Gerard Butler hits rock bottom – even after the execrable The Ugly Truth – as a Scottish former footballer who is divorced from his soppy wife (Jessica Biel) and longs to connect with his son. So he agrees to coach his child’s soccer (it’s set in small-town USA) team, whereupon a legion of mothers (Uma Thurman, Catherine Zeta-Jones) hit on the smirking lunk
Tom Hooper’s quasi-operatic mega-musical is loaded with major historical events, weighty themes, tragic deaths and symbolic rebirths, so it’s no wonder that the film version of Les Mis gets so exhausting, especially in the static, unspectacular second half. Â Â Â Â
One of the year’s most talked about films is already hitting Blu-ray, but that’s partly because of the way it was made. Upstream Color and Jack Reacher are the highlights of the week, with a ton of new catalog titles hitting as well.
“I’m not OK, they want to kill me,†pleads Stephen Moyer to his best pal, Michael (Jack Davenport). Who are “they� Vampires, of course.
Debutant Suraj Sharma equips himself well as earnest teenager Pi in Ang Lee’s sensational-looking adaptation of Yann Martel’s spiritual heartbreaker.    Â
From planetary, super-size hurricanes and next-generation space flight to bathing with Google Glass and the world’s smallest movie, here are the best tech pictures of the week.
The creator of The Sopranos talks to NPR’s Steve Inskeep about movies he loves — a Kubrick classic, a Vittorio De Sica masterpiece, and a Laurel and Hardy frolic that inspired an obscure shout-out involving Uncle Junior.
The Coen brothers’ first masterpiece, their neo-noir 1983 debut (above), relies on its lead characters explaining diddly-squat to each other.
Films from the 1930s, as well as the ’70s and ’80s, are now on DVD for the first time.
Tom Cruise may seem like a curious choice to play the 6ft 5in hero of Lee Child’s vigilante novels, but, casting aside, Jack Reacher is a satisfyingly meaty whodunnit which has more in common with the private-eye thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s than it does with Mission: Impossible . Â Â Â Â