Rating: 2 stars

The key to watching Knowing is to simply enjoy the ride. Because if you start to connect the dots—and they’re all there, laid out pretty obviously—you begin to realize that something truly silly and self-important is about to transpire. Anticipating a horrible ending—and Knowing’s is a real doozy—is a surefire way to ruin a film.
But at least for a while, Knowing is a decent, if overly noisy, sc-fi/action/horror film about a creepy little girl who buries a series of frantically scrawled numbers in a time capsule. Fifty years later, that time capsule is dug up and her scrawlings are given to 10-year-old Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) who is being raised by his widower father John (Nic Cage) an MIT astrophysicist.
John, an atheist who believes that everything in life is random, inspects the numbers and begins to see that they correspond to the dates and casualty counts of world-wide disasters—many that took place after the capsule was buried and some that are yet to come. John becomes convinced that it’s his job to alert people to...

Rating: 2 stars

I suppose when you film a nihilistic and profane graphic novel about morally ambiguous super heroes in a dystopian alternate universe, you have an obligation to the novel’s hardcore fans. After all, they’re your guaranteed audience, the only ones invested enough in the material to show up no matter what. But here’s the problem with that logic: The readership for The Watchmen may be sizeable, but they would amount to a mere gnat on Spiderman’s spinneret, relatively speaking. Those cult fans alone ain’t going to move the box office needle.
So you could attempt to make the adaptation more tame, less dense with mythology, less pornographically violent, and more user-friendly. Whoa, boy—then you’re really in trouble. Pissed off fans and a watered down product. Not exactly a recipe for success.
So director Zack Snyder, the blockbuster wunderkind behind the hyper-stylized (and soul-dead) 300, chose the only route he could—talmudic faithfulness to the novels—with predictably shaky results. Maybe The Watchmen...

Last night, I watched the Oscars and a Tony telecast broke out.

That being said, for the most part, I liked the irony-free, “let’s put on a show!” vibe of the broadcast. The fact that we had a “song and dance man” as our host—not a snarky political quipster or a jaded late night comedian—was kinda refreshing.
The first production number, with its charming homemade sets, got things off on to a promising start. (And Anne Hathaway: Who knew?)

But the Vegas-tastic Beyonce/Zac Efron/Mamma Mia number, with the top hats and the bedazzled, Rockette-style dancers, was so random. I mean, do we really need to hear excerpts from Grease, like, ever?

Here’s a funny thing about the telecast: Even though it felt so corny and old-fashioned, it was also rather slyly forward-thinking. Somebody finally noticed that the staid and formal Oscars are out of step with our Twitter-y times. So the accounting firm of Pricewaterhouse Cooper was not trotted out for our approval and the MPAA president didn’t get to make a long, gassy speech—he...

Rating: 2.5 stars

The International asks the question: Can an otherwise unremarkable thriller be salvaged by one truly kick-ass scene? The answer is. . .almost.
For most of its 2 hour running time, The International, which features Clive Owen as an Interpol agent on the trail of a corrupt international bank and Naomi Watts as the D.A. who assists him, is a well-mannered, mildly intriguing, and highly derivative suspense movie. Unlike the ill-conceived Confessions of a Shopaholic, at least it has the advantage of being of the zeitgeist—who doesn’t hate banks these days?
Then, about two-thirds of the way through, director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) stages one of the most spectacular gun fight sequences I’ve ever seen. It’s dazzling in how long it goes on, how entertaining it is, and mostly for its audacity of setting: The fight takes place at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, an iconic building that is known as much for its remarkable spiraled architecture as...