Remove Isla Fisher’s kooky charm, and there isn’t much to the frilly pink romantic comedy Confessions Of A Shopaholic (Touchstone). Even with Fisher around, it’s little more than a featherweight trifle, but her adorability and a supporting cast stocked with ringers (John Goodman, Joan Cusack, John Lithgow, Kristin Scott Thomas, Fred Armisen, Lynn Redgrave) make this an agreeable enough time-waster…
Maybe the worst thing about The Pink Panther 2 (MGM), a lazy sequel to a lazy remake, is that Steve Martin honestly seems to be trying to be funny, giving his all to the required pratfalls and funny talk. It’s sadly all for naught, however. A cast with international appeal—Jean Reno and Aishwarya Rai in one place—gets put through its paces, but nothing really connects…
The effects-driven fantasy-novel adaptation Inkheart (New Line) flopped hard at the box office, which is a bit of a shame; it’s no instant classic, but it’s a perfectly serviceable kids’ movie in the mode of Bridge To Terabithia, City Of Ember, and so forth. Brendan Fraser leads the cast as a man whose voice brings books to life, which introduces Andy Serkis and other bad guys into the real world, endangering Fraser’s family in big, bold, generally entertaining strokes…
The concept of an animated documentary—much less one as serious as an inquiry into mass murder in the 1982 Lebanon War—was enough to win Ari Folman’s overrated Waltz With Bashir (Sony) a competition slot at Cannes and plenty of raves for its audacity and originality. The succession of interviews that comprise the film call to mind the musings of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, but without the flights of whimsy, philosophy, and academic wit….
The indie drama Phoebe In Wonderland (Image) confronts the complications of progressive child-rearing head-on in its first hour, presenting a problem that looks unsolvable. Then it scrambles to reassure everyone that good hearts and good intentions can make everything okay. Yet for all its cop-outs, Phoebe still beats out the “how to be a better person” hoo-hah of so many middlebrow dramas, if only because the problems it depicts are real, not overcooked reactions to trumped-up traumas.