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Give this much to Oliver Stone: His movies are never boring.
 
And, somewhere within the overstuffed blend of agitprop and melodrama that is “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” there lies a lean cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked capitalism – as if the reality of the actual Wall Street weren’t example enough.
 
But Stone is never content to just make one movie; he always makes several, then squeezes them all together into one engorged package, chockablock with…

George Clooney returns, setting aside the warm and witty persona that his fans love, and giving them instead one of his darkest and most unsympathetic characters: an ice-cold professional killer marooned in loneliness and fear. The director is Anton Corbijn – the former photographer who made his brilliant feature debut with Control, a biopic of Joy Division’s frontman, Ian Curtis – working from a screenplay by Rowan Joffe. It is adapted from the 1991 novel A Very Private Gentleman by…

When I heard about The Switch, a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston as a Manhattan singleton who decides to get pregnant on her own, I confess that I had no desire to see it. I’d already been through Jennifer Lopez in The Back-Up Plan, and frankly, one screwball sperm-donor chick flick per year seemed more than enough. But The Switch is a pleasant surprise. It’s a by-the-numbers movie, but the dots that get connected feel new. Aniston, playing a forward-thinking…

In the gadget-fond super-villain ’toon Despicable Me, he plays a meanie so mean that he’ll fashion balloon animals to console distraught children, only to pop them with a pin and walk off with maniacal satisfaction. What Carell brings to this cruel mastermind, actually the hero, is a mad Russian accent, lugubrious timing, and a general air of knowing exactly what he’s doing — one not wholly shared by the movie around him.
The picture is a first venture into 3D…

Early reports about Knight And Day, a film that’s been in development hell for ages, suggested another flop after Lions for Lambs and Valkyrie. Cruise’s enduring success — and the intensity with which he has clung to it — has always been the most fascinating thing about him: what’s left when the halo slips?
Knight and Day, directed by James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) from a script by Patrick O’Neill, goes out of its way to avoid…

Frantic. If there’s one word that defines Get Him To The Greek — its goals, characteristics, limitations — frantic is it. It’s a film that’s impatient to vault its lead star Russell Brand to the big time, to winch him from the petty, spiteful world of Daily Mail vendettas to the lustrous freedoms of Hollywood stardom. It’s a road movie that’s boosted, artificially stimulated even, by many scenes designed to make you feel you’re at a party gorging on the…

Carrie has finally snagged Big, but misses the excitement of evenings out on the town. Charlotte’s worried that husband Harry is smitten with the new and very bra-less nanny. Samantha’s overdoing pills and ointments to stave off the menopause. Miranda’s packed in her job because she can’t hear her own voice at work.
In short, they’re all getting older, and developing a new set of neuroses to cultivate between their continued shopping frenzies.
“Neuroses” is a heavy way of putting…

The Monkees were cobbled together in the Sixties as America’s answer to the Beatles and plonked in a zany television sitcom; yet the songs – perky, infectious, intricately-crafted – were actually quite good. As cartoon characters, the Archies were even less “real”, but Sugar, Sugar, their worldwide hit of 1969, is two minutes and 48 seconds of pure pop.
A few years later came a confection rather less wholesome but just as mouth-watering – the Runaways. The first all-girl rock-and-roll…

The not-so-scary villain in “Shrek Forever After,” the fourth and supposed final installment of the “Shrek” franchise, is a sleazy mortgage lender for a bank that’s too big to fail. Well, not exactly.

He is actually Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn), the Brothers Grimm trickster, with spiky red hair and larcenous eyes rolled up to the sky, his thin lips twisted into a malevolent smirk. As the volatile king of the land of Far Far Away in an alternate universe, he dons…

In Killers, Spencer (Ashton Kutcher) is a gorgeous spy with a perfect body who hangs out with hot models and drives fancy cars when he’s not killing bad guys (shirtless!) but longs to give it all up because the bad guys aren’t always bad and suburbia and normalcy is starting to sound awfully good. Just as he’s coming to this conclusion, he meets Jen (Katherine Heigl), an awkward, neurotic, freshly dumped woman who’s on vacation in Nice with her parents;…