Johnny Reb finds he belongs on Planet Red. Andrew Stanton’s most peculiar “John Carter,” which was produced as “John Carter of Mars,” and appears as the film’s end title, is a boy’s dream story come true, if you’re Andrew Stanton grown tall. Adapted from a novel in an Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series about a Confederate soldier transported to Mars, “John Carter” makes a mix of live action and animation into something deluxe but dinky, neither “Cowboys & Aliens” nor the original “Star Wars.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” a labyrinthine tale about British espionage and spycraft, is an adaptation of John le Carre’s 1974 novel, from Tomas Alfredson, the director of “Let The Right One In.”

The level of patience and control is similar between the two films: in the superb, measured “Tinker Tailor,” we realize there’s horror inside all of us, the potential for terrible things. George Smiley (Gary Oldman) may not even know it consciously, but he’s just waiting to spring cruelty on someone. After a botched mission, a search for a double-agent in Britain’s MI6 begins: the complex interlocking narratives are enacted by a brilliant, precise Oldman, but also John Hurt, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon McBurney, Toby Jones and Colin Firth. Read the rest of this entry »

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John Michael McDonagh’s debut feature is a Western, cop-buddy, fish-out-of-water, “In Bruges”-style, talk-talkative scrappy fucker of a comedy, teasing and vulgar and so full of movie-movie love: you might miss how smart it is smiling at the sly goodness of performances by Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Gleeson) is a smart man playing dumb in the middle of his career in the outback of the West of Ireland in the tiny town of Connemara: while constantly needling his colleagues and superiors with his subversive humor, he’s a repository of the accumulated knowledge of the common man. After the disappearance of his new partner and reports of a huge drug run in the offing, an American FBI agent, Wendell Everett (Cheadle) arrives. Read the rest of this entry »

In second century Britain, two young men from opposed camps undertake a perilous mission to recover a totemic silver eagle with tactical value. Their late fathers were foes. Now this duo, a slave and his owner, bond on oaths of honor. More than twenty years ago, the Ninth Legion disappeared somewhere far past “the end of the known world” now known as Scotland. Slander of cowardice and surrender taints the legend. The symbol of this Roman occupational force is rumored to surface in the wrong hands. Brandished by Druid insurrectionists, this imperial standard could disgrace and demoralize Romans posted on the frontier. In “The Eagle,” threaded with muddy chases and bloody clashes, Channing Tatum plays Marcus the Centurion and Jamie Bell plays his slave Esca, a local who will play his master’s master once they’re in the land of the “Painted People,” leagues and leagues from Hadrian’s Wall. Jeremy Brock (a co-writer of “The Last King of Scotland” and writer of “Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown”) adapts the 1954 novel “The Eagle of the Ninth” by Rosemary Sutcliff. Her “holy men” who “preach holy war” against “unbelievers” translates into no contemporary echoes, though. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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Robert Downey, Jr.–or Warner Bros. publicists using him to channel a crossover high concept to highbrows–dubs Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes “an intellectual superhero.” Downey fans will deduce he can once again play a damaged charmer and loner with arcane tastes, wizardly expertise, a self-destructive appetite and a social disability or two, and a kinky likelihood to find himself tied up. Downey excels here as a freelance sleuth and scallywag in an 1891 London littered with murdered young women that recalls the 1888 London of “From Hell.” The 1866 London of “Steamboy” and the 2020 London of “V for Vendetta” also come to mind for resonant themes of empire and regimes of fear. Guy Ritchie directs a snappy screenplay by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg that sports such dialogue as “My clay pipe should service that ambition”… “You do know what you’re drinking is meant for eye surgery?”… “No girl wants to marry a doctor who can’t tell whether a man is dead or not.” That last line is meant for Sherlock sidekick Watson (Jude Law), just returned from the Afghan war and betrothed to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly). Period detail includes protestors bearing elegantly mounted banners and a chase down a carnivalesque alley rather like the Fellini-inspired cover Joel Brodsky shot in NYC’s Sniffen Court for “Strange Days” album by The Doors. The baroquely sinuous conspiracy at hand involves a cult in high places launching a New Order with designs on conquering England’s former colonies across the Atlantic with fake black magic aided by radio-controlled chemical weaponry. “Sherlock Holmes” assures Downey future employment in another serial like his sequel-friendly “Iron Man,” a like-minded ‘intellectual’ action franchise. With Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong, Eddie Marsan, Robert Maillet and Geraldine James. 128m. (Bill Stamets)

Put bluntly, Emily Blunt puts the daffy beneath the regal in “Young Victoria,” produced by Sarah Ferguson, with a sturdy corset by “Gosford Park”‘s Julian Fellowes and dutiful direction by Jean-Marc Vallée (the spritely “C*R*A*Z*Y”). Set in 1837, the historical bones are these: Princess Victoria ascends to the throne amid a power struggle among an earlier generation of family powers. It’s more Royalism for those who enjoy such things done without undue brio, but Blunt’s fleet, eccentric features capture joys the perfunctory telling does not. As Prince Albert, Rupert Friend makes a fetching pairing with Blunt. She’s droll in even the dourest passage. With Paul Bettany, Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent, Mark Strong, Thomas Kretschmann, Jesper Christensen, Harriet Walter. 104m. (Ray Pride)

“Young Victoria” opens Friday at Landmark Century.

Like the recent “Traitor,” “Body of Lies” is a terrorist thriller sporting an American intelligence operative who speaks Arabic and deploys an inter-cultural sensibility. And, once again, the field operative has a stateside handler in a suit. Rotate Leonardo DiCaprio into the Don Cheadle role as the hands-on, on-the-ground agent, and bring in Russell Crowe in the role formerly occupied by Jeff Daniels. Like the old-school commander behind his desk corralling the renegade street cop, the Crowe and Daniels characters are used to set up dialogue with the DiCaprio and Cheadle characters on the proverbial bigger picture of how this messed up world really works. Screenwriter William Monahan here adapts reporter David Ignatius’ 2007 novel. As in “The Departed,” where DiCaprio played a deeply undercover mob infiltrator, Monahan again looks for serious stuff about tactical ethics and macho loyalty. For chases and bang-bang, director Ridley Scott (“American Gangster,” “Black Hawk Down”) supplies slick, fierce sequences shot in Morocco as fake Iraq. “Body of Lies” is far from a foreign policy seminar, but it’s unexpectedly on-message about nuance in mapping terror wars and intelligence networks. This otherwise acute drama of conscience falters, though, when the bad guys—and the writers—shamelessly leverage a romance with a nurse to trap a good guy. With Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Ali Suliman, Alon Aboutboul and Oscar Isaac. (Bill Stamets)

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. The director of “La Haine” has expressed his disappointment in the final cut of this Prague-shot post-apocalyptic thriller set in Eastern Europe and “the teeming megalopolis of New York City,” where Vin Diesel must deliver a “package”—”a mysterious young woman with a secret.” With Michelle Yeoh, Melanie Thierry, Lambert Wilson, Mark Strong, Gerard Depardieu and Charlotte Rampling as the “Neolite Priestess.” Shot by the talented Thierry Arbogast, a frequent collaborator of Luc Besson. 99m. NR. Not previewed.