David Ayer, the writer of "Training Day," directs "Street Kings," starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker and Hugh Laurie opens in wide release. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times writes, "It’s easy to laugh at “Street Kings” for its bigger than big emotions, its preposterously kinky narrative turns and overwrought jawing and yowling, but there’s no doubt that it also keeps you watching, really watching, all the way to the end." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly notes, "Every so often, Keanu Reeves' robo-voiced blankness serves him well, but when he has to play a pulpy, tormented demon-saint, scraping up insults and spitting them out like bullets, he's like the host of an infomercial doing an impersonation of a badass."
Dennis Quaid attempts to rebound from the miserable "Vantage Point" with the intellectual comedy "Smart People" also starring Ellen Page, Thomas Hayden Church and Sarah Jessica Parker. Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal raves, "With a title like "Smart People," a movie should be, at a minimum, reasonably bright. This one is unreasonably bright; it passes the IQ test with flying colors. And intelligence plus genuine wit aren't its only distinctions (as if they were in such plentiful supply these days that we could dismiss them). The people in question -- primarily Dennis Quaid's college professor, Lawrence; his precocious daughter, Vanessa, played by Ellen Page; and Sarah Jessica Parker's Janet, an emergency-room doctor who once had a crush on Lawrence when she took his Victorian literature class -- are also wounded, angry, yearning for love, emotionally stupid and wonderfully affecting."
Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" won the 60th Anniversary Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. It opens at Matt Smith's delightful Market Street Cinema. J. Hoberman of Village Voice opines, "The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor."
I can't get excited about "Prom Night." No one seems have been able to see it prior to release which always means it sucks. That doesn't mean, however, that it won't draw crowds.
