The previous three Gus Van Sant movies—Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days—have the quality of a dream, slipping so fluidly through time and space that they practically float on air. Van Sant's latest, Paranoid Park (IFC), is more grounded in conventional plot tension, concerning a skater boy's involvement in the accidental death of a security guard. But it's also a gorgeous reverie on adolescence and defines in a completely cinematic way the boundaries of his world…
Criticisms of post-Sixth Sense M. Night Shyamalan films (The Village, Signs, etc.) have largely boiled down to criticisms that the big "surprise" plot twists weren't convincing, unexpected enough, worth the wait, etc. But the big plot twist in Shyamalan's misbegotten non-thriller The Happening (Fox) is the least problematic part of a poorly made, preposterous film. Wildly exaggerated performances, comically unreal dialogue, tremendous clichés, limp storytelling, and Shyamalan's usual hushed, airless tone all turn a potentially interesting horror-thriller into a hilariously awful howler…
Television's smartest, funniest, fastest comedy, 30 Rock (Universal) got even smarter, funnier, and faster in its strike-shortened but Emmy-festooned second season. After a rocky, Jerry Seinfeld-hampered opener, the second season leaped from one high to the next, including the all-time great therapy scene between Tracy Morgan and Alec Baldwin and Tim Conway's wickedly subversive Emmy-winning guest turn as a deliciously perverse old goat…
Sad-eyed character actor and ace supporting player Richard Jenkins slid comfortably into a lead role in actor-turned-writer-director Tom McCarthy's The Visitor (Anchor Bay), an exquisitely modest character study about a buttoned-up professor who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a big-hearted illegal immigrant percussionist, a bond that has unexpected political ramifications…
Is it possible to engender peace in the Middle East through dick jokes and cartoonish comedy? That's the question behind You Don't Mess With Zohan (Sony), a spectacularly silly lowbrow laffer about a Mossad agent (Adam Sandler) who fakes his own death to pursue his dream of becoming a hairdresser in New York. Tomfoolery ensues…