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Review: 'Repo Men'
"Repo Men" makes sci-fi's strongest possible case for universal health care. In a world of the near future, where they still drive current cars, a giant corporation named the Union will provide you with a human heart, kidney, liver or other organ. Let's say a pancreas costs you, oh, say $312,000. No, it's not covered by insurance, but the sales guy says, "You owe it to yourself and your family." For a guy in need ...

	Review: 'The Bounty Hunter' I'm on the brink of declaring a new entry for Ebert's Little Movie Glossary: No comedy not titled "Caddyshack" has ever created a funny joke involving a golf cart. The only thing preventing me is that I can't remember if "Caddyshack" had golf cart jokes. In any event, if there is a golf cart, it will sooner or later drive into a water hazard. The funny angle here is that the filmmakers went to all that trouble because they trusted the audience to laugh.
	Review: 'The Runaways' "The Runaways," chronicling the rise and fall of Joan Jett's first band, easily could have degenerated into a movie-length music video, with Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning merely glam-rock poseurs.
	Review: 'Remember Me' "Remember Me" tells a sweet enough love story, and tries to invest it with profound meaning by linking it to a coincidence. It doesn't work that way. People meet, maybe they fall in love, maybe they don't, maybe they're happy, maybe they're sad. That's life. If a refrigerator falls out of a window and squishes one of them, that's life, too, but it's not a story many people want to see. We stand there looking ...
	Review: 'Our Family Wedding' One enters a movie like "Our Family Wedding" bracing for cheesiness. As a genre, wedding films are typically about as cloying as two-hours worth of kitten videos on YouTube. Add in the equally checkered history of stridently ethnic movies, and you might want to start asking moviegoers to remove their belts before entering the theater. But as Rick Famuyiwa's "Our Family Wedding" - which combines both elements - moves along, the fingers in front of ...
	Review: 'Green Zone' "Green Zone" looks at an American war in a way almost no Hollywood movie ever has: We're not the heroes, but the dupes. Its message is that Iraq's fabled "weapons of mass destruction" did not exist, and that neocons within the administration fabricated them, lied about them, and were ready to kill to cover up their deception.
	'Hurt Locker' best picture; Bullock, Bridges top actors; Bigelow director LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Iraq War drama "The Hurt Locker" won best picture and five other prizes Sunday at the Academy Awards, its haul including best director for Kathryn Bigelow. Bigelow is the first woman in the 82-year history of the Oscars to earn Hollywood's top prize for filmmakers.
	Review: 'Alice in Wonderland' As a young reader, I found "Alice in Wonderland" creepy and rather distasteful. Alice's adventures played like a series of encounters with characters whose purpose was to tease, puzzle and torment her. Few children would want to go to Wonderland, and none would want to stay.
	Review: 'Brooklyn's Finest' Three cops, three journeys to what we suspect will be doom. No good can come of the lives they lead. They aren't bad guys, precisely, but they occupy a world of such violence and cynicism that they're willing to do what it takes to survive. In the kind of coincidence provided only by fate or screenplays, each one will mean trouble for the other two.
	Review: 'Cop Out' Jimmy and Paul are cops hunkered down across the street from a stakeout when they see a mysterious figure run across rooftops and break into a house. Seconds later, he can clearly be seen in an upper window, sitting on a toilet and reading a magazine.
	Review: "The Crazies' "The Crazies" is a perfectly competent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its interest for me, the zombie film. It provides such a convenient storytelling device: Large numbers of mindless zombies lurch toward the camera and the hero, wreaking savage destruction, and can be quickly blown away, although not without risk and occasional loss of life. When sufficient zombies have been run through, it's time for a new dawn.
	Review: 'When in Rome' Of all the pretty faces and talented comedians to populate "When in Rome," the funniest co-star is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
	Review: 'Shutter Island' "Shutter Island" starts working on us with the first musical notes under the Paramount mountain, even before the film starts. They're ominous and doomy. So is the film. This is Martin Scorsese's evocation of the delicious shuddering fear we feel when horror movies are ABOUT something and don't release all the tension with action scenes.
	Review: 'Valentine's Day' I've heard of all-star casts, but "Valentine's Day" has a complete star cast. What did other movies do for talent when this one was filming? It has 21 actors who can be considered stars, and some are very big stars indeed. It's like the famous poster for "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," with a traffic jam of famous faces.
	Review: 'Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief' Every movie involving superheroes requires an origin story, and "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" has a doozy.
	Review: 'The Wolfman' Authors and filmmakers have come up with endless ways to inject fresh blood into the vampire, while the werewolf generally has been left out there alone on the moors, howling at the moon.
	Review: 'Crazy Heart' Some actors are blessed. Jeff Bridges is one of them. Ever since his first starring role in "The Last Picture Show" in 1971, he has, seemingly without effort, created a series of characters who we simply believe, even the alien "Starman." He doesn't do this with mannerisms but with their exclusion; his acting is as clear as running water. Look at him playing Bad Blake in "Crazy Heart." The notion of a broke-down, boozy country ...
	Review: 'Dear John' Lasse Hallstrom's "Dear John" tells the heartbreaking story of two lovely young people who fail to find happiness together because they're trapped in an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Their romance leads to bittersweet loss that's so softened by the sweet characters that it feels like triumph. If a Sparks story ended in happiness, the characters might be disappointed. They seem to have their noble, resigned dialogue already written. Hemingway wrote one line that ...
	Review: 'From Paris with Love' In the space of just a few weeks, we have movies starring Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson and John Travolta. It's like the early '90s all over again.
	Review: 'The Spy Next Door' Let's see. Jackie Chan is a spy working for China and the CIA, who falls in love with a widow with three kids. He retires to be with them, but his job follows him home. Mom goes to be with her sick dad. Evil Russians have a plot to control the world's oil supply, and this requires them to chase Jackie and the kids through shopping malls, large empty factories and so on. Jackie's character is named Bob Ho, which reminds me of someone.
	Review: 'Edge of Darkness' Can we think of Mel Gibson simply as an action hero? A star whose personal baggage doesn't upstage his performances? I find that I can. He has made deplorable statements in recent years, which may be attributed to a kind of fanatic lunacy that can perhaps be diagnosed as a disease. The fact remains that in "Edge of Darkness" he remains a likable man with a natural screen presence.
	Review: 'Tooth Fairy' In the pantheon of such legends as Santa Claus and the Bogeyman, the Tooth Fairy ranks down in the minor leagues, I'd say, with Jack Frost and the Easter Bunny. There is a scene in "Tooth Fairy" when the hero is screamed at by his girlfriend for even BEGINNING to suggest to her 6-year-old that there isn't a Tooth Fairy, but surely this is a trauma a child can survive. Don't kids simply humor their parents to get the dollar?
	Review: 'Extraordinary Measures' "Extraordinary Measures" is an ordinary film with ordinary characters in a story too big for it. Life has been reduced to a Lifetime movie. The story, based on fact, is compelling: Two sick children have no more than a year to live when their father determines to seek out a maverick scientist who may have a cure. This is "Lorenzo's Oil" with a different disease, Pompe disease, although it fudges the facts to create a ...

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