On the Town

Reviewers searching for ways to describe the cabaret singer Baby Jane Dexter often use words like “garrulous” and “bawdy.” True, one hears traces of every barrelhouse belter from Lizzie Miles to Belle Barth in her blue-tinged Big Mama baritone, but since I first became aware of this formidable performer at old, defunct clubs like Eighty-Eights and the Firebird, I have rarely witnessed so profound a change in an artist’s style and repertoire. The refined folks who prefer soft, subtle, smoky voices like June Christy, Peggy Lee and Julie London may find her an acquired taste. God knows, she’s no Blossom Dearie. She’s not even a blossom.  read more »

Lake City
Running time 92 minutes
Written and directed by Hunter Hill and Perry Mowore
Starring Sissy Spacey, Troy Garity, Rebecca Romijn, Keith Carradine

Sissy Spacek could read her grocery list and hold my attention. So I am not surprised that her absorbing performance in Lake City makes an otherwise small, unexceptional little film seem a lot more important than it is. She’s a filmmaker’s best friend. Throw her some buckshot and she’ll convince you it’s caviar.

The filmmakers with a lot to be grateful for this time around are writer-directors Hunter Hill and Perry Moore, two transplanted Southerners who have based their movie on a traumatic childhood incident in Mr.  read more »

Milk
Running time 128 minutes
Written by Dustin Lance Black
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, Diego Luna, Victor Garber, Denis O’Hare

In real life, Harvey Milk was an unexceptional Jewish boy, as plain as a matzo, but with extraordinary courage, as challenging to homophobic society as a pierced nipple. Without much public egotism or personal glory, he was a late bloomer who, at 48, made history, first when he became the first gay-rights advocate elected to public office on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, and the next year, when he was assassinated for it.  read more »

The Dukes
Running time 96 minutes
Written by James Andronica and Robert Davi
Directed by Robert Davi
Starring Robert Davi, Chazz Palminteri, Miriam Margolyes, Frank D’Amico, Peter Bogdanovich

Another modest comedy, The Dukes is about a has-been Hollywood doo-wop group popular in the 1960s, and the elaborate, sometimes larcenous things they do to make a comeback in 2007. Robert Davi, a rumpled-face actor who has made a career out of playing terrorists, thugs and villains, most notably Colombian drug lord Franz Sanchez in the 1989 James Bond thriller, License to Kill, makes his directorial debut with The Dukes, which he also co-wrote and produced.  read more »

How About You
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Jean Pasley
Directed by Anthony Byrne
Starring Hayley Atwill, Orla Brady, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Fricker, Imelda Staunton, Joss Ackland

How About You is a confection about Christmas in a senior citizen’s home in Ireland that has fallen on hard times. The feisty residents are impossible, the health department is threatening foreclosure, the staff has deserted the place like rats on the Titanic, and a young girl named Ellie (Hayley Atwill, who starred last year in Woody Allen’s ill-fated Cassandra’s Dream) finds herself left in charge while her unhappy, pragmatic older sister, Kate (Gate Theatre alumnus Orla Brady), who runs the place, eschews the responsibility and takes a week off to visit their ailing mother.  read more »

Quantum of Solace
Running Time 106 minutes
Written by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade
Directed By Marc Forster
Starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Mathieu Amalric, Olga Kurylenko

James Bond movies long ago outgrew the original fun and thrills invented by Ian Fleming, and they’ve been coasting on noise and luck ever since. Quantum of Solace, the 22nd entry in the interminable franchise, is one of the most pointless, chaotic and forgettable of them all. It is also one of the dullest.

The Bond checklist is always a bit like Mexican food—spicy and bloating for the moment, promising exotic locations, tech toys, outrageously expensive cars ready to be demolished at random, outrageous villains thinking up inhumanly monstrous tortures, secret agents navigating humanly impossible escapes, sexy girls wearing Band-Aids, and mindless satisfaction guaranteed.  read more »

The Guitar
Running time 95 minutes
Written by Amos Poe
Directed by Amy Redford
Starring Saffron Burrows, Paz de la Huerta, Isaach De Bankolé

The Guitar is a modern New York fable about a woman simultaneously dumped by her boyfriend, fired from her job and diagnosed with inoperable cancer. At this point, what good are Reiki massages, guidance counselors and Hallmark cards? So mousey Melody (Saffron Burrows) short-term leases a loft penthouse, orders a Vera Wang bed, orders from every restaurant in Greenwich Village and maxes out her credit cards. Indulging in every childhood fantasy in a materialistic orgy sponsored by Visa, she becomes the envy of everyone trapped in a gray and meaningless world who would happily go on a rampage of luxury objects promising redemption if they could just afford it.  read more »

Gardens of the Night
Running time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Damian Harris
Starring Gillian Jacobs, Evan Ross, Tom Arnold

Riding in on the crest of praise from assorted international film festivals, Gardens of the Night is another newfangled kind of horror movie, unsuitable for Halloween. No vampires here, and no slice-and-dice gore from the Saw franchise, either. The monsters are all people, as ordinary-looking as movie critics, but twice as lethal. This is a dossier on the ramifications of child abuse that leave perfect children emotionally destroyed for the rest of their lives. It is hard to watch, but worth every sobering moment because of the things you learn about one of life’s most grueling subjects.  read more »

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas
Running time 93 minutes
Written and directed by Mark Herman
Starring Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Richard Johnson, Sheila Hancock

At the movies, as in life, there is nothing more harrowing to think about or painful to observe than children in peril. At a time when a lot of people will not go near a film about the Holocaust, it’s quite brave to make a new one (there are three coming out before Christmas). The Boy in the Striped Pajamas shows an aspect of the greatest atrocity in the history of civilization through the eyes of children, which makes it doubly risky.  read more »

Where have all the monsters gone? As a kid, I was gung-ho for Lugosi, Karloff and Chaney, not to mention Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and the rest of the more sophisticated Warner Brothers stock company turning out classy thrillers like The Beast With Five Fingers. Eventually, the legitimate monsters of my youthful mania turned into gruesome parodies in the air-conditioned, garishly colored trash that came out of England’s Hammer Films and the hysterical comic-book parodies from cheapjack American-International. I mean, let’s face it: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Mummy were master creations fashioned by the special-effects wizards at Universal, and are still often copied but never duplicated.  read more »

I’ve Loved You So Long
Running Time 115 minutes
Written and directed by Philippe Claudel
Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius

In the solemn, touching French drama I’ve Loved You So Long, the bilingual British-born actress Kristin Scott Thomas, currently starring on Broadway in a much-overrated production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, returns to the screen, where she shines best. With mousey brown hair and not a speck of makeup, she plays Juliette Fontaine, a woman whose name delivers a more delicate lift than any of her disheartening experiences in life. Once a respected doctor from a good family, Juliette has lost everything she once held dear—her husband, her career, her child, her friends and her family.  read more »

Changeling
Running Time 140 minutes
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Michael Kelly, Jason Butler Harner, Amy Ryan

From chicken shit to chicken salad, don’t miss Changeling, Clint Eastwood’s absolutely true and overwhelmingly gripping saga of how crime and police corruption in 1920s Los Angeles led to a lifelong ordeal for a single mother named Christine Collins, a career-defining role for Angelina Jolie.

One sunny Saturday in 1928, while Christine works extra duty as a telephone-company supervisor, her bright, sensitive 9-year-old son Walter mysteriously disappears from her home in broad daylight without a trace.  read more »

Synecdoche, New York
Running Time 124 minutes
Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Samantha Morton, Dianne Wiest

The word of the week is contrast. Decorating the top of the cake: a new Clint Eastwood. At the bottom of the cesspool: a new Charlie Kaufman. First, the dregs. There’s always a dumpster full of crap just waiting to lower the I.Q.’s of rational men, but the pain usually wears off fast, and the brain damage is rarely permanent. (Does anybody even remember Borat, Apocalypto or anything with Adam Sandler?) Then, just when you think it’s safe to go back to the movies, the plunger sucks up something from a clogged drain like the unspeakable, unpronounceable Synecdoche, New York, and you’re forced to take back every prematurely made prophecy about “the worst movie ever made.  read more »

FLASH OF GENIUS
RUNNING TIME 119 minutes
WRITTEN BY Philip Railsback
DIRECTED BY Marc Abraham
STARRING Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham, Alan Alda, Dermot Mulroney

Equally sincere but without much entertainment value, Flash of Genius is another of those movies about honest, ordinary citizens fighting the powerful system of corporate corruption. This time little David is Dr. Robert Kearns, a professor of mechanical engineering in Detroit who invented the “intermittent” windshield wiper. The corporate Goliaths who stole and marketed his invention, cheated him out of his patents and falsely claimed the credit for his ideas were the Ford Motor Co.  read more »

BREAKFAST WITH SCOT
RUNNING TIME 90 minutes
WRITTEN BY Sean Reycraft
DIRECTED BY Laurie Lynd
STARRING Thomas Cavanagh, Ben Shenkman, Noah Bernett

Breakfast With Scot is being called the first gay family film, whatever that is. It certainly has “wholesome” scrawled all over it in pink. Tom Cavanagh, the toothy, bright-eyed charmer from the popular TV series Ed, stars as Eric McNally, a gay network sports announcer and ex-pro hockey player for the Maple Leafs, who keeps his private life a secret for fear of ruining his career and disillusioning his fans. (Traditionally, hockey is apparently ragingly homophobic.) So he and his life partner, Sam (Ben Shenkman), a sports lawyer, are not your stereotypical “out” couple.  read more »

BODY OF LIES
RUNNING TIME 128 minutes
WRITTEN BY William Monaham
DIRECTED BY Ridley Scott
STARRING Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong

Body of Lies is yet another in a long, tiresome line of loud, violent, nauseating and incoherent riffs on how mercenary and inhuman the spooks in the C.I.A. are, even to each other. Pointless and plotless, it’s nothing more than a series of gut-blasting near-death experiences, with Leonardo DiCaprio sporting a goatee for gonads. The idea is that a little facial fur might make him look a little less like a Boy Scout. Wrong. Action director Ridley Scott actually expects us to buy Leo as the toughest secret U.  read more »

The cabaret season is off to a slow start, but effervescent KT Sullivan’s sparkling Jerome Kern tribute at the Algonquin (through Oct. 11) is required homework for music lovers with superior taste. Her concert-ready soprano waxes obscure gems such as “The Land Where the Good Songs Go,” “Raggedy Ann” and “April Fooled Me” with pure Shinola, and her warm lower register underscores the romantic subtext of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics in “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” “In the Heart of the Dark” and “All the Things You Are”; it’s as though she’s singing just for you. Her trilling soprano is not an automatically appropriate vessel for “Ol’ Man River,” but she invests it with the sweet insouciant nostalgia of a Southern belle on foreign soil homesick for the Mississippi.  read more »

Blindness
Running Time 120 minutes
Written By Don McKellar 
Directed By Fernando Meirelles
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Danny Glover, Gael García Bernal

In Blindness, a noxious, stomach-churning and deadly pretentious freak show by Fernando Meirelles, the talented Brazilian director of City of God and The Constant Gardener, the citizens of a big city are stricken by a plague that renders them sightless. A Japanese man goes blind in traffic. The same fate befalls the man who steals his car, as well as the eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who attends them both. Suddenly it’s happening all over town, as victims are quarantined in the cages of an abandoned mental institution.  read more »

Rachel Getting Married
Running Time 114 minutes
Written By Jenny Lumet
Directed By Jonathan Demme
Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Mather Zickel, Debra Winger

After dazzling tough film festival audiences in Venice and Toronto, Jonathan Demme’s pulsating new film Rachel Getting Married has arrived on the fall movie scene to remind me what real movies are still all about. Up to my eyeballs in draggy, shapeless amateur junk, I am genuinely thrilled to welcome a film this colorful, artistically realized and wonderfully alive. Steeped in the tradition of sound narrative form yet scrappy and unpredictable, acted and written with enormous style but with front and back doors open to experiment and surprise, it’s a film that challenges you to keep a jogger’s pace to keep up with it, then leaves you breathless.  read more »

The Lucky Ones
133 minutes
Written by Neil Burger and Dirk Wittenborn
Directed by Neil Burger
Starring Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams, Michael Peña

Movies about the war in Iraq are box office poison. Perhaps wisely, writer-director Neil Burger’s new film, The Lucky Ones, is not about this unpopular war, but about the people who are fighting it. The action does not take place on the frontlines, but on the American home front, which turns out to be every bit as treacherous. The emotional scars and incendiary fallout are equally painful; it’s just a different kind of shrapnel.

The “lucky ones” are supposed to be the soldiers who come home in one piece.  read more »

Choke
89 minuted
Written and Directed by Clark Gregg
Starring Sam Rockwell, Kelly Macdonald, Anjelica Huston, Brad William Henke, Joel Grey

I don’t know what to tell you about a dismal bucket of nauseating swill called Choke, except to warn that if you spend hard-earned money to sit through it, you deserve to do exactly what the title implies. Based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the loony Oregon-based author of such literary horrors as Fight Club and the nauseating Snuff, Choke sets out with only one mindless purpose—to outrage, alienate and confuse readers and viewers alike. Directed and adapted from an unreadable book by an actor named Clark Gregg, who has been watching entirely too many noxious Charlie Kaufman flicks, it pretends to be about the lost world of sex addicts, but it’s not really about anything except how to make a movie with no lasting value.  read more »

Nights In Rodanthe
98 minutes
Written by Ann Peacock and John Romano
Directed by George C. Wolfe
Starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Viola Davis, Scott Glenn, Christopher Meloni

While the rest of the world is having a noisy nervous breakdown, it’s good to know there are still a few folks at the movies selling feel-good fun and falling in love. Proving all is not grim and fatal, Nights in Rodanthe (an unfortunate title if ever there was one) is a classy tearjerker with butter-cream frosting, raised to the level of (maybe undeserved) artistry by the convincing sincerity and no-nonsense honesty of Diane Lane.  read more »

The Duchess
110 MINUTES
WRITTEN BY Jeffrey Hatcher and Anders Thomas Jensen
DIRECTED BY Saul Dibb
STARRING Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Charlotte Rampling, Hayley Atwell, Dominic Cooper

In true and dubious movie fashion, The Duchess transforms a serious, carefully researched biography of historical significance by best-selling British writer Amanda Foreman into a bucket of frothy banality overwhelmed by wigs, costumes, gilt-edged ceilings, sumptuous country manors and expensive period furniture as imagined by Sofia Coppola. It looks like outtakes from the nauseating bubble-gum fantasy Marie Antoinette.

The scandalous lady in the title is 18th-century socialite Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and if the movie has any longevity, it’s because she was the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales.  read more »

Appaloosa
114 Minutes
WRITTEN BY Robert Knott and Ed Harris
DIRECTED BY Ed Harris
STARRING Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Renée Zellweger, Jeremy Irons, Timothy Spall

In most movie westerns, an appaloosa is a horse. But the title of his new revisionist oater, Ed Harris’ first outing in the director’s chair since Pollock, refers to a town where, as one wag at last week’s dull Toronto International Film Festival observed, “men are men and women are … Renée Zellweger.” It went over with a thud there, but in retrospect, considering all the pretentious bores surrounding it, it’s beginning to look good.  read more »

The annual Toronto International Film Festival, a.k.a. TIFF, is usually the barometer that tests the temperature of the coming movie year. But this year, the 33rd installment has tested a whole lot more: patience, I.Q.’s, trash resistance, and bladder control. Film festivals (and let’s face it, there’s one in every town) have good years and bad years. For Toronto, this is a bad one. Veterans who have been coming here for decades all agree. The fun days when fans and critics and movie moguls all stayed in the Sutton Place Hotel and turned the Bistro 990 across the street into their local commissary, trading anecdotes with John Cassevetes and hanging out with Clint Eastwood, are only memories, like first marriages.  read more »

ELEGY
RUNNING TIME 113 minutes
WRITTEN BY Nicholas Meyer
DIRECTED BY Isabel Coixet
STARRING Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard, Dennis Hopper

Elegy, a depressing but well-made adaptation of a Philip Roth novella by Spanish director Isabel Coixet, explores the changing landscape of love between a history professor (Ben Kingsley) and a Cuban student 30 years his junior (Penélope Cruz). Her beauty takes his breath away, but their affair is ruptured by his anxiety, jealousy, insecurity and imagination—all crippled by her absence when she leaves him. He allows himself to become a fool for love, without putting up any resistance, but convinces himself it’s just a matter of time before she finds someone younger, more desirable.  read more »

RED
RUNNING TIME 98 minutes
WRITTEN BY Stephen Susco
DIRECTED BY Trygve Allister Diesen and Lucky McKee
STARRING Brian Cox, Tom Sizemore, Amanda Plummer, Noel Fisher, Kyle Gallner, Shiloh Fernandaz, Robert Englund

Dog lovers will adopt Red, but although the title belongs to a beloved Irish setter (or is it a rusty-colored Airedale?), the movie should appeal to people who like people, too. It is not about a dog. It’s about the dying values of truth, honesty and justice when bad things happen to good people and their pets. The brilliant actor Brian Cox—versatile, accomplished and always full of surprises—stars as Avery Ludlow, a quiet, reclusive old man in rural Oregon who owns a small general store and minds his own business.  read more »

SWING VOTE
Running Time 120 minutes
Written By Jason Richman and Joshua Michael Stern
Directed By Joshua Michael Stern
Starring Kevin Costner, Stanley Tucci, Nathan Lane, Dennis Hopper, Kelsey Grammer, Madeline Carroll

Say about it what you will, but in an election year, you can’t accuse Kevin Costner’s political satire Swing Vote of failing to keep up with current events. With an eye on the box office coffers and a finger on the nation’s nervous pulse, this romp with a conscience, directed by Joshua Michael Stern, who co-wrote the edgy screenplay (with Jason Richman), features the new scruffy, self-deprecating and slightly graying Mr.  read more »

BOTTLE SHOCK
RUNNING TIME 110 minutes
WRITTEN By Jody Savin, Ross Schwartz, and Randall Miller
DIRECTED BY Randall Miller
STARRING Bill Pullman, Alan Rickman, Chris Pine, Freddy Rodriguez, Rachael Taylor

Two things I can count on every August: Movies get lousier than they were all year, and I go on vacation. This time, it’s different. I’m still taking a month off, but there are some big surprises at the movies. Most of them are unexpected and underpublicized, some of them boast low budgets and high rewards, a few of them need to be added to your must-see list, and you can start with Bottle Shock, a marvelous, beautifully made, feel-good movie that is guaranteed to revive everyone’s flagging faith in American pride at home and abroad—something in these sorry, perilous times we’re desperately short of.  read more »

Tom Wopat
The Metropolitan Room
Until July 31

You’ll have more fun on the cabaret scene, where two seasoned pros have cooled off the month of July like a frozen mojito. Every Thursday night, when the curtain falls on the Broadway musical A Catered Affair, Tom Wopat shakes it down to the great new Metropolitan Room at 34 West 22 Street to knock the crowds right out of their sandals. This shaggy dog looks better at 56 than he did as a pup, cutting his baby teeth on the old TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, and you gotta laugh when he tells the audience, “If you like me, I’m Tom Wopat; if you don’t, I’m John Schneider.  read more »

Lucie Arnaz
Birdland

I once wrote that Lucie Arnaz was a chip off the old blockhead. I was talking about genes, of course, but at Birdland—where she’s been knocking them wall-eyed and packing them in tight as ACE bandages—the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz is very much her own star. With power, passion, a dynamic vibrato for emphasis on the swing tunes and a lemon twist for tartness on the torch songs, she’s pretty much a one-woman phenomenon. The looks? Eat your hearts out, ladies. I’ve seen her eat, so I know she doesn’t live on Bibb lettuce, but I guess she walks 18 miles a day because she’s got the same sylphlike body and the same swanlike neck she had on her mom’s old comedy shows.  read more »

TAKE
RUNNING TIME 99 minute
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Charles Oliver
STARRING Minnie Driver, Jeremy Renner

Take is another in a meaningless parade of time-wasting marquee cloggers that have been coming at us this summer in sections. Directed and written by Charles Oliver, this bargain-basement crime melodrama about anguish, violence and redemption among the socially marginalized is a kind of Dick and Jane primer of how not to make a movie that will appeal to anyone with an attention span of more than 30 minutes.

Telling parallel stories simultaneously, it starts with Ana (Minnie Driver), a poor housewife with a small son who suffers from learning disabilities.  read more »

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
RUNNING TIME 135 minutes
WRITTEN BY Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies
DIRECTED BY Julian Jarrold
STARRING Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, Hayley Atwell

Here it is at last: the intelligent movie filmgoers have waited for all year. The film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited transforms one of the quintessential novels of the 20th century into one of the grandest, most enriching films of 2008. The 11-part 1981 miniseries was such a milestone in TV history that purists who watch the four-volume DVD set might squabble about the merits of reducing so much artistry into an almost two-and-a-half-hour film.  read more »

FELON
RUNNING TIME 104 minutes
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Ric Roman Waugh
STARRING Stephen Dorff, Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, Harold Perrineau

Prison movies may not be everyone’s idea of escapist entertainment, but with nearly two million people overcrowding the U.S. penal system already and the numbers growing daily, it’s a problem worth addressing. Audiences are gruesomely fascinated by horror stories behind bars, and like the phenomenal TV series Oz, the stuff that happens in a tense, taut new movie called Felon is nothing less than electrifying.

The versatility and charisma of the dynamic, always surprising actor Stephen Dorff is the catalytic converter in this harrowing story of an innocent man caught up in America’s flawed legal system.  read more »

THE DARK KNIGHT
RUNNING TIME 152 minutes
WRITTEN BY Christopher and Jonathan Nolan
DIRECTED BY Christopher Nolan
STARRING Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal

Some folks take metaphysical pleasure from the New Batman Philosophy According to Christopher Nolan: that good and evil lurk side by side in everyone, including Batman. But in my opinion, every Batman movie is about only one thing: action hero (the caped crusader with wings) vs. bad guys (everyone else). Writer-director Nolan’s Batman Begins, with its surreal and mystical mumbo jumbo about playboy Bruce Wayne’s beginnings, remains the worst Batman movie I’ve ever seen, although the comic-book addicts disagree.  read more »

MAMMA MIA!
RUNNING TIME 108 minutes
WRITTEN BY Catherine Johnson
DIRECTED BY Phyllida Lloyd
STARRING Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters

Amid the summer junk-movies that are already going down in history as artifacts, some folks will welcome, I suppose, the nauseating cornball music of the Swedish pop group ABBA which pounds its way through the monumentally inconsequential Mamma Mia! To me, the popularity of the jukebox blather of this gang of no-talents is only slightly less understandable than the war in Iraq. And the movie they’ve made of the bafflingly popular tourist attraction still playing on Broadway is only slightly more unbearable than finding myself the real-life star of all the Saw movies rolled into one.  read more »

DIMINISHED CAPACITY
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Sherwood Kiraly
Directed by Terry Kinney
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C. K.

Diminished Capacity is a harmless but monotonous trifle about a baseball card. Matthew Broderick is making too many movies and giving the same performance in all of them. This time, he’s a Chicago newspaper editor named Cooper who suffers a brain concussion and gets demoted to proofreading comic strips. His neurologist says he’s got what they call “diminished capacity,” but he no longer throws up when he drives a car, so he goes home to visit his mother (the wonderful Lois Smith) and discovers that everyone in his hometown has diminished capacity, too—especially his Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda).  read more »

August
Running time 88 minutes
Written by Howard A. Rodman
Directed by Austin Chick
Starring Josh Hartnett, Adam Scott, Naomie Harris, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rip Torn, Robin Tunney, David Bowie

Worse still, there’s a deadly, amateurish infection going around called August, with yet another novocained performance by zombified Josh Hartnett as a dot-com Internet star named Tom Sterling, who invents a company called Landshark with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott). Nobody knows what Landshark does, but when Tom explains it, he says: “That’s so third quarter ’99. You want bleeding-edge, mission-critical, cross-platform robust scale. What you want is E. Pure E. Not E commerce.  read more »

TheWackness
Running time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Thirlby, Famke Janssen, Mary-Kate Olsen

Not the least of the problems facing people who write about movies on a weekly basis is the deadlines. You can’t say, “I think I’d rather go to the beach today.” The empty space looms at you like a computerized monster, always demanding to be filled with your words, whether you have anything to say or not. Also, they say as you get older your attention span shortens. I don’t know about that, but I can promise you as sure as Monday follows the weekend that as the world changes and filmmakers get younger, the quality of motion pictures has diminished, and I find very few movies of worthwhile value to hold my interest.  read more »

Liz Callaway
Feinstein’s at Loews Regency
Through June 28

As usual, when it comes to value received for money spent, the music scene surpasses the movies. At Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, glorious jazz diva Ann Hampton Callaway’s younger, shorter and equally talented sister Liz is knocking their socks off. A veteran of Broadway show tunes and classy concert halls, she has chosen, for reasons of self-satisfaction only she can explain, to celebrate the pop tunes of the 1960s. She calls this cabaret whim “The Beat Goes On” and as Fats Domino used to chide at the Peppermint Lounge, “It do, babe, it sho’nuff do.  read more »

Expired
Running Time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Cecilia Miniucchi
Starring Samantha Morton, Jason Patric, Teri Garr

“Expired” is the word you see before they tow your car away. So it is little wonder that a new movie called Expired should be about—what else?—a meter maid. “I’m one of