Hollywood sharpies spend endless hours at pitch meetings dreaming up hybrids of famous movies, and sometimes they hit pay dirt. “It’s like Jaws, but on a spaceship”: Alien. Then the hybrid blossoms into its own format until it …
Reviews
Captain America: Been There, Saved That
Approach Captain America: The First Avenger with caution. It could leave you super-pooped and quite possibly super-duped
Friends with Benefits: Soft Porn, Meet Snarky Charm
Romantic comedies tend to be lousy. This is a given that director Will Gluck’s Friends with Benefits uses to its advantage. It revels in poking fun at the formula that of course it won’t be able to avoid: pretty people fall in …
Another Earth: Sister from Another Planet
Screenwriter-star Brit Marling enters a new atmosphere in the dreamy sci-fi film Another Earth
Life, Above All: A Frank Capra Vision of a Devastating Plight
A wise child in desperate straits is the soul of this affecting South African drama
Tabloid: The Honey Blonde and the ‘Manacled Mormon’
After Errol Morris’s more sobering films, this larkish documentary about a beauty queen gone bad plays like a vacation at a seedy seaside resort
The Undefeated: Her Holiness Sarah Palin
Stephen K. Bannon’s The Undefeated is a worshipful, no-warts biopic of Sarah Palin, a former Miss Wasilla who could be the next President of the United States — if she only had the time
Winnie the Pooh: A Sublimely Silly Old Bear
Disney aims for a new classic and succeeds
Harry Potter: Hail and Farewell to a Hallowed Franchise
The blockbuster series reaches its climax in a solid, satisfying final film
Zookeeper: Kevin James’ Animal Distraction
The star can be funny and endearing, but here he’s buried under derivative gags and ritual humiliation
Horrible Bosses. So-So Movie. Excellent Jason Bateman!
It’s Hangover Hitchcock, with guys putting toothbrushes down their pants, locking each other out of cars, debating who would get raped in prison first and bumbling through a plot to commit murder
Larry Crowne: Tom Hanks’s Unemployment for Beginners
Losing your job ain’t so bad when you get to date Julia Roberts
The New Transformers: Turn On the Dark
For good or ill, director Michael Bay is the soul of a new machine, the poet of post-human cinema, the CEO of Hollywood’s military-entertainment complex