(500)Days of Summer, is not a love story, at least that’s what we’re told within the first few minutes of the film. It’s not a love story, like All the Real Girls or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind aren’t love stories; they’re about love but reveal the bleaker underside, the heartbreak and uncertainty that inevitably come with commitment.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Tom, and he believes in love. He learned about love from pop music and movies, and he believes that there is someone perfect out there for him. …

Some stories are rather simple; they can be reduced to a symbiotic dichotomy. Life and death. Cops and robbers. Men of action, defined by their chosen profession, who live by the gun and die by the gun. Michael Mann’s Public Enemies follows in the reductionist vein of his last several films, finding a myriad of intersections between oppositional — and codependent — forces of self-identity. Public Enemies may be Mann’s most schematic film to date — a study in contrasts, gilded by period detail and graced by the presence of two of the most dynamic leading men in show business, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.

Beyond the excess of his fright scenes (ghosts appearing at a seance, a catfight in a tool shed, a fake-wake from a bad dream), this is one of Raimi’s most tightly constructed films — predictable and thematically consistent, if repellent. Aesop didn’t need to resort to supernaturally fetishistic vignettes of domestic abuse and carjacking to make his points; Raimi’s aspirations to be a contemporary fabulist are undercut by both his moral rigidity and blinders toward his own neurotic obsessions. If he had a firmer grip on the nuance required of good moralists and ethicists, perhaps he would have succeeded.

Terminator Salvation also opens with a text crawl that recapitulates information we don’t need to know. In fact, it restates events that we already saw in Terminators one through three, and the rest of it is restated in expository dialogue only minutes into the film. The text crawl of T4 assumes two things: 1.) We’re really dense, and utterly incapably of tracking basic plot points along with the film, and 2.) None of us has seen a Terminator film before. Evidently because an audience shelling out greenbacks to the fourth film in a franchise is rarely familiar with the movies that preceded it.

Although celebrities are clearly a better class of people, they are nevertheless still people, still subject to human frailties and medical conditions. In order to raise awareness and sales of their memoirs, some celebs have told the world of their troubles: Mary Tyler Moore chairs a diabetes charity, Magic Johnson has advocated for HIV awareness and safer sex, and members of the Brat Pack have never tried to hide their prefrontal lobotomies. But other celebs have hidden behind a wall of shame. Let us shatter the secrecy surrounding five …

Kambaakht Ishq
Kambaakht Ishq – the new romantic comedy from from Sabbir Khan and featuring the talents of Kareena Kapoor and Akshay Kumar – opens with the perfect scene to signal the direction in which it is heading. Hollywood stuntman Viraj (played by the popular Akshay Kumar) is seen gate crashing the wedding of his brother, proclaiming that he must not get married because women are worthless and only tie men down. The happy couple are stunned at this outburst and I also was struck by the vehemence of the scene. …

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a film that assumes its target audience actively desires to have no taste or aesthetic standard. It assumes that the viewer’s reservoir of self-awareness tops out at the recognition that all they want out of life is a big, stupid movie about stupid characters and big robots that beat the shit out of each other. It is a movie so big and so stupid and so damn long that it very nearly forgets about halfway through that it is a movie whose sole purpose for existence is to sell toys and entertain people with big, stupid robot battles and exquisitely rendered explosions. How do you forget something that elementary?

“I don’t know who you are.  I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career.  Skills that make me a nightmare for peope like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don’t… I will look for you. …

Attached to the beginning of Pixar’s latest film, Up, is a great short film. No, not Partly Cloudy (although that is diverting). The first ten to fifteen minutes of Up work on an entirely different level than the rest of the film. They encapsulate the life of a romance from its inception until the “death do us part,” in which an introverted balloon salesman named Carl sits alone after his wife’s wake. Their life was quotidian, poignant, and full of love. While the film ultimately celebrates the regular, down-to-earth adventure of a simple life, it’s the wildly implausible, imaginative feats of derring-do that can’t hold up to the cliched litany of everyday moments that comprise the film’s magisterial opening sequence.