Joan Cusack Page 2

An astute satire of the pop music business, this raucous mock-documentary is consistently hilarious from start to finish. Some of the jokes are corny, but everything about this movie has a point to make about fame and the music industry. The songs are jaw-droppingly wacky, as is the constant string of big-name cameos. And it's anchored on a riotously funny performance by Andy Samberg.

He plays Connor, formerly one-third of the boy band Style Boyz, alongside his childhood friends Owen (Jorma Taccone) and Lawrence (Akica Schaffer). When Conner decided to go solo, Owen tagged along with him as his deejay, while Lawrence angrily left to become a farmer. But sales of Connor's new album are wobbling, and with 32 people on his personal payroll, he needs to bring in the cash. After a marketing scheme to upload his music to kitchen appliances backfires, he heads out on his Connquest world tour, supported by unhinged singer Hunter (Chris Redd). But Owen thinks that what Connor really needs is to make up with Lawrence, and bring the Boyz back together again.

Samberg is perfect as the too-cute musician who believes all the hype and doesn't have a clue what's really happening around him. Even in his ignorance, Connor is hugely likeable, because he never means to be cruel. This makes his interaction with the people around him thoroughly engaging, and often laugh-out-loud funny, from Sarah Silverman's PR guru to Tim Meadows' enthusiastic manager to Maya Rudolph's kitchen appliance queen. Joan Cusack has some marvellous moments as his dotty mum, while Imogen Poots gets the film's best sequence as the "official" girlfriend he proposes to complete with an ill-advised pack of wolves and live music by Seal. And then there's Justin Timberlake as Connor's singing chef.

Continue reading: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping Review

Andy (Morris) is getting ready to go to university, so the toys are preparing to be deposited in the attic. But a mix-up sees Woody (Hanks), Buzz (Allen) and pals sent instead to Sunnyside Daycare, an apparently happy place with no end of children to play with them. Except they're put in the terrible 2's room. And the leader of the Sunnyside toys, Lots-o-Huggin Bear (Beatty) is more like a prison warden. After a series of adventures, the toys must plot an elaborate escape.

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There's an odd sense of dragging in the middle, and some of the action sequences feel like they never quite crank up to high gear.

On the other hand, the film is a series of gorgeously conceived set pieces and terrific character interaction and, unlike newer films, it's not afraid to get a bit grim. Stinky Pete's character is especially well-realised, right through to the anarchic closing-credit outtakes. As with most good sequels, the secret is to create strong new characters, and Stinky Pete certainly does that. It's also great to have Barbie in this world.

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Imagine my shock; Nine Months is pretty good.

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Thank God! Almost as good as the original, Toy Story 2 is an unabashed crowd-pleaser to children and adults. With enough (non-offensive) adult humor and plenty of good-natured kid stuff, this film had our tiny audience in stitches from start to finish.

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Raising Helen is all about Hudson, who stars in the title role, when it should focus on other topics -- the ties of family, coping with tragedy, and starting your life from scratch. The movie harps on how Helen's glamorous life is turned upside down when she is bequeathed her sister's three kids. The story should be on how hard it is for the kids, rather than Helen's bemoaning how fat her ass has gotten.

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My sentiments exactly, pal. The Federal Reserve couldn't pay you enough to sit through Technicolor gobbledygook like this. Dante has a technical feat on his hand, crafting a vigorous cartoon hybrid that seamlessly merges beloved Warner Bros. animated characters with unlucky C-list actors who apparently made their agents very angry and are being punished.

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There's just one thing standing in the way of "ArlingtonRoad" taking a place among the best film noir politics-and-paranoiathrillers -- the script is so tight that the hero is forced to make a dumbmistake now and again to advance the plot.

That hero is Jeff Bridges, playing a West Virginia historyprofessor who obsesses over his class in domestic terrorism because itdoubles as a form of therapy while grieving for his dead wife -- an FBIagent killed in a botched, Ruby Ridge-like raid.

He's a guy doesn't trust the government one bit, and inhis class sermonizes that federal and extremist conspiracies abound andthat the lone psycho theory applied to most American terrorists is a ruseby the feds to lull the populace into feeling safe again in the wake oftranquillity-shattering attacks.

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Jack Black isn't an actor, he's a clown -- and a one-schitck clown at that.

Compare any two-minute clip of his new comedy "School of Rock" to any of his scenes from "Orange County," "Shallow Hal" or "Saving Silverman," and you'll see the exact same tongue-wagging and eye-bugging mugging, the exact same frenzied, finger-knotting gestures and roly-poly, off-balance dancing, the exact same eyebrow-stitching failed attempts at momentary sincerity, and the exact same set-devouring dialogue delivery.

"Read between the lines, baby! Read between the lines!" he whispers then screams, whispers then screams while giving a three-fingered flip-off to the musicians who have just kicked the embarrassing stage-hog out of their band in this movie's establishing scene.

Continue reading: School Of Rock Review

A wonderfully ambitious, old-school ensemble piece, very much in the can-do spirit of the community to which it pays homage, "Cradle Will Rock" is a politically-undertoned dramedy about theater, censorship, ambition, apprehension, oppression, Orson Welles and the Great Depression.

Written and directed by Tim Robbins -- never one to shy away from cause-fueled entertainment -- this passionate labor of love celebrates and fictionalizes a legendary moment in American theater, when the government shut down the performance of a musical produced by the Works Progress Administration -- and the actors, at the risk of losing their jobs during the bleakest economic season in U.S. history, staged it anyway in a show of inspiring solidarity.

The play was entitled "The Cradle Will Rock" and its story of a greedy industrialist taken down by the organized working man made a lot of federal bureaucrats see red -- as in communism.

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Julia Roberts and Richard Gere have the kind of spellbound chemistry that can make even a movie riddled with flaws feel like an instant romantic comedy classic.

Like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Debroah Kerr and Yul Brynner, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, when Roberts and Gere share the screen, there's just no denying something magical is happening between them.

Their eyes lock when they just glance at each other. They crack giddy smiles like they just can't help it. They're drawn to each other like magnets.

Continue reading: Runaway Bride Review