Give the advertising campaign credit: “Who is Salt?” isn’t just a marketing tagline, but the question you’ll find yourself asking over and over as Salt unreels before you. At first Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) appears to be a CIA agent with a loving husband and a normal life, but it isn’t long before she’s crossing and double-crossing people without explaining to anyone, least of all the audience, why she’s doing what she’s doing.
And on paper, that’s kind of a nifty idea. Salt is undeniably the protagonist of the movie; we …

Christopher Nolan’s characters live in a world of ideas. They’re trapped by them, enslaved by them, dominated by them and ruled by them. They are fallible people who externalize every lash on their souls; their gestures change the world and they know it, but they know also that they will never live up to the abstract ideals they forever chase or evade. They are haunted by dreams dashed, lost, or inadequately conceived.
Therefore it seems predestined that Nolan would eventually tap Leonardo DiCaprio to play one of his leads. DiCaprio has …

John’s got a problem: ever since his wife left him seven years ago, his life has been one long, slow spiral into the gutter. He’s functional and continues to work, but that’s about all that can be said for him. So when his ex (Catherine Keener, whose presence always improves a movie’s charisma) invites him to her engagement party with the stated purpose of meeting women, he accepts. Grudgingly. His pick-up technique involves long, intense spiels about the hopelessness of his life and how finding someone to connect with may …

Of all the supernatural powers and companions Jonah Hex possesses, his horse may be the most impressive. Consider that in the first scene, Hex’s horse is forced to carry or drag three dead bodies, two mounted Gatling guns, and Jonah himself, which probably totals up to over a thousand pounds of steel and dead weight. Now consider that this same horse can handle both the whiplash and noise generated by having those two Gatling guns firing from either side of its neck and I think you’ll agree: That’s some horse.
You’ll …

When I think of latter-day Liam Neeson movies, I think of a line Steve Martin used in Bowfinger to justify filming a guerilla movie around an unwitting and paranoid action star (played by Eddie Murphy): “Tom Cruise didn’t know he was in that vampire movie for two years!” Just so with Neeson. I do not believe Taken or The A-Team are movies, exactly; I think a crew just followed Neeson around and recorded his day-to-day activities.
Or maybe that’s just his value to movies like this one. Something about Neeson’s presence—the …

Let’s get this sorted: Russell Brand is reprising the role of Aldous Snow from the charming if overlong Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In that movie he played the new beaux for the titular Sarah, and generally carried on like the pompous but affable rock star he was. Jonah Hill, who played Matthew the creepy waiter and aspiring musician in Marshall, is playing a new character named Aaron Green. Kristen Bell makes a cameo as Sarah Marshall. Nicholas Stoller, the director of Marshall, apparently saw something in the one brief but divine …

Years back I went to the museum with my brother and mother. In one of the larger rooms—high vaulted ceiling, crisp white walls, echo chamber acoustics—we came across a forklift sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by some rubble and, to keep away curious hands, velvet ropes. The joke came naturally: Put a plaque next to this thing and too many people would take it for a sarcastically avant-garde piece of art. We laughed and moved on, because no one could be that dim, right?
Right?
Exit Through the Gift …

I’ll be plain: movies like this one bother me because they’re rigged games. I know, of course, that all movies (and all other kinds of art) are rigged games, if only because they’re created by someone to express a point of view. Nonetheless, the word “rigged” bubbled up in my mind time and time again as I watched Harry Brown unfold. There may be a more graceful way to tell a story like this; I’m skeptical, but I suppose it’s possible. But this is an ungainly enterprise, and quite possibly …

Full disclosure: I’m a fan of the comic book The Losers is based on. And when I say “a fan,” I do not mean “I read the comics and enjoyed them.” I mean “I own a page of original art, which I had framed.” I mean “I hosted a contest on my blog to put the comic in peoples’ hands.” I mean I will at least glance at anything writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock do from here on out. I am a fan of The Losers.
But I’m also a …

I don’t know why, but there seem to be a lot of these kinds of movies lately. This summer we have Killers and Knight and Day, and earlier this spring we had The Bounty Hunter. Five years ago Mr. and Mrs. Smith gave us sexy action heroes bogged down in humdrum relationship doldrums; now we have a small fleet of movies launching everyday folk into the world of the sexy action hero. As escapist entertainment goes, this is a pretty pure hit.