Before watching the last Pirates movie, there were tons and tons of trailers. Each trailer had the movie rating and the new elaborate warnings that crack me up, such as “perilous danger and vampire violence.” The only movie that came with no warning before it was Bratz. After watching the trailer, I said, “Out of all the movies shown, that one needed a warning the most. My eyes!”
Nationwide Releases
The Bourne Ultimatum
Directed: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles
Trailer: Quicktime
Jason Bourne remembers even more about his past, and comes home to find the first guy who trained him while the government is still after him.
RT Score: 94%
RT Consensus: The Bourne Ultimatum is an intelligent, finely tuned non-stop thrill ride, and the finest installment of the Bourne trilogy.
You don’t want to mess with Jason Bourne. Guy’s as lethal as Chinese wheat gluten.
- Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star
It’s the rare action picture whose adrenaline-driven thrills neither overshadow the characters nor degenerate into cartoonish preposterousness.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
The Bourne Ultimatum is a spectacular windup toy of a thriller — a contraption made by an artist.
- Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
Moves relentlessly, intelligently forward, as everything extraneous gets chucked over the side … the picture thrums with an unbelievable amount of energy.
- Andrew Wright
The Stranger (Seattle, WA)
The Bourne Ultimatum leaps, scampers, scraps and drives its way into the pantheon of all-time great action movies.
- Chris Vognar
Dallas Morning News
Hot Rod
Directed: Akiva Schaffer
Starring: Andy Samberg, Isla Fisher
Trailer: Quicktime
Rod wants to be the best stuntman so he plans a jump, except he isn’t really good at stunts.
RT Score: 38%
RT Consensus: A few funny scenes can’t save the disjointed Hot Rod, which is too silly and sloppy to hold up.
Here’s a comedy with a Napoleon complex.
- Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star
There’s a pretty good chance you’ll find at least some of it pretty funny.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
Wait until the best parts pop up on YouTube.
- Gregory Kirschling
Entertainment Weekly
The film’s low-key Wayne’s World vibe takes it only so far. I laughed, then I wished it was funnier, then I just wished it would end.
- Peter Travers
Rolling Stone
There are perhaps 10 to 15 minutes of good, gag-worthy material here stretched out to interminable lengths.
- Scott Foundas
L.A. Weekly
El Cantante
Directed: Leon Ichaso
Starring: Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez
Trailer: Quicktime
Biopic of Puerto Rican salsa singer Hector Lavoe told through the eyes of his girlfriend so Jennifer Lopez could have a lead role.
RT Score: 22%
RT Consensus: El Cantante adheres to the most basic conventions of the musical biopic, rendering it indistinguishable from others of its ilk.
Ichaso takes the inspiration-explanation technique a step further, setting up scenes that echo Lavoe’s album covers, which flash across the screen. Corny, yes, but sort of cool.
- Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star
A conventional, brassy blat of a biopic.
- Scott Brown
Entertainment Weekly
Biopic clichés hamstring producer-star Jennifer Lopez’s pet project, which purports to recount the rise and fall of pioneering salsa singer Hector Lavoe but devotes as much — if not more — screentime to his hellion wife.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
The awkwardly told story of salsa legend Hector Lavoe, El Cantante doesn’t even get the title right: It should have been called La Esposa, since it’s really less about the singer than his wife.
- Elizabeth Weitzman
New York Daily News
‘El Cantante’ takes the life of a fascinating and complex man and waters it down into a decidedly uninspiring and vanilla biopic …
- Kim Voynar
Cinematical
Underdog
Directed: Frederik Du Chau
Starring: Peter Dinklage, Jason Lee, Amy Adams
Trailer: Quicktime
The cartoon has been made into a live action movie with talking dogs.
RT Score: 19%
If, however, you set your expectations just low enough, or are an easily satisfied 8-year-old, you might have a bit of fun.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
CFrederik Du Chau transforms the campy ’60s and ’70s cartoon into a mostly toothless, family-friendly action-comedy.
- James Diers
E! Online
There may be no need to fear now that Underdog is here, but there is no reason to feel very happy, either.
- Nell Minow
Movie Mom at Yahoo! Movies
Even at a lean 84 minutes, padded with a credit blooper reel, it seems long. If you’ve seen one flying dog, you’ve seen them all. Jay Leno’s cameo appearance proves he’s almost as big a publicity hound as Larry King.
- Peter Howell
Toronto Star
Hollywood once again demonstrates its ability to take a mediocre idea and destroy what little potential it had. They offer a graduate-level course in this skill at Disney University.
- Eric D. Snider
EricDSnider.com
Bratz: The Movie
Directed: Sean McNamara
Starring: Paula Abdul, Skyler Shaye, Janel Parrish
Trailer: Quicktime
Based on dolls for girls, girls are taught to not be in a clique by being in a talent show. Huh?
RT Score: 9%
M&M-colored high school fantasia for aspirational 10- and 12-year-old girls who’ll be shocked (or, hopefully, delighted) when they get to ninth grade and find out life isn’t so super-Bratz-fabulous.
- Gregory Kirschling
Entertainment Weekly
This is why the terrorists hate us.
- Nathan Rabin
Onion AV Club
Little more than a long-form music video that isn’t that far removed from its direct-to-DVD animated predecessors.
- Mack Bates
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The derivative Bratz is a great big pink marshmallow of a movie, aimed at one demographic only: tween girls into fashion and lip gloss. Anyone else, enter at your own risk.
- Kit Bowen
Hollywood.com
O.M.G! This movie is SO BAD!
- Amy Biancolli
Houston Chronicle
Limited Releases
The Ten
Directed: David Wain
Starring: Paul Rudd, Jessica Alba, Winona Ryder
Trailer: Quicktime
From the fabulous people that brought you The State comes ten stories about the ten commandments. The trailer should be watched just to hear how they pronounce the cast members’ names at the end.
RT Score: 40%
RT Consensus: Although a few of the sketches that make up The Ten are humorous, the uneven and random tone of the film cause it to fall apart.
Everyone involved seems to have been operating from the presumption that gross and blasphemous equals hilarious. Would that it did.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
Lacking a steady hand, this flimsy amalgam of bad jokes is without form and void.
- Eric Kohn
New York Press
Let’s talk about Paul Rudd. I think he may be in every film in 2007 and that’s okay by me, because Paul Rudd has become an acting Man-God.
- Mark Bell
Film Threat
Hilarious stuff, though many of the segments go on too long, so that the gags tend to wear out their welcome.
- Edward Douglas
ComingSoon.net
Many of the films have little to do with the Commandments, and none has anything provocative or profound to say about them.
- Chris Hewitt (St. Paul)
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Becoming Jane
Directed: Julian Jarrold
Starring: Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters
Trailer: Quicktime
Jane Austen wants to be a writer and marry for love, but society only wants her to have a proper marriage to someone in her class.
RT Score: 57%
RT Consensus: Although Becoming Jane is a well-crafted period piece, it lacks fresh insight into the life and works of Jane Austen.
Has a burnished feminine sadness, and the director, Julian Jarrold, gives it a creamy-dark visual flow.
- Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
Hathaway and McAvoy bring some genuine, if discreet, sparks to their secret romance, but there’s something fundamentally lifeless about director Julian Jarrold’s shallow gloss on Pride and Prejudice.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
While there is little that is fresh in this costume drama, it is well done and Anne Hathaway makes a delightful Jane, who is unafraid to defy convention.
- Urban Cinefile Critics
Urban Cinefile
Was Austen really a smarter, feistier Carrie Bradshaw in more sensible shoes, longing for love even as she failed to hang onto it? Becoming Jane would have been more honest if it had been called No Sex in the Country.
- Stephanie Zacharek
Salon.com
We can’t quite shake the feeling we’ve seen this all done before, and better.
- Elizabeth Weitzman
New York Daily News
If I Didn’t Care
Directed: Ben Cummings, Orson Cummings
Starring: Bill Sage, Susie Misner, Roy Schneider
Trailer: Quicktime
Film noir set at a Hampton resort community where a trophy husband hopes to get an heir for his family’s fortune.
RT Score: 30%
Lazy little thriller about murder in the Hamptons aspires to update classic noir situations and characters but falls sadly short.
- Maitland McDonagh
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
Doesn’t dig too deeply into its stock characters, but the whole thing moves so quickly and efficiently, it’s over before you notice.
- Frank Lovece
Film Journal International
At 80 minutes, this movie is short, but long enough to be boring.
- Kyle Smith
New York Post
Let us praise If I Didn’t Care for living up to its title: You will not see another film this year made with so little ambition.
- Ed Gonzalez
Slant Magazine
The Cummings boys paint themselves into the proverbial corner with a cop-out ex machina ending — at which point there is no longer a need for the title’s If.
- Aaron Hillis
Village Voice
Them
Directed: David Moreau, Xavier Palud
Starring: Olivia Bonamy, Michael Cohen, Adriana Mocca
Trailer: Flash
In Romania, a young teacher and her boyfriend are terrorized in their own house by strangers.
RT Score: 81%
The directors have thoroughly soaked up the best of its countless predecessors, elevating Ils to highly effective and atmospheric genre entertainment.
- Boyd van Hoeij
europeanfilms.net
Suspenseful, eventually, but the first half’s a snooze.
- Tim Robey
Daily Telegraph
So skilfully does the film shield its hand that the final “reveal” actually comes as a disappointment – the enigma was truly much harder to bear.
- Anthony Quinn
Independent
A 20-minute calling card short extended to a tolerance-stretching 74 minutes, this is an effectively directed but ultimately pointless wind-up exercise.
- Nigel Floyd
Time Out
Just one long unendurably tense and frightening sequence, beginning with the terrified couple waking in the middle of the night and having to creep downstairs, extended like a violin string about to snap.
- Peter Bradshaw
Guardian [UK]
Summer ’04
Directed: Stefan Krohmer
Starring: Martina Gedeck
Trailer: none
A woman and a young girl fall for the same older man.
RT Score: 92%
The film unfolds with cold, Chabrolian detachment and quietly builds to a coolly satisfying denouement that leaves everyone involved — including the audience — second-guessing everything that’s come before.
- Ken Fox
TV Guide’s Movie Guide
As twisted and steamy a psychological thriller as you could hope to find, provided you’re not put off by the pedophilia coursing through this intriguing romantic roundelay.
- Kam Williams
NewsBlaze
A well-crafted and deceptively leisurely film, with a heart of ice.
- Andrew O’Hehir
Salon.com
A rare thing: a successfully asymmetrical drama.
- Adam Nayman
eye WEEKLY
Summer ’04 is so plainly the product of meticulous forethought that the shooting script might have been etched on marble slabs.
- Matt Zoller Seitz
New York Times
