‘Julie & Julia’ movie review: Meryl Streep is Julia Child
There’s exactly half a great film in Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia: the Julia half, based on Julia Child’s My Life in France
September 29, 2009
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There’s exactly half a great film in Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia: the Julia half, based on Julia Child’s My Life in France
Night of the Living Dead 3D is a cheap cash-in trying to capitalize on the name of the original and the recent resurgence in 3D films
Gamer is a loud, incoherent, and ultimately miserable experience, but the directors are trying here
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past uses Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as a basis of sorts, and it’s this storyline that keeps the movie afloat
A brilliant central concept and excellent computer-generated effects bolsters director Neill Blomkamp’s provocative District 9
Man on Wire tells Petit’s incredible tale, and lets Petit tell it himself a good portion of the time
The Taking of Pelham 123 is another pointless remake that strips the original film down to its bare essentials for an update, removing most of the flavor in the process
The Proposal starts out dismally but greatly improves as it goes through the motions
There’s a fascinating story in the behind-the-scenes of the Woodstock music festival, but Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock only tells about half of it
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a real pleasure to watch, an audacious and inventive amalgamation of spaghetti westerns and WWII exploitation films,
Pixar’s Up doesn’t quite reach the heights of Ratatouille and Wall-E, the kind of wonderful, transcendent animated films that Hollywood rarely sees
Two Lovers stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, in what is apparently his final acting appearance
G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra may be mindless junk but it’s also mostly harmless and occasionally fun
Brüno is a rather loose collection of gags akin to Cohen’s Da Ali G Show or the Jackass movies
Cage is terrific in Knowing, which has one of the most effective scenes of terror ever seen in a film
A wonderful little slice of Americana, Sam Mendes’ Away We Go is the perfect antidote to his previous feature, the emotionally devastating Revolutionary Road
There’s a real love for classic rock and pirate radio that shines through in Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked
The Accidental Husband has a couple of appealing performances from Uma Thurman and Jeffrey Dean Morgan
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson is a striking but strangely aloof film that would have been better served had the director shown a little restraint
Crank: High Voltage is bigger and faster than the first film, with more sex and violence, but it also feels less fresh this time around
Jim Jarmusch goes all Godard-arty in The Limits of Control, a painfully slow-moving and (nearly) fatally pretentious film
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a much tighter, carefully constructed, leisurely-but-fluidly paced adaptation of the J.K. Rowling books
Mickey Rourke is nothing short of phenomenal in The Wrestler, an intimate, personal drama from director Darren Aronofsky
Public Enemies, starring Christian Bale and Johnny Depp, is Michael Mann’s finest film: an out-and-out masterpiece and an immense technical achievement