items tagged with William Hurt

ROBIN HOOD

With director Ridley Scott's heavy-spirited adventure Robin Hood, the audience waits nearly an hour for its first reprieve from the grimness and grime, and when it finally arrives, the moment consists of Max von Sydow's blind land baron getting a whiff of Russell Crowe's gamy Robin and growling, "You stink." As mood lighteners go, so does that gag. And so, for the most part, does the movie.
Read More About Not-So-Merry Men: “Robin Hood” And “Letters To Juliet”...

THE INCREDIBLE HULK

Up until its final reel, when the movie lapses into a tiresome big-screen adaptation of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, The Incredible Hulk is a pretty entertaining superhero blockbuster, in large part because it doesn't much feel like a typical superhero blockbuster.

BE KIND REWIND

It's easy to enjoy writer/director Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, but it's not the sort of enjoyment that lasts longer than your drive home from the cineplex, and the disappointment of the movie is that you really want it to be.

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN

Memories of the meandering, tiresome, and ceaselessly smug Ocean's Twelve - Steven Soderbergh's first sequel to his 2001 heist flick Ocean's Eleven - were enough to make me leery about Ocean's Thirteen, and during the film's first reel, that feeling rarely subsided; it, too, seemed both simplistic and maddeningly convoluted, and inordinately pleased with itself from the get-go.

DREAMGIRLS

You may have heard that, in the middle of Bill Condon's Dreamgirls, former American Idol belter Jennifer Hudson lets loose with a power ballad that has the audience cheering and applauding at its finish. If the screening I attended is any indication, this rumor is untrue. The audience cheers and applauds the number way before Hudson's finale. And no one in their right mind could blame them.