Matt Semansky

John Madden follows up last year’s crackling thriller The Debt with a piece of lightweight fluff tonally reminiscent of his directorial breakthrough Shakesepeare In Love, and comes up flat. Remarkably so, considering the acting royalty on hand to play a group of aging Brits taken in by an ad from an ambitious young Indian hotelier […]

Five sets of prospective parents—at least two sets too many—experience pregnancy and childbirth in this adaptation of the famous self-help book. Director Kirk Jones can’t wrangle the mismatched storylines into a cohesive whole, juggling plotlines that range from the romcom wackiness of reality TV star procreation to African adoption to the tragedy that befalls a […]

Joss Whedon didn’t have an official hand in any of the individual Marvel superhero movies that laid the foundation for The Avengers, but his signature is all over this one. That’s a good thing. The nerd-god auteur handles several films’ worth of characters, and the big name actors who play them, as adroitly as could […]

Zac Efron is a haunted man in The Lucky One, a spoonful of sap tapped from the same source—novelist Nicholas Sparks—as The Notebook. Efron’s Logan is an ex-Marine suffering from post-traumatic stress and a nagging need to connect with the mystery blonde (Taylor Schilling) whose photo he found in Iraq. Efron himself wears a stunned […]

David Gelb’s unassuming little documentary works itself into you with gentle insistence, its hypnotic effect as subtle as it is inevitable. The subject is Tokyo’s master sushi chef Jiro Ono, an 85-year-old whose dedication to the job is so total that his middle-aged sons, well-trained sushi wizards in their own right, seem destined to forever […]

Ever wonder what happened to the American Pie characters after the second sequel in 2003? Me neither. Still, here are Jim (Jason Biggs), Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), Stifler (Seann William Scott), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and a familiar crew of supporting characters, cramming the unwanted answers into multiplexes. The gang, now into […]

This take on the Snow White story is a pleasant family affair with wry comic turns from both expected and unexpected sources. Julia Roberts tops the marquee as a vain, scheming queen desperate to maintain her grip on her kingdom and her fading beauty, delivering everything one could ask for in a big movie-star performance […]

Gary Ross adapts the first of a trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins, introducing movie audiences to a future world where moneyed elites, having quashed a rebellion by poorer citizens, rub the losers’ noses in it with an annual event that pits the children of the 99 percent against each other in a televised duel […]