Rating: 3 stars

You could say that Burn After Reading is a spy caper where everything is at it seems to be. You keep waiting for the big reveal, the moment when you find out that at least one of the bumbling, low IQ schemers is not all they appear to be.
But no.
Brad Pitt—in a hilariously goofy turn—really is just a Jamba-juice feuled meathead who stumbles across a disk at the gym where he works and becomes convinced it’s a top secret CIA document.
His co-worker Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) really is just an aging gym rat, serial online dater, and self-help-book-activated optimist who will do anything to get plastic surgery she’s convinced she needs.
John Malkovich, brilliantly cast as a grumpy and supercilious former CIA agent, really is just an alcoholic loser who clings to his glory days at Princeton University.
As for Harry (George Clooney)—jogger, ladies man, and paranoid ex-Secret Service agent—well don’t even ask what he’s making in the basement.
The joke of the movie is that all of these...

Rating: 1 star

To say that I’m not the target audience for Death Race is a bit like saying that Ray Lewis is not the target audience for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Suffice it to say, I held up my end of the bargain: I hated this loud, violent, retrograde movie, a remake of the Roger Corman sci-fi B-movie Death Race 2000.
The year, curiously enough, is 2012. (A sly joke that the world will be radically altered in four years? Or, more likely, the byproduct of a budget too low to get properly futuristic?). Corporations have taken over the prison system and are staging vicious car races to the death for online and television viewing pleasure. The evil prison warden, played by a seriously slumming Joan Allen, presides over the event in power suits and a scowl. Any resemblance to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is strictly intentional. Ugh.
Into this mix comes former race car drive Jenson Ames (Jason Statham), who is accused of killing his wife. (We know it was the prison warden’s henchman who actually did the deed.)
A few words...

Rating: 1.5 stars

Behind-the-scenes casting decisions are rarely made public—it’s only way after the fact that we discover that John Travolta turned down the Richard Gere role in American Gigolo, or that Mel Gibson was tapped to play Russell Crowe’s part in Gladiator—but it seems pretty clear to me that Rainn Wilson was not the first choice for The Rocker. The role practically screams Jack Black, and, frankly, he would’ve been better at it.
I like Rainn Wilson well enough—he was deliciously creepy in Six Feet Under and brings his own strange, uptight energy to The Office. But he’s not leading man material. Okay, maybe in some sort of Vincent Gallo-helmed indie film, but in a lovable family-style romp, not so much. His eccentricity has too much of an edge.
In The Rocker, Wilson plays drummer Robert “Fish” Fishman, who was kicked out of the 80’s metal band Vesuvius right before they made it big. (Don’t even ask me to decode the horribly unfunny opening scene where Fish, upon hearing of his ouster from...

Rating: 1.5 stars

About 5 minutes into Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the new animated film from Lucas Studios, I turned to my friend Travis and said, “Wait. I thought Anakin went bad in Revenge of the Sith. Then why is he swashbuckling right alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi?” “Because this film takes place before that one,” he explained.
Let me get this straight: The most recent three Star Wars films—Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Sith—were not sequels, but prequels, right? So what does that make this? A midquel? Episode 2.5? A palate cleanser? The mind reels.
Actually, the mind doesn’t reel at all. It’s quite clear what Star Wars: The Clone Wars is—a giant advertisement for Lucas’s next project, an animated Star Wars TV series that will run on the Cartoon Network and TNT.
Surely, that explains why the animation is so horrible—the faces are so stiff and robotic they bring to mind Max Headroom—and the voice work done by a cast of no names (except for a random cameo from Samuel Jackson). Why set up fans for a...