Slick odd-couple blockbuster which sees secret service grandee Anthony Hopkins forced to team up with street-punk Chris Rock in Prague as a nuclear bomb in a suitcase goes up for sale. Jerry Bruckheimer ensures the noisy pace never lets up; an anarchic Rock plays it strictly for laughs and a horizontal Hopkins looks mighty bored. Great stuff, all the same.
Not as astute or ambitious a satire of "reality TV" as Series 7: The Contenders, but Marc Evans' house-of-horror, shot on webcam, hosts a rattling good scary yarn. If the kids stay in the creaky pad for six months they win a million, but as Davina day looms, things get gory. A superior, if pretentious, genre piece.
Audrey Tautou's wide-eyed, innocent expressions are subverted cleverly in this Gallic romance-mystery. Hints of Hitchcock, but a mention of Memento's inevitable, as we see the story first through her eyes, then through those of the object of her amour fou, Samuel Le Bihan. Doesn't soar, but studded with scenes both picturesque and psychologically taut.
Producer Lawrence Bender wears his Tarantino badge with pride. Which is fine when producing QT movies but problematic in everything else (see Killing Zoe, From Dusk Till Dawn 3). Knockaround Guys, in classic Tarantino fashion, has edgy twenty somethings (Barry Pepper and Vin Diesel), a bag of loot, leather jackets, guns, the mob and, natch, a high-intensity Mexican stand-off finale. Derivative.
One of the last spasms from the gross-out "wave", this National Lampoon effort has—among the boobs, belching and frat-boy self-fingering—moments of comic charm from Ryan Reynolds. He has a knack for letting us know he's above it all while throwing himself into the stench. Bet he sleeps nights by telling himself Tom Hanks began his career in such muck.
A polite, prissy take on Wilde which seems to think he wrote for children. Rupert Everett and Colin Firth are there, of course, as a playboy and a country mouse, both posing as "Earnest" while ducking scenery-munching from the tragically overrated Judi Dench and, in the token Gwyneth role, Reese Witherspoon. Muffs every joke as lamely as a fifth-form production.
Made in 1990 but in a Serpico-style '70s tradition, Sidney Lumet's Q&A pits Nick Nolte's corrupt Irish-American cop against Timothy Hutton's idealistic assistant DA. Quality old-school fare, marred only by over-emphasis on a sub-plot involving Armand Assante's gang boss and Nolte's odd moustache and high-heeled shoes.
The spaghetti western was flagging by 1970 when Enzo Barboni gave it a spoof shot in the arm with this breezy global smash and its sequel—now a one-disc double bill. Terence Hill plays the eponymous drifter with a lightning draw and an appetite for beans; Bud Spencer is his bear-like half-brother, Bambino, who dispatches opponents by thumping them on the head; a laid-back but lethal Laurel & Hardy favouring slapstick over ultraviolence.
Sean Penn has done many good things, and none of them can be found in this sentimental guff. As Sam, he's an autistic who, with the help of saintly lawyer Michelle Pfeiffer, tries to prove he's a fit father to his daughter. It's manipulative, dishonest, and wreaks carnage on The Beatles' songbook. Penn was Oscar-nominated. You have to laugh.
