No Glory, Plenty of Cliches

Spy film gets wide, warm reception

(NEWSER) - Critics aren’t hiding their love for the twists and turns of Duplicity, a combination “caper movie,” “love story,” and “extra-dry corporate satire,” AO Scott notes in the New York Times. The buzz on the Julia Roberts-Clive Owen flick:

• "Attempts—and to a surprising degree, succeeds—to pour a classic vintage into a 21st century bottle," writes Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune.

Top-notch performances make prize-winning play work as a movie

(NEWSER) - Doubt erases any qualms over whether the claustrophobic, Pulitzer Prize-winning play would work on the big screen, say critics. A "frighteningly good" Meryl Streep stars as the hardline principal of a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, Lou Lumenick writes in the New York Post. A game of cat-and-mouse begins when Streep's nun suspects a priest, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, of molesting the school's first African-American student. More»

Holiday comedy saps critics of their Christmas cheer

(NEWSER) - Holiday comedy Four Christmases had some critics chuckling but left most moaning ho-ho-no. Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon star as a couple forced by circumstance to visit the dysfunctional families of their divorced parents, but the "predictable and dyspeptic story" lacks the bite of misanthropic holiday classics like Bad Santa, Claudia Puig writes in USA Today. More»

France delivers excellent old-style Hollywood thriller

(NEWSER) - French thriller Tell No One has the critics rushing to tell the world how much they liked it. The fast-paced and thickly plotted adaptation of a novel by American writer Harlan Coben is "hot-blooded, haunting and packed with the pleasures of the unexpected," writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. More»

Sex thriller a 'slow case of déjà vu'

(NEWSER) - Deception is a twist-filled thriller, but critics say the cloak of deceit will be paper-thin to anybody familiar with the genre. Ewan McGregor stars as a dull accountant whose life gets spicier after an attorney, played by Hugh Jackman, introduces him to a secret sex club. Soon after, the thriller cliches roll out, and "it's genre time," writes Desson Thompson in the Washington Post. More»