Stephen Root

Watching this gross-out comedy, it's clear that the gifted cast and crew had a great time making it. Scenes are packed with wildly ridiculous improvisation, as the script throws characters into some genuinely outrageous situations. And yet it's never actually funny. The longer the film goes on, the more the audience will wonder why they don't feel in on the joke.

It's loosely based on the true story of chucklehead brothers Mike and Dave (Adam Devine and Zac Efron), whose parents (Stephen Root and Stephanie Faracy) tell them they can't go stag to the wedding of their sister (Sugar Lyn Beard) in Hawaii. They have to find dates to calm down the antics that have ruined family events for years. So Mike and Dave put an ad on Craigslist, and it goes viral, drawing the attention of slacker flatmates Tatiana and Alice (Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick). Pretending to be nice girls, they win over Mike and Dave and head to Hawaii for the big event. But the girls are even more anarchic than the boys. So it's no surprise that a wave of disruptive mayhem follows.

Basically this is a simple coming-of-age story, structured like a standard romantic-comedy that plays out in a series of messy set-pieces. Every beat of the plot is predictable, and the big surprise is that the filmmakers seem terrified of genuine sexuality. Despite using sex and nudity as the (ahem!) butt of most jokes, the film is childish and even prudish. And it doesn't help that virtually all of the gags are obvious and cheap.

Continue reading: Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates Review

John Edgar Hoover (DiCaprio) was only 29 when he became director of the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI), and he ruled supreme until his death in 1972, holding eight US presidents in the palm of his hand with his notorious files of personal secrets. But he also had loyal friends, including his secretary Helen (Watts) and his right-hand man Clyde (Hammer). As a young man, his mother (Dench) instilled in him a hatred of liberalism and homosexuality, so his enemies included Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy (Donovan) and himself.

Continue reading: J. Edgar Review

Bob (McGregor) is a Michigan journalist desperate to prove himself, so he heads to Kuwait, hoping to find a story in Iraq. He meets the enigmatic Lyn Cassady (Clooney), whose story is so surreal that he can't help but follow him into the hot zone. Lyn is a member of the New Earth Army, a secret platoon formed in the 1980s by a hippie (Bridges) to create soldiers with Jedi mind powers. But their work went wrong when a jealous teammate (Spacey) dragged them into the dark side.

Continue reading: The Men Who Stare At Goats Review

The Coen Brothers flopped with last year's comedically clumsy and questionably hammy "Intolerable Cruelty," and now that they have repeated and amplified the same arched-performance mistakes in "The Ladykillers," I am beginning to understand what it is about Joel and Ethan's movies that their detractors dislike so much.

The characters in the Coens' recent comedies have frequently been oblivious to the world beyond their whimsical capers, and in these last two pictures even the protagonists have become objects for audience ridicule, making them poor surrogates for getting us involved in their stories.

Tom Hanks takes that bullet in this loose remake of a 1955 British laffer about a band of crooks inadvertently foiled by the little old landlady who rents them a room. All toothy, affected mannerisms and blabbering balderdash as the endlessly loquacious supposed mastermind of the criminal enterprise, his character is nothing but caricature -- an over-educated, old-fashioned, pocket-watch-and-hankie type Southern gentleman who goes by the tongue-tying moniker of Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D.

Continue reading: The Ladykillers Review

Can somebody please stop Ben Stiller?

Since becoming a box-office draw with "There's Something About Mary," the guy has been a horrendous ham, devouring scenery with an eye-bugging, eyebrow-stitching schtick so stale and predictable that his last dozen movies have all included the same gag: slow-motion scenes of Stiller madly mugging while dancing, or running, or playing the titular game of schoolyard pain and humiliation in "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story."

The only variation in his on-screen persona is that sometimes he's an irritatingly neurotic, hapless chump ("Along Came Polly," "Envy," "Meet the Parents") and other times he's an irritatingly arrogant, mock-sexy-pouting, self-obsessed moron ("Starsky & Hutch," "Zoolander").

Continue reading: Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story Review