“Ferrari,” director Michael Mann’s long gestating look at the summer of 1957 and the existential crisis that plagued Italian motor racing pioneer Enzo Ferrari, both personally and professionally, goes flat out, even when it isn’t on the racetrack.
When we first meet Ferrari (Adam Driver) he is a cultural hero in Italy, but his company and marriage are falling apart. His advisors tell him he must take on a partner, like Ford or Fiat, and
Increase his consumer car sales by four times if he hopes to stay afloat. Trouble is, Ferrari wants complete control of his company, and that means no partner and concentrating on race cars, not street vehicles.
At home, his infidelity pushes his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) to extremes. She doesn’t care if he sleeps around, just so long as nobody knows about it. When he arrives home after the maid has served coffee, Laura expresses her displeasure by taking a potshot at him with a gun she carries for protection. That is, unfortunately, the extent of the passion left in the marriage.
Unbeknownst to Laura, who is grieving the loss of their young son, Enzo has a long-term relationship, and has fathered a son, with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), a woman he met, and fell in love with, during the war. As their son’s baptism approaches, Lina wants to know if the child will carry the name Ferrari, but Enzo has other things on his mind, like the imminent collapse of his company.
His financial advisor Giacomo Cuoghi (Giuseppe Bonifati) suggests entering the grueling, 1000-mile open road race, the Mille Miglia. A win would establish Ferrari supreme over their main rival Maserati, and hopefully encourage sales. “Win the Mille Miglia, Enzo,” Cuoghi says. “Or you are out of business.”
Working from a script by Troy Kennedy Martin, who wrote 1969s “The Italian Job,” Mann’s film feels like two movies on one. On one hand there’s the drama with Laura, Lina and the company. On the other is a piercing look at the dangerous world of racing, circa 1957. “It is our deadly passion,” Enzo tells racers Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell), and Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey). “Our terrible joy.”
The racing scenes are exciting, shot with verve and style, with a couple of unexpected turns (literally) that vividly capture the dangers of racing. But the racing scenes feel conventional when stacked up against the more complex portraits of Enzo and Laura.
Driver plays Enzo as a charismatic man of action, a physically imposing person haunted by the voices of those who have gone before him, his father, his son and racing colleagues taken too soon. It reveals a rich inner life hidden by his stolid façade. Driver doles out Ferrari’s personality in dribs and drabs; the contented lover with Lina, the hard driving boss with his racers and the stoic husband no longer in love with his wife. All aspects of this performance come packaged in the form of a man treated like a deity—a priest even refers to him as a “god”—but prone to real world failings. Driver captures the public and personal to create a complex portrait of a man driven by a variety of forces.
He is at his best when opposite Cruz. Laura is a supporting character in the story over-all, but her agony/rage for a loveless marriage, a son she was powerless to save and a company she co-founded but is unable to have a say in, is palpable.
You can’t make a movie about Enzo Ferrari and not include racing, particularly the career defining Mille Miglia, but Mann wisely keeps the focus on the interpersonal. “Ferrari” has race scenes, several very effective ones, but the memorable moments happen when Driver and Cruz put the pedal to the emotional metal.
This weekend the Orient Express pulls into the station, bringing with it murder and mayhem. Murder on the Orient Express features an all-star cast including Johnny Depp, Dame Judi Dench and Daisy Ridley. Directed by and co-starring Kenneth Branagh as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, the often-filmed mystery is based on the book of the same name by Agatha Christie first published in 1934.
The sensational story of a murder —13 strangers on the luxury train and an investigator’s race to solve the puzzle before the killer strikes again — is Christie’s best-known novel, but it is just one of 66 detective novels she penned in a career that spanned more than five decades.
“I think people have been pretty tough on her,” Branagh told The Guardian. “They’re suspicious of the volume of her output.”
It’s true that the author’s omnipresence on bookshelves, 20th century household-name status and massive popularity — over two billion copies of her books have been sold worldwide making her one of the bestselling authors ever — didn’t endear her to the literary elite, but Branagh sees her differently.
“Personally I admire the prolific nature of what she does … her ability to grab the audience’s attention is really striking,” he said. “The surface of what she writes has led people to dismiss her as a second-rater. But I think she is far more than that.”
Christie’s public persona was that of a button-down grandmother with a macabre imagination, but she led a remarkable life.
In an essay for Radio Times, Branagh writes, “This was a woman full of surprises.” He goes on to describe how the author became the first British female surfer to hang ten in Hawaii. “It was 1922,” he writes. “She was fully upright, scantily clad, and 32 years old.”
In her own words Christie says she wore a “wonderful, skimpy emerald green wool bathing dress, which was the joy of my life, and in which I thought I looked remarkably well!”
Another episode from her storied life feels like it could have been ripped out of the pages of one of her books. The year was 1926. Christie was on the verge of a divorce from her first husband when she vanished, leaving behind only her abandoned car, an expired driver’s licence and some clothes.
Already considered a national treasure, her mysterious disappearance was front-page news. Some thought it was a publicity stunt, others wondered if she was trying to frame her husband for murder.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, tried to solve the mystery with the help of a psychic. When Christie re-emerged 11 days later, after living under an assumed name in a small hotel, she offered no clues as to what had happened.
One popular theory suggests the Queen of Crime had fallen into a psychogenic trance. In the book The Finished Portrait, biographer Andrew Norman sites the adoption of a new personality and “failure to recognise herself in newspaper photographs” as signs that she was depressed and had fallen into a fugue state.
Christie never publicly commented on those missing days, not even in her official biography.
Now, 91 years later the mystery will likely never be solved. So much time has passed that not even Christie’s greatest creation, Murder On The Orient Express’s master detective Hercule Poirot, could get to the bottom of this mystery.
Agatha Christie’s story of murder and mayhem and a moustachioed detective comes to vivid life on the big screen with, as they used to say, more stars than there are in the heavens. Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Leslie Odom Jr., Michelle Pfeiffer and Daisy Ridley play travellers on the luxurious train and all are suspected of doing a dastardly deed by Hercule Poirot, the legendary Belgium detective played by director and star Kenneth Branagh.
Set in 1934, a time when women wore afternoon dresses, men donned flat hats and the Orient Express was seen as the epitome of first-class steam-age travel. Poirot, looking for peace and quiet, some downtime between cases, joins the Orient Express in Istanbul, heading for Calais for a much-needed holiday. “Three days free of care, concern the crime,” says friend Bouc (Tom Bateman).
On board is a colourful collection of characters. There’s Russian Princess Dragomiroff (Judi Dench) and her obedient maid Hildegarde Schmidt (Olivia Colman); the racist German academic Gerhard Hardman (Willem Dafoe); “husband huntering” American widow Mrs. Hubbard (Michelle Pfeiffer); the troubled Countess Andrenyi (Lucy Boynton) and her ballet star husband, Russian dancer Count Andrenyi (Sergei Polunin); Spanish missionary Pilar Estravados (Penélope Cruz); British governess Mary Debenham (Daisy Ridley) and American art dealer Ratchett (Johnny Depp), his butler, Masterman (Derek Jacobi) and private secretary, Hector MacQueen (Josh Gad). “There’s nothing like a triangle of strangers pressed together on a train with no purpose but to go from one place to another.”
One of them is murdered and one is a murderer. Vacation or not, there is a crime to be solved and only one man for the job. “My name is Hercule Poirot,” says the elaborately moustachioed detective, “and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.” Thus the “Avenger of the Innocent” goes fishing for clues in a barrel of red herrings.
Lush production design and old school story telling gives this version of “Murder on the Orient Express” a Masterpiece Theatre vibe. It is a parade of great faces and attention to period details with a slight updating in the character’s ideas about race but while the train may be speeding along on tracks of steel, the story isn’t.
Branagh revels in the deduction phase of the tale, shining a spotlight on Poirot’s process. He’s a great character and Branagh is clearly having a good time playing him but his larger-than-life presence sucks much of the air out of the room, leaving the others gasping. Individually the sprawling cast aren’t given much to do, many reduced to little more than cameo appearances. The real mystery is why Branagh would assemble such a stellar cast and then not give them anything to do.
Even more frustrating are several of Branagh’s stylistic choices. Beautiful sets, and frequently, beautiful performers are obscured by odd cinematography. Pfeiffer’s big entrance is shot in an impressive tracking shot that spends more time showing the outside of the train than the actors. Later a crucial revelation is inexplicably shot from above, showing only the backs of the actor’s heads. The camera is almost constantly in motion and while it helps create a sense of forward movement it can be distracting. However, when it focuses on the period details it is a pleasure to gaze upon.
At its core “Murder on the Orient Express” does end with a morally interesting question but doesn’t spend enough time with its characters—save for the great detective who is clearly being set to be the focus of a franchise—for us to get fully invested in whodunit in question.
The idea behind “The Brothers Grimsby” was to make an outrageous comedy with all the earmarks of an all-out action flick. “The Transporter” helmer Louis Leterrier knows his way around a car chase and can blow things up real good, but can Sacha Baron Cohen provide the laughs to go along with the action?
The “Borat” star plays Grimsby native “Nobby” Butcher, a lager-loving football hooligan from northern England, with a Liam Gallagher hairdo and eleven kids. He hasn’t seen his baby brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) in twenty-eight years and has no idea his long-lost sib is now a high-powered MI6 agent. When they do reunite Nobby inadvertently puts in motion a series of events—including almost killing a World Health Organization ambassador for peace in the Middle East—that see the estranged brothers team up to do battle with a deadly assassin, travel the world and hide inside an elephant (you read that right, that is NOT a typo) in an effort to save the world.
“Yesterday I was down at the pub having a regular day with my mates,” says Nobby. “Today I’m with my brother, running, swimming, jumping and doing all sorts of cardio.”
If “Borat” and “Bruno” made you laugh like a hyena on a nitrous oxide binge you’ll know what to expect from “The Brothers Grimsby.” The new film doesn’t have the same cutting edge innovation as Baron Cohen’s best-known work, but it still has plenty of edge. It’s the kind of movie that uses a blocked toilet as a plot point and finds delight in HIV jokes, registered sex offender gags and too many bodily fluid quips to count. It should be a bonanza for those who enjoy their humour on the gastrointestinal side.
Nobby is Baron Cohen’s least developed character yet, a comedy concoction who feels like he might not be that out of place in a particularly raunchy “Carry On” movie. He uses Nob’s idiot temperament to make some social comments—“I understand why you like guns so much,” Nobby says after shooting a gun for the first time. “They completely detaches you from the guilt of your actions.”—but the character has none of the danger and few of the interesting quirks that came along with his mockumentary creations.
Mark Strong waffles between his action man pose and wild slapstick and pulls off both but I’m afraid the image of him covered in elephant ejaculate will stay with me the next time I see him trying to play it straight in a dramatic role.
The guys are given plenty of screen time and some fun stuff to do, which cannot be said for the women in the cast. As Nobby’s wife the usually hilarious Rebel Wilson is wasted, reduced to a fat joke and Penélope Cruz’s character makes her recent turn in “Zolander 2” look like Lady Macbeth.
Like all the best spy movies “The Brothers Grimsby” has international locations like South Africa, Chile, Jakarta and some good action scenes, but like all Baron Cohen’s films it is outrageous lowest common denominator stuff. It may make you laugh, but those laughs come along with a certain amount of shame at finding some of this stuff amusing. At least at a scant eighty-five minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
“Zoolander 2,” the fifteen years in the making follow-up to the 2001 comedy hit, finds former “Blue Steel” supermodel Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) “out of fashion,” literally and figuratively. Following a tragic event involving his wife and his Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good, Derek stepped away from fashion and the world. He now lives the life of a “hermit crab,” complete with a long beard that obscures his “really, really, really, really, really ridiculously good looking face.”
When some of the most beautiful people in the world turn up dead, their Instagram images frozen in time in perma-duckface, Derek’s most famous facial expression, Zoolander and his past partner Hansel (Owen Wilson) are tricked into travelling to Rome to uncover who is behind this evil plot to rid the world of good looking celebrities.
In the Eternal City the dim-witted models will search for Derek’s long-lost son—whose blood may contain the secret to eternal fashionability—battle fashion criminal Mugato (Will Ferrell) and meet new high-powered fashionista All (Benedict Cumberbatch). Aiding the boys is Valentina (Penélope Cruz), a former swimsuit model troubled by her inability to “transition to print and runway work,” now working as an agent for Interpol’s Global Fashion Division.
“Zoolander 2’s” main joke isn’t the Blue Steel, the pouty-lipped move that made Zoolander a superstar, or the dim-witted antics of Derek and Hansel. No, the movie’s best joke is its commentary on how quickly the best-by date comes for modern day celebrities. The speed of popular culture has revved considerably since 2001 and what seems hip today may be passé tomorrow. Fashion is fleeting, as cameos from Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger, Marc Jacobs demonstrate, but the big question is has “Zoolander 2” reached its expiration date?
I usually avoid the scatological in my reviews but suffice to say any movie whose best joke involves the morphing of the word “faces” into feces over and over, that features a hotel made of “reclaimed human waste” and subtitles itself with “No. 2” is really asking for it.
To put it more delicately, villain Mugato marvels at how “super white hot blazingly stupid” Derek is, and you’ll do the same thing about the film. Stupid can be OK if it’s funny but “Zoolander 2” leaves the laughs on the runway. Stiller’s mugging gets tired quickly and the simple, juvenile jokes were much funnier fifteen years ago when we heard them the first time. To use the movie’s own dialogue against itself, “You guys are so old-school,” says Don Atari (Kyle Mooney), “so lame.”
Stiller, who directs and co-wrote the script, jam packs every frame with with cameos in a desperate grab for relevancy. Everyone from Justin Bieber (who appearance may please non- Beliebers) to Joe Jonas and Katy Perry to Ariana Grande decorate the screen, while Susan Sarandon does a “Rocky Horror” call back and Billy Zane demonstrates that he is no longer an actor, but a pop-culture punchline. I doubt even Neil deGrasse Tyson could scientifically explain why he chose to appear in this dreck.
Fred Armisen as an eleven-year-old manager of social media tries his best to make his brief role strange-funny while Will Ferrell’s Mugatu is essentially an audition to play an alternate universe Bond villain.
The best thing about “Zoolander 2” that it is such a fashion faux pas and so desperately unfunny it’s hard to imagine Stiller and Company making a third one fifteen years from now.
“The Counselor” is the feel bad movie of the year.
Bleak and hopeless, it’s an ice-cold crime drama that examines the reasons and consequences of crime instead of focusing on the crime itself. It’s a stylish cautionary tale about the worst of human behavior driven by greed, lust and hubris; a non-action, action movie where most of the fireworks are in McCarthy’s dialogue. Luckily actors like Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Rosie Perez and Michael Fassbender are there to keep the fuse lit.
In Cormac ‘No Country for Old Men’ McCarthy’s screenwriting debut he tells a gritty story about a greedy lawyer (Fassbender) in over his head after dipping his toe into the narcotics trade with charismatic drug lord Reiner (Bardem) and his sociopath girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz).
When the deal, smuggling carrying 625 kilos of cocaine from Mexico to Chicago, goes south after one “we’ve got a problem” phone call, the Counselor finds his life swirling out of control.
Spiraling around this grim vortex are womanizing middle-man Westray (Pitt), prison inmate Ruth (Rosie Perez) and the counselor’s long-distance girlfriend Laura (Penélope Cruz).
In “The Counselor” director Ridley Scott mutes his usual high-octane visual sense to focus on the words.
And there’s a lot of them.
Talky to the extreme, the entire movie is built around dialogue that sounds like it flowed from the hardest boiled crime writer out there, which I guess McCarthy is now that Elmore Leonard is working from his celestial typewriter. Catch phrases abound—“You don’t know someone until you know what they want,” for example—but it is wordy. Sometimes brilliantly so, but the pacing, particularly in the first hour, will be thought of as hypnotic by some, slow by others.
Scott takes his time creating tension in every scene, which really begins to pay off in the second hour when the themes of truth or consequences really start to pay off. “If you think you can live in this world and not be part of it, you’re wrong,” the Counselor is told, just after it’s too late to change his fate.
Or the most part the acting is top notch. Fassbender’s shift from confident criminal to a man who lands himself in a world of trouble after doing a good deed gives a nakedly raw performance. As his desperation grows his defenses drop and the weight of what he did in the name of greed crushes him.
Perez and Pitt (who’s in his “Killing Them Softly” mode here) are both fine, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else describing a “gynecological” love scene between a woman and a car with as much strange gusto as Bardem. “You see something like that,” he says, “and it changes you.”
These actors bring the words to life. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Diaz, whose cold-blooded take on the character is too detached to be truly effective.
Like “Killing Them Softly,” another thriller that relied on dialogue and ideas to provide the thrills instead of gunshots and explosions, “The Counselor” will polarize people. Some will find it a head scratcher, others will be drawn into its uncompromising look at life and death, cartel style.
Still others, like me, will be left half in, half out, wishing the film’s virtues—it’s dialogue and ideas—were propped up with just a bit more attention to plot and possibly some warmth. But the chilliness of the story and characters may be McCarthy’s point. Early on Malkina says, “I don’t think truth has a temperature,” which sums McCarthy’s ice cold look at primal, criminal behavior.
Javier Bardem dedicated his No Country for Old Men Oscar to a frequent co-star. “Mom this is for you,” the emotional actor said. “This is for your grandparents, for your parents, Rafael and Matilde, this is for the actors of Spain, who have brought, like you, dignity and pride to our job.”
You see, Bardem, the first Spaniard to win an acting Academy Award, comes from a long line of actors. His performing arts lineage stretches back nearly a hundred years but it wasn’t always a given that he would join the family business.
His first acting gig came at age six and even though he continued to work on TV and in films he studied to be a painter. He put down the brush, however, when he realized he’d never be a great artist and tried his hand at writing, construction and even stripping (but only for one night).
His road to Hollywood began at age twenty with an offer to appear alongside his mother Pilar Bardem in the movie Las edades de Lulú. She advised him to take the role seriously and take acting classes. He did, and never looked back.
The young Bardem appeared on TV, worked with Pedro Almodovar, certainly a rite of passage for all future Spanish superstars, and found fame with Jamon, Jamon, a film co-starring his future wife, Penelope Cruz.
If not for the persistence of John Malkovich however, English language audiences may never have discovered the Spanish star. In 1997 Malkovich was planning his directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs. He offered the lead to Bardem who turned it down because he didn’t feel confident acting in English. Continuing to work in Spain, Bardem made two dozen films, collected awards like Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for The Sea Inside and become the first Spanish actor to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for Before Night Falls.
The part made him an international superstar—Al Pacino even left a message on his answering machine praising the performance and Francis Ford Coppola compared him to Robert de Niro.
Meanwhile Malkovich finally had the money to make The Dancer Upstairs, and by this time, 2002, Bardem had becoming fluent in English—he says he sang along with AC/DC to learn the language—and felt confident enough to take on a major English speaking role.
Of course, Hollywood came calling—he turned down the Witwer role in Minority Report which eventually went to Colin Farrell—and he finally made his Hollywood debut in a cameo appearance as a crime lord who hires Tom Cruise to dispatch some troublesome witnesses in the thriller Collateral.
He made his strongest impression as No Country for Old Men’s sociopathic assassin, Anton Chigurh. Entertainment Weekly called him one of the “50 Most Vile Villains in Movie History.”
Then he switched gears, playing a comedic role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, a part which made him a Hollywood romantic lead, on screen and off. Reunited with his old Jamon Jamon co-star Penelope Cruz in Allen’s film they quietly started dating in 2007. The couple kept a low profile—when asked about their relationship in 2009 all Cruz would say is, “He’s a friend and the best actor in the world.”—but married in 2010 in front of family members during an intimate ceremony at a friend’s Bahamian home. In January 2011 the actress gave birth to their son, Leo.
Professionally Bardem also kept busy. In 2010 he proved he could do it all. In the same calendar year he released two movies back to back, Eat Pray Love, a big budget romance and Biutiful, a gritty Spanish language drama that cemented his rep as the movie’s most versatile leading man.
Speaking with him the night before Biutiful made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival I asked if his preparation process varies from role to role.
“I think it is the same process but of course there is more weight in this,” he said. “There is more emotional weight than in Eat Pray Love because the character has to carry a lot of things with him but I think at the end it is about trying to understand who the person is, being honest and trying to put that on the screen.”
Biutiful’s story of a low-level criminal in Barcelona trying to put his life together in light of unbearable guilt over a tragic accident and a death sentence from his doctor grabbed Bardem right away.
“Most of the scripts [I get] are very boring,” he told me. “They are the worst reading material you can have. When you are in to too many scripts you don’t read a good book for a long time and you realize you need to get a good book and lose yourself in those words. In this case [the script] had an emotional impact on me.”
Biutiful offered up one of the biggest challenges of his career. “To take a man that you are not actually liking from the first moment [and make an audience] understand that behind that is a man who really needs compassion, who really needs to love. That is the challenge.”
Biutiful which airs on TMN this month, earned Bardem his third Oscar nomination. He calls the movie a “a gift” and acknowledged to me that his performance wouldn’t have been possible without the help of his director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
“I think he is one of the greatest actor’s directors,” he said, adding that Iñárritu provided a detailed, written character sketch before shooting began.
“When he handed that great work to me I was pleased because I am lazy. It helps you to more or less have the image. We work with imagination so we have to understand who [the character is]. Even if the others don’t get it you need to know where you are when he says action, otherwise you are up in the air.”
Popular culture has frequently paid homage to the lowly rodent. The Captain and Tennille scored a hit with Muskrat Love, their ode to arvicoline amour and Michael Jackson rode to the top of the charts on rat back with the tune Ben, possibly the only love song to a rat ever released.
Ben, of course, was the theme song to the 1972 movie of the same name. It was the sequel to Willard, the original “revolución de las ratas” flick. Ben and Willard, along with Stuart Little, Mr. Gopher, the burrowing terror from Caddyshack, Rizzo the Rat, Despereaux Tilling, Fievel Mousekewitz, the gang from Once Upon a Forest and of course, the biggest rodent star of all, Mickey Mouse, have left their mark in movie theatres. This weekend a new set of rodents that go by the collective name G-Force hope to do for guinea pigs what March of the Penguins did for tuxedo clad furry birds.
This mix of live action and animation from hotshot producer Jerry Bruckheimer centers on a team of trained secret agent guinea pigs. There’s team Leader Darwin (voiced by Sam Rockwell), Juarez (Penélope Cruz), Blaster (30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan) and mole Speckles (1996 Best Actor Nicolas Cage). In the midst of their biggest US government assignment ever—stopping evil billionaire Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy), from destroying the world with household appliances—they are shut down and sent to a pet shop. There they go rogue, hooking up with Hurley (Jon Favreau) and hamster Bucky (Steve Buscemi) and get back to the business of saving the world.
On the cute scale the G-Force members are somewhere between Ratatouille and Stuart Little, which is to say they are quite adorable. Pet stores should brace themselves for a run on guinea pigs but I couldn’t help but think that the rodents are less characters than prototypes for action figures and other toys. As is so often the case with bad kid’s films, more thought seems to have been given to the spin off toys kids will want after they leave the theatre than what is actually up on the screen.
The story is silly, but really, what did you expect from a film about crime fighting guinea pigs? It’s not the story that brings G-Force down, but the flat, bored performances.
The live actors aren’t the focus of the movie, but Wil Arnett and Bill Nighy do little more than simply show up and Zach Galifanikis blows whatever street cred he built up after his bizarre breakout performance in The Hangover.
The voice cast includes not one, but two Oscar winners, which may be an indication that the recession has finally taken root in Hollywood. When the best gig Penelope Cruz can get involves saying lines like “Oh, I have to save his fur again?” you know times are tight for a-listers.
Voice work wise only Nicolas Cage seems to be putting in much effort, doing a kind of Pee Wee Herman impression as the brianiac mole Speckles and Steve Buscemi has a naturally good cartoon voice but the other actors blow through their lines as if they had something better to do elsewhere.
The 3-D is sharp but other than a few fun stereoscopic gags it adds nothing to the movie except $3 to the price of the ticket.
G-Force has some good messages for kids about believing in yourself and the importance of family, but they are wrapped in a frenetic and cynical excuse for a movie that ends by setting itself up for a sequel which, if there is a patron saint of film critics, will never happen.
Penelope Cruz’s lackluster performances in Hollywood movies like Gothika and Vanilla Sky left North American audiences questioning her star power. Well, question no more. Her powerhouse performance in Volver as Raimunda, a resourceful working class mother who must deal with a precocious daughter, a lazy husband and an eccentric sister, is earning her the best notices of her career. Working in her native Spanish and paired for a second time with superstar director Pedro Almodóvar, Cruz unveils a tangled web of a story that mixes humor with murder, abuse and hope—think Mildred Pierce with a hint of Arsenic and Old Lace— as three generations of women deal with the hands that life has dealt them.
