Fresh off the first Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, director Gore Verbinski teamed up with Johnny Depp again for Rango (Paramount), a standard-issue spaghetti Western made weirdly magical by gonzo CGI execution. Depp voices a timid pet chameleon who reinvents himself as a tough-guy lawman when he winds up in a Wild West town suffering from a water shortage; the storyline is part High Noon, part Chinatown, but the herky-jerky pacing and crazed imagery are more like a drug-fueled whisk through a particularly ambitious children's picture book…
Based on Michael Connelly’s novel, The Lincoln Lawyer (Lionsgate) feels like a throwback to the John Grisham legal thrillers of the ’90s, except it’s much better executed than most of them. The cat-and-mouse game between Matthew McConaughey as a shady criminal defense attorney and Ryan Phillippe as a dangerous client creates a thrilling tension both inside and outside the courtroom…
There’s an element of commercial calculation to Insidious (Film District), the latest horror film from the creators of Saw. Now that the Paranormal Activity movies have eclipsed the Saw movies as the Halloween franchise of choice, writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan offer their own take on the haunted-house movie. Though it owes a heavy debt to Poltergeist, the most obvious of its many influences, Insidious is genuinely intense and frightening, following a family spooked by a malevolent ghost that doesn’t limit itself to just one house…
The original 1981 Arthur, with Dudley Moore, is no masterpiece. It’s shrill, sentimental, poorly staged, and features a malevolent earworm of a theme song by Christopher Cross. Yet it did have John Gielgud’s Oscar-winning turn as a brutally funny butler who looks after Moore’s cackling man-child. The 2011 Arthur (Warner Bros.), with Russell Brand in the title role, casts Helen Mirren as a capable fill-in for Gielgud, but in all other respects, this remake is worse than the already-mediocre original…
Winner of the Palme D’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Strand) is the latest enchantment from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose previous work includes Tropical Malady, Blissfully Yours, and Syndromes And A Century. Tim Burton, who acted as jury president at Cannes, likened the film to “a beautiful, strange dream,” and that’s probably the best way to process it, given the obscurity of its cultural and spiritual references.