept from behind the camera meant that Kurosawa had to make a movie that was several movies in one: the chef de cuisine would go down with his kitchen if he had to. The battle scenes are like watercolors written in lightning.  The most expensive Japanese film of its time, with not a yen ill-spent. 160m. (Ray Pride)

“Ran” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

I laughed. I didn’t cry. My immediate reaction to “Date Night” wasn’t, “That could have been worse,” but, “That’s not bad at all.” The biggest problem with this version of “After Hours” re-orchestrated for dual instead of single voice is systemic: the pairing of the verbally fleet Tina Fey and Steve Carell is filled with felicities and asides in the midst of inane, pile-on screenwriting. They’re doing needlepoint in a thunderstorm, a deluge of gunfire and car chases and ill-motivated mayhem. And that’s the dilemma of modern mega-deca-million-dollar filmmaking: a story about a couple from New Jersey whose big night out in the city who find their seemingly small lives in counterpoint to a big, bad world of New York low-lifes cannot exist without a thunderous, ripping car chase along Yonge Street in Toronto with a climactic pile-up through downtown Los Angeles that does not end on location under one of Manhattan’s glorious bridges. Read the rest of this entry »