Co-screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s baseball variation on The Social Network, Moneyball focuses on another outsider-rebel-wunderkind determined to upend traditional social and business paradigms through technological innovation via the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of Major League Baseball’s Oakland A’s franchise. Based on Michael Lewis’ book (and co-written by Steven Zaillian), and playing…

Rise of the Planet of the Apes takes the predictable franchise-rebooting route, delivering a modern-day origin story about the ascension to intelligence and power of the planet’s simians. That climb up the evolutionary ladder comes courtesy of Will (James Franco), a geneticist whose potential cure for Alzheimer’s makes ape Caesar – a test subject’s offspring…

‘80s nostalgia has evolved from cheeky fun to putrid cultural stain, and Take Me Home Tonight merely furthers that progression, trotting out shoulder pads, big hair, Michael Jackson dance moves and Appetite for Destruction album covers as dim-witted signs of tongue-in-cheek retro coolness. Along with these trappings – which also involve a soundtrack of the…

Brutal men in desperate situations are Nicolas Winding Refn’s (Bronson, the Pusher Trilogy, Valhalla Rising) stock and trade, a preoccupation that continues with Drive, the story of a nameless Hollywood stuntman and auto-mechanic (Ryan Gosling) who spends his evenings working as a wheelman for heists set up by boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston). Like many of…

Tom Tykwer dazzles the eye and dulls the mind with 3, the Run Lola Run director’s tedious promotion of a new identity-definition paradigm. In modern-day Berlin, long-time couple Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) are struggling with a loss of sexual excitement, a problem that leads first Hanna, and then Simon, into the inviting…

Everything goes viral in Contagion – most critically a rampant new disease that threatens to wipe the globe clean, but also fear, rumor, panic and information. Sharing with his Oscar-winning Traffic a multi-character, multi-focus structure, Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic thriller fixates on hands and mouths as they silently pass germs, and potential apocalypse, from public bus…

Paul Rudd is a divine moron who brings peace and harmony to his secretly miserable sisters in Our Idiot Brother, a pleasant-enough trifle that ensnares itself in the uneasy middle ground between indie drama and dumb-guy comedy. The titular doofus is Ned (Paul Rudd), a hippie who gets himself incarcerated for selling pot to a…

Hoodlums get to be heroes for a night in Attack the Block, an alien invasion saga that evokes far more childlike Spielbergian wonder than this summer’s similar Super 8, yet nonetheless somewhat stumbles in attempting to generate an unnerving sense of terror, raucous humor, or consistent empathy for its teenage protagonists. Writer/director Joe Cornish’s debut…

Errol Morris’ lightest, most amusing film since 1997’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, and yet nonetheless a companion piece to 2008’s Standard Operating Procedure in its investigation of media-filtered truth, Tabloid tells the truly outrageous tale of Joyce McKinney, a wannabe model and former Wyoming beauty queen who in 1977 became a UK gossip-rag…