Catherine Keener Page 3

Leave it to a comedian to make one of the scariest movies in recent memory. Jordan Peele moves into writing and directing with this offbeat comedy, a fresh and fiendishly smart story with engaging characters and provocative themes. It's a combination of a knowing issue-based drama, lively romantic comedy and unhinged horror that hits all of its targets with precision. And it keeps us gleefully entertained with its escalating terror.

The story centres on Chris (Sicario's Daniel Kaluuya), whose girlfriend Rose (Girls' Allison Williams) invites him home for a weekend to meet her parents Missy and Dean (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford). Rose assures Chris that they're so liberal that they won't mind at all that he's black. But things don't feel quite right from the start. For one thing, there are two creepy servants (Betty Gabriel and Marcus Henderson) who seem to be lurking everywhere. And Rose's brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) revels in stirring up problems. As things get increasingly freaky, Chris calls his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), an airport security officer back in New York, for advice. Then things take an even more bizarre turn when Missy and Dean's friends arrive for an annual party.

Peele begins to play with the audience right from the start, using Michael Abels' disorienting music and Toby Oliver's quirky camerawork to maximum effect. Often this involves pushing us far too close to a character whose behaviour is just a bit off. Every moment is undercut with humour, including awkward moments and snappy gags that serve as a relief valve even as they set us up for something scary. It's such clever filmmaking that we have little choice but to sit back and enjoy the ride. And woven through all of this is an inventive and lacerating exploration of attitudes toward race in American society.

Continue reading: Get Out Review

Tom DiCillo wrote and directed this new low-budget story of making a film-within-a-film, and it comes off superbly better than most of its predecessor "movies about movies." DiCillo has assembled the most perfectly matched cast I've come across in ages, featuring Steve Buscemi as Nick, a film director for whom nothing will work out, Catherine Keener as a much too sensitive leading lady, Dermot Mulroney as a leather-clad cinematographer, and James LeGros as an unbelievably shallow leading man--possibly his best role ever.

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After the obnoxious but popular host Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams) is caught taking bribes from parents who want their kids on television, network head Frank Stokes (Jon Stewart) pulls the plug on his show. An exhaustive search through the downtrodden Barney wannabes to replace Randolph yields a pink, squeaky-clean rhino named Smoochy (Edward Norton), who becomes an overnight success with the kids despite his preachings of bland politically correct messages to children. Despite Smoochy's best wishes, his boss Nora (Catherine Keener) wants to cash in on the show's newfound success by selling Smoochy-sponsored cereals, cola, and string cheese. Randolph, on the other hand, is hell-bent on making life miserable for the rhino, and Smoochy's crooked agent (Danny DeVito) is busy making backdoor deals trying to sell Smoochy out to the mob.

Continue reading: Death To Smoochy Review

Like King of the Hill and the groundbreaking videotape, some of this work is genius.

Continue reading: Full Frontal Review

In a welcome change from puerile and stinking-rotten Rob Schneider and David Spade movies, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is a ribald comedy that is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, despite being custom-built around a scene-stealing second-banana who really belongs in small roles.

Deadpan "Daily Show" correspondent Steve Carell, who briefly but memorably upstaged Will Ferrell in "Anchorman" and Jim Carrey in "Bruce Almighty," stars as Andy Stitzer, a king-dork electronics store clerk rapidly approaching middle age and so bereft of social skills that he's never managed to get much past first base with a woman. When his co-workers realize this, watching him fumble to fit in while swapping sex stories during an after-hours poker game, they make it their mission to get the poor guy laid.

Co-written by Carell and director Judd Aptow (creator of TV's "Undeclared" and "Freaks and Geeks"), the plot is perfectly pitched to its star's talent for playing hapless, hopeless twits. Put Carell in a polo shirt, a pair of khakis and a K-Mart windbreaker, and he can garner hardy chuckles with little more than a perplexed stare from his deep-set buggy eyes. He dives headlong into this character, earning cheek-hurting laughs with painfully awkward moments (his pals convince him to get his chest waxed) and giving Andy such an authentic geekdom (his apartment is lined with collectable toys in their original packaging) that the movie's plot hardly feels like a gimmick at all.

Continue reading: The 40-Year-Old Virgin Review

The circumstances of her accidental eavesdropping are alittle suspect as well -- she just happened to be in a sound booth lateat night, where a microphone inexplicably left on just happened to pickup a conspiratorial conversation in a regional dialect she and only a handfulof others speak outside of the fictional African country of her birth.

Couple this with a covered-up past of rebel activity aimedat the dictator she claims will be targeted during an controversial upcomingaddress on the floor of the U.N., and it's no surprise that the SecretService agent assigned to investigate (Sean Penn) finds her revelationto be dubious at best.

Although the milieu is unusual, "The Interpreter"is largely a variation on a standard Hollywood template about a broodingcop assigned to protect a pretty witness. With a less talented cast anda less interesting director than Sydney Pollack ("Havana," "TheFirm"), it could have easily been dumbed down into an action moviecocktail with a romantic chaser.

Continue reading: The Interpreter Review

Beneath the uncanny, inevitable and seemingly shrewd facade of the movie-biz farce "Simone" -- about a computer-generated actress taking Hollywood by storm because nobody knows she's not real -- lies a plot cobbled together from largely flat and uncreative moments.

The brainchild of inventive and otherworldly writer-director Andrew Niccol ("Gattaca," "The Truman Show" screenplay), who plucked the picture's concept out of the film industry's paranoid collective subconscious, "Simone" stars Al Pacino as Viktor Taransky, a washed-up and somewhat neurotic director whose last chance at making a big studio film has just walked off the set along with his petulant leading lady (Winona Ryder in a cameo).

But just as he envisions his career going off a cliff, a dying wacko computer genius and Taransky fan (Elias Koteas) brings the director a computer hard drive containing the culmination of his life's work: a program that creates a near-perfect, completely malleable, realistic simulation of beautiful girl. Called Simone (a contraction of Simulation One), in the confines of a computer she can walk, talk, flirt and cry with a single keystroke. She has a database of famous actresses' best performances to draw from for mannerisms and moods. She's utterly at Taransky's control and, of course, her fabricated "performances" can be digitally inserted into any scene of his movie, any way he chooses.

Continue reading: S1m0ne Review

Adapted from Sam Shepard's play about betrayal, blackmail, and a horse racing scam that haunts its conspirators for 20 years, "Simpatico" gets by for a while on a cast full of tense, brutal, benumbed performances.

Nick Nolte stars as Vinnie, a haunted, hard-drinking and fraudulent private eye who has lived a near-destitute existence in Los Angeles for two decades on hush money extorted from a former friend named Carter (Jeff Bridges), his partner in a pony-fixing during their younger days.

As the film opens, Vinnie sets in motion a chain of events designed to see him trade places with Carter, now a rich Kentucky breeder. He plans not only on usurping the wealth his ex-buddy has amassed since their friendship disintegrated, but also on recapturing the cold heart of Rosie (Sharon Stone), the girl that came between them.

Continue reading: Simpatico Review