Premiere NASA Dollar 8

There are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky-- and, eventually, on earth-- in Jack the Giant Slayer, X-Men director Bryan Singer's big-budget, gently revisionist, 3-D spin on "Jack and the Beanstalk." It's a journey... More »

There are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky-- and, eventually, on earth-- in Jack the Giant Slayer, X-Men director Bryan Singer's big-budget, gently revisionist, 3-D spin on "Jack and the Beanstalk." It's a journey facilitated by the eponymous Jack (Nicholas Hoult), the naïve farm boy who trades his horse for magic beans that sprout up like some unholy tincture of Miracle-Gro and HGH, putting both Jack and an intrepid princess (newcomer Eleanor Tomlinson) face to face with mankind's potential extinction. The story is hardly original or surprising, but the supremely confident Singer lends Jack an enjoyably old-fashioned showmanship that recalls a time when movie illusions were created by hand rather than by computer. Hoult (Warm Bodies) makes for an appealing lead, with the hesitant milk-fed smile of the young Tom Cruise and an unforced chemistry with Tomlinson. Simply put: Any five minutes of this is preferable to all of The Hobbit. « Less

1:10 PM, 4:05 PM, 7:05 PM, 9:30 PM

It's hard out there for a video game villain—always being attacked, never given the benefit of the doubt, and forever pigeonholed. Such is the fate of Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the bad guy in an old-school arcade game. With gigantic hands,... More »

It's hard out there for a video game villain—always being attacked, never given the benefit of the doubt, and forever pigeonholed. Such is the fate of Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly), the bad guy in an old-school arcade game. With gigantic hands, a round face, and overalls strapped over one shoulder, Ralph resembles a human Donkey Kong, and after 30 years of his smash-and-growl routine, he has grown tired of his station in life. At a therapy session for like-minded scoundrels including Super Mario Bros.' Bowser and Street Fighter's Zangief and M. Bison, Ralph wonders aloud why he can’t ever be the hero. A Pac-Man ghost responds, "We can’t change who we are." With bouncy CG that's given greater depth by 3-D, director Rich Moore's film blends the secret-lives-of-toys reality of Toy Story with the self-actualization vibe of Bolt, with the former proving far more electric than the latter. There’s an invigorating energy to the first 20 minutes, with Reilly's ho-hum-glum narration hilariously establishing Ralph's discontent, and Ralph’s travels through the game world marked by one winning cameo after another, including 2-D icons Pac-Man (detested by Ralph) and Q*Bert (now homeless). Thus, it's disappointing to find Wreck-It Ralph squandering the opportunities it sets up, retreating into static be-yourself territory when Ralph gets stranded in a cart-racing game with a smart-talking teen (Sarah Silverman) to save. Wreck-It Ralph's themes don't develop by branching out in wild, unpredictable ways; instead, they become narrower and more monotonous, perhaps replicating the fundamental nature of '80s-era games, which were predicted on basic, repetitive action. « Less

1:20 PM, 3:45 PM, 6:45 PM, 9:20 PM

As with her Twilight series, the infelicities of Stephenie Meyer's The Host-- drab dialogue, ridiculous plotting, more emotional crises than story-- are enlivened by its thematic eccentricities. For all her programmatic love triangles, Meyer's... More »

As with her Twilight series, the infelicities of Stephenie Meyer's The Host-- drab dialogue, ridiculous plotting, more emotional crises than story-- are enlivened by its thematic eccentricities. For all her programmatic love triangles, Meyer's fantasy is at least humane. You know how most fantasy adventures films have their orcs or stormtroopers or Germans who the good guys have a grand time genociding? The Host's heroine-- or heroines, more on that later-- actually forbids her friends from killing any of the parasitic space-protozoa who have taken over the bodies of most of the Earth’s population and are actively hunting down the last human survivors. Of course, that's only after she's slumped about for much of the story (in true Meyer fashion) trying to choose between two hunks who seemed to me interchangeable—despite living holed up in a Utah cave, far from civilization, both appear to have gym memberships and limitless access hair product. Once she is stirred to action, the heroine-- a part-human, part-alien frump played by Saoirsie Ronan-- argues for peace. This isn't quite like if Princess Leia, post-Alderaan, urged appeasement with the Empire as she sulked over whether she preferred Luke or Han. Instead, Ronan's Melanie understands the low odds of a human victory and hits upon a solution that isn't all pew-pew. She even suggests to the surviving Earthlings that best way to handle the invading force is to show it love-- the thing that makes us human, and the thing that the aliens can learn from. The movie's a slog, but it's nice to see Hollywood offer an option besides killing every motherfucker in the room. « Less

1:20 PM, 4:10 PM, 7:00 PM, 9:35 PM

Director David O. Russell is still doing penance for I Heart Huckabees, a wonderfully nutty 2004 passion project exploring the desperate search for meaning within corporate America. Silver Linings Playbook feels more personal than The Fighter,... More »

Director David O. Russell is still doing penance for I Heart Huckabees, a wonderfully nutty 2004 passion project exploring the desperate search for meaning within corporate America. Silver Linings Playbook feels more personal than The Fighter, his last feature, but it also feels like the movie version of a brilliant but unbalanced mind on too many edge-sanding meds. Released from the psych hospital where he was sent after a marriage-ending manic fit, Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) moves back into his childhood home. Cooper spits out such lines in an unmodulated, rapid-fire assault, his eyes wide and shining. Russell trusts us to draw on, like, every movie we've ever seen to recognize this is what the fearlessness of the mad looks and sounds like; the twist is that Pat's parents-- superstitious amateur bookie Pat Senior (Robert De Niro) and the sweetly overbearing Dolores (Jacki Weaver)-- speak the same way. The scenes in the Solitano home are a cacophony of mile-a-minute monotone. They’re the best, most alive parts of the movie. Like many assholes, Pat brands himself a "truth teller"; he is, of course, the only person who can’t see the truth about himself, which is that he’s incapable of empathy. It comes as no surprise that the vehicle for this transformation is a slow-building romance with a bruised young widow played with feisty authenticity by Jennifer Lawrence. Manic as it might be stylistically, Silver Linings Playbook maintains too even of an emotional keel. It's a film about the alienated that makes sure to alienate no one, a movie depicting wild mood extremes that never rises or falls above a dull hum of diversion. Russell has made a great movie about American malaise; this isn't it. « Less

1:20 PM, 3:45 PM, 7:10 PM, 9:35 PM

You can almost see the minds of the filmmakers working: Someone out there has just got to take umbrage at 21 & Over-- please. But the most offensive thing about the picture-- the directorial debut of the guys who wrote The Hangover-- is how... More »

You can almost see the minds of the filmmakers working: Someone out there has just got to take umbrage at 21 & Over-- please. But the most offensive thing about the picture-- the directorial debut of the guys who wrote The Hangover-- is how inoffensive it is. 21 & Over pretends to take chances even as it timidly retraces the same dance steps we've already seen in movies like, well, The Hangover. Three former high school besties, having gone off to separate colleges some three years earlier, reconnect on the night the youngest of them finally turns 21. The leads are appealing enough in their hapless, just-of-age way. Casey (Skylar Astin, of Pitch Perfect) and Miller (Miles Teller, who gave a terrific performance in Rabbit Hole and is also a veteran of another recent guys out-of-control comedy, last year's Project X) show up at Northern Pacific University to surprise their pal Jeff Chang (Justin Chon, of the Twilight movies), hoping to kidnap him for a night of birthday brewskis. But JeffChang-- his buds long ago having merged his first and last into that catchy uniname-- has an important med-school interview in the morning, and his glowering doctor-dad (François Chau) has showed up to escort him. Somehow, Casey and Miller persuade JeffChang to go out for just one little beer, which will eventually lead to shots of chartreuse-- or something similarly nasty-- being slurped out of a really fat guy's navel. Mayhem ensues, but as any woman writing about guy humor will tell you, it's really all about male insecurity. « Less

12:55 PM, 3:05 PM, 5:20 PM, 7:30 PM, 9:40 PM

WWE Studios, the film production arm of World Wrestling Entertainment, breaks from its usual target audience of guys who like films about shirtless, muscley men with The Call, a suspense thriller starring adequate actress and Academy Award... More »

WWE Studios, the film production arm of World Wrestling Entertainment, breaks from its usual target audience of guys who like films about shirtless, muscley men with The Call, a suspense thriller starring adequate actress and Academy Award recipient Halle Berry as an overcommitted, hotshot 911 emergency operator. When she makes a rookie-level error that costs a teenage girl her life, she opts to hang up her call center headset-- until the girl's killer kidnaps another teen victim. Locked in a car trunk with a prepaid cell phone, she calls 911. The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes in which the girl, guided by Berry, deploys the contents of the trunk (screwdriver, paint roller handle, cans of white matte finish) to make her kidnapper's vehicle more conspicuous while Berry presses her for details she can relate to the police. In a nod to the studio's usual demographic, two-time WWE tag-team champion David Otunga plays officer Jake Devans, though fans hoping for spinning headlock elbow drops or backflip kicks will be disappointed. When the emergency call ends, Berry drives out to the crime scene the cops traced down and goes all Clarice Starling inside the spooky cabin where the bad guy keeps his Saw basement, which has to be seen as a departure from the film's thin blue line of realism, or the workaday reality that WWE became known for when the Undertaker defeated Kane with his signature Tombstone piledriver at Wrestlemania XX. « Less

1:00 PM, 3:00 PM, 5:00 PM, 7:00 PM, 9:25 PM