Rather than draw out their goodbyes in a single sitting, as Peter Jackson’s Hobbits did in his too-long “Lord of the Rings” finale, Team Harry’s swan song will unfold in two parts, a decision dismissed in some quarters as purely a marketing strategy.
Yet at 2½ hours, the first installment of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — J.K. Rowling’s conclusion to the saga of an orphaned wizard destined to battle a Hitler-like menace — emerges as the most faithful adaptation in the series.
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His downfall plays like a Greek tragedy, a flawed hero laid low by hubris. It has inspired “Saturday Night Live” skits, the 18th-season finale of “Law & Order” and the hit CBS drama “The Good Wife.” Now the story of the former New York governor brought down by his ties to a high-priced prostitution ring is revisited in Alex Gibney’s “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.”
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The much-anticipated documentary "Waiting for 'Superman,' " which opens in Washington-area theaters Friday, highlights the District's poorly performing public schools and its reformist Chancellor Michelle Rhee while making an urgent case for improving the nation's failing education system.
"Waiting for 'Superman' " shadows five urban students, including Southeast D.C.'s Anthony Black, seeking to escape into charter schools through a lottery system.
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Lindsay Lohan is finally getting her life back on track — and could her romance with Samantha Ronson be back on track too? A new report claims that now that the starlet has cleaned up her act via jail time and rehab, her former lover is ready to give her another chance.
“Lindsay and Sam started speaking as soon as Lindsay got out of rehab. They text constantly,” a pal of the “Machete” star told Life&Style magazine. “It turned into something more, and they’ve secretly hooked up.”
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Conceived 32 years ago as producer Roger Corman’s tongue-in-cheek spin on the “Jaws” formula, “Piranha” returns with a new 3-D gimmick courtesy of director Alexandre Aja, who resurrected Wes Craven’s original “The Hills Have Eyes” with passably nasty results.
The movie requires little explanation.
It’s spring break under siege, as busty coeds lose their tops and then their limbs in graphic enough detail that “Piranha,” deemed too raunchy for Comic-Con, earns its R rating the old-fashioned way.
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Todd Solondz makes harsh, bleak, fearlessly cynical, perversely funny and not entirely unaffecting comedies that depict horrible things people do to each other and the askew ways in which casualties and perpetrators alike continue to tick (and sometimes call it quits) post-infliction.
“Life During Wartime,” his latest release, continues that track. While weaker than “Happiness,” to which it is a semi-sequel, the movie affirms Solondz’s status as a sentimentalist’s nightmare and a solid, distinctive talent.
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It took him the better part of a decade, but producer Dean Zanuck — whose charming new drama, “Get Low,” opens Friday — finally got his men.
After working with original screenwriter Chris Provenzano (“Mad Men”) for three years and eventually recruiting first-time feature director Aaron Schneider to the project, Zanuck, 37, reached out to Oscar-winner Robert Duvall, his first choice to play ornery hermit Felix Bush. Then, he pressed his luck.
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The Irish urban ripple “Kisses” follows two preteens as they run away from horrid home conditions and spend an exhilarating few hours in Christmastime Dublin, experiencing worldly phenomena such as gummy candy and Bob Dylan impersonators, along with transcendent moments of friendship and trust.
This is a wisp of a movie — 75 minutes, punctuated by a few quirky encounters and a couple of chases that Hollywood’s speedometer would hardly register.
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What a disheartening spectacle we have in “Dinner for Schmucks,” the latest comedy to squander Steve Carell’s impeccable timing and his gift for frantic, Clouseau-like cluelessness.
For better and more often worse, we see in Barry, his latest on-screen buffoon, a character reminiscent of Michael Scott, the deluded middle manager he plays on “The Office.”
Hopelessly oblivious in every aspect of his modest existence, Barry is a tragic figure, partly because of the pain behind his manic grin, and partly because he’s so easy to despise.
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A pretty girl, a prettier guy, and a ghostly little brother form a triangle involving a choice of either romantic love in the present or supernatural connection with the past for the troubled protagonist in “Charlie St. Cloud.”
Grief gets the schmaltz treatment in this contrived drama, and the result is greeting-card cinema strictly for teens and the cosmetically minded.
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