Film + TV

A portrait of a woman trapped—by her feelings, her choices and her times—The Deep Blue Sea is by turns claustrophobic, overly mannered and moving, overcoming its shortcomings with a typically powerful performance from Rachel Weisz. The wife of a judge (Simon Russell Beale) in post-war London, her Hester Collyer walks away from a passionless marriage, […]

Young tourists explore the abandoned town of Prypiat, and discover that something has survived the radiation. A one-line premise stretched to gossamer thinness in Chernobyl Diaries. This shaky horror film, written and produced by Paranormal Activity auteur Oren Peli, finds several adventurous twentysomethings taking an “extreme tour” of the areas ravaged by the 1986 Chernobyl […]

A decade after the second installment of Men in Black and fifteen years after the original, it’s fair to say MIB III is a money grab—a chance to cash in on characters we already know long after we’ve stopped thinking about them. But for mindless entertainment, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Agents J (Will […]

  Leave it to us Canadians to make a movie about a badass bank robber, Edwin Boyd (Scott Speedman) and downplay his historical celebrity status. Boyd, a WWII vet dissatisfied with his humble Toronto life tries to get an acting gig, but settles for becoming a criminal (he wears face paint, so that’s kind of […]

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 […]

Admiral General Aladeen has previously always had plenty of women, but after being shaved and dumped on the streets of New York he’s forced to learn to masturbate. An accompanying visual montage, containing that scene from Forrest Gump where young Forrest runs for the first time, is probably the funniest part of the low-swinging comedy […]

Liam Neeson sadly does not shout, “You sunk my battleship!” in this two-hour long Navy commercial based on a board game. Instead, Neeson sadly sits most of Battleship out while Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights), Jesse Plemons (Friday Night Lights), and Rihanna (the singer) fight alien invaders off the coast of Hawaii. Tranformers-eque destruction, all […]

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 […]