Seth Rogen ventured far outside his comfort zone playing affable, wisecracking stoners to inhabit the twisted psyche of a bipolar mall security guard with delusions of grandeur and a pathetic crush on self-destructive party girl Anna Faris in Observe And Report (Warner Bros.), a dark comedy from Eastbound & Down co-creator Jody Hill. Report’s eviscerating darkness, moral ambiguity, and controversial sex scene divided critics and audiences, but Report seems destined to attract at least a small cult following…
The umpteenth misappropriation of A Christmas Carol—call this one Charles Dickens’ Tool Academy—Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros.) stars Matthew McConaughey as a womanizing fashion photographer who learns the value of intimacy in the most gimmicky ways imaginable. What a shame to waste McConaughey as a charismatic, long-in-the-tooth skirt-chaser; this is exactly the kind of role that made him a star after Dazed And Confused…
Tracy Morgan, Jack McBrayer, and Jane Krakowski all picked up long-overdue Emmy nominations for the third season of 30 Rock (Universal), Tina Fey’s whip-smart, lightning-fast behind-the-scenes look at the madcap goings-on behind a Saturday Night Live-like sketch show. 30 Rock grows less and less interested in its show-within-a-show with each successive year, and while the third season didn’t quite meet the sky-high standards set by the first two seasons, it’s still a consistent laugh-out-loud delight…
Jeff Goldblum delivers a bravura performance as a former concentration-camp prisoner with seemingly supernatural powers who survived World War II by acting as a dog for a sadistic Nazi officer (Willem Dafoe) in Adam Resurrected (Image). Paul Schrader’s staggeringly odd drama jumps back and forth chronologically between Goldblum’s life in the camps and his equally surreal post-war existence in an Israeli mental hospital. A film this surpassingly strange should have attracted at least a little attention, yet Schrader’s latest meditation on faith and insanity slipped in and out of theaters without notice…
Late this summer, District 9 brought mainstream audiences an intelligent science-fiction thriller that trafficked in the subversive notion that the humans might be the bad guys in an alien-invasion scenario. Now imagine that same sentiment being expressed in an animated adventure for little kids, and you’ve got Battle For Terra (Lionsgate), the surprisingly brainy story of Earthlings looking to colonize another planet after making a mess of their own.