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At the Movies With Peter Travers

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At The Movies With Peter Travers: Fall Movie Preview

September 10, 2009 9:27 AM

With absolute garbage spilling into theaters this weekend — if you were expecting actual reviews for Sorority Row and Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself we apologize — Peter Travers uses this week's At the Movies to get you revved up for autumn with his Fall Movie Preview, spotlighting all the Oscar-bound films and the Scum Bucket-worthy debacles heading to a multiplex near you this season. The biggest directors and actors are all making a play for awards season gold or Christmas dollars, so let Travers help navigate you between the must-see films and the don't-see flops.

Check out all of Peter Travers' fall movie picks.

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At the Movies With Peter Travers: Best and Worst of Summer '09

September 3, 2009 5:19 PM

Labor Day marks the official end of Summer Blockbuster Season, and '09's wasn't a nightmare: this summer was the most profitable in Hollywood history, and critically speaking, the least offensive in recent history. In fact, four of the Top Five highest-grossing films were actually really good! In a special edition of At the Movies With Peter Travers, Rolling Stone's film critic hands out his awards for the summer's best, while banishing the summer's worst to the Scum Bucket.

You'll have to watch Travers' video to find out who earns which honor, but loyal viewers will find some honorees are more obvious than others (cough, Christoph Waltz, cough). The winner of the summer's Best Movie and Best Director might take you by surprise, however, as it sadly flew under the radar in a summer filled with teen wizards, Austrian fashion reporters, hangovers in Vegas, reboots and giant shape-shifting robots that made really annoying noises.

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At The Movies With Peter Travers: "Taking Woodstock" and "World's Greatest Dad"

August 27, 2009 6:12 PM

This weekend At the Movies, Rolling Stone's film critic Peter Travers celebrates the 40th anniversary of a certain legendary music festival by tripping back to 1969 with Taking Woodstock. The film has all the ingredients needed for a great film: an Oscar-winning director in Ang Lee, top-notch actors like Emile Hirsch and Liev Schreiber and a world-famous, generation-spanning event at its epicenter. Unfortunately, the film never actually makes it to Woodstock, opting to tell the story of how the festival made its way to Yasgur's Farm in upstate New York instead the story of the fest itself.

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At The Movies With Peter Travers: "Inglourious Basterds," "My One And Only" and "Post Grad"

August 20, 2009 5:59 PM

For those who love the cinema, this weekend presents possibly the most anticipated film of 2009: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, or as Peter Travers calls it, QT's How I Won the War. A revenge film with dozens of subplots, the plot boils down to this: Brad Pitt stars as Lt. Aldo Raine, a backwoods hick from Tennessee that demands that each of his Jewish-American soldiers give him 100 Nazi scalps while under serving under "Aldo the Apache." It's all revisionist history, from a fiery film premiere that brings the upper crust of the Nazi regime—including Adolf Hitler—to the recruitment of a British film critic/soldier named Archie Hicox, sensationally played by actor Michael Fassbiner. This is Tarantino's vision of World War II, and it's a breath of fresh air.

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At The Movies With Peter Travers: "District 9" and "The Time Traveler's Wife"

August 13, 2009 5:21 PM

Peter Travers has had a bad week. Not only did he pay his own hard-earned money to see the deplorable G.I. Joe last week, millions around the world also spent a fraction of their paychecks seeing G.I. Joe, thereby ensuring that Travers will eventually have to stomach watching G.I. Joe 2.

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, since there's a new film in theaters this weekend that rewards us all for enduring the Transformers 2s of the Hollywood world, and this new film is called District 9. Produced by Lord of the Rings' Peter Jackson and written and directed by South African first-timer Neill Blomkamp, the pair only needed $30 million to make the must-see sci-fi film of the summer. And yes, that includes Star Trek.

Read Peter Travers' full review of District 9.

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At the Movies With Peter Travers: "G.I. Joe"

August 7, 2009 4:34 PM

This morning, while most of you were still sleeping, Peter Travers did something very adventurous for this week's At The Movies: He went to his local movie theater, plunked down $10 and change and went to see a matinee screening of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra because Paramount Pictures wouldn't let film critics get a sneak peek. After 120 action-packed minutes, Travers emerged from with some good news: G.I. Joe is not worse than the decade's most abominable film, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. However, that doesn't mean by any stretch that G.I. Joe is a good film, it's "big, loud and galactically stupid," according to Travers. It's just better than Transformers 2, but still worse than everything else in theaters now.

Read Travers' review of G.I. Joe here.

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At the Movies With Peter Travers: "Funny People" and "The Cove"

July 30, 2009 4:02 PM

After a weak week of new movies, At the Movies with Peter Travers is just giddy about Judd Apatow's third film Funny People, starring Adam Sandler (Apatow's former roommate when the pair were struggling stand-ups),Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann and the rest of the Apatow Universe of actors. Apatow continues his penchant for blending comedy with emotion that he established with The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, telling the story of a successful comedic actor who looks to change his life after a health scare.

(Freaks, Geeks and Paul Rudd: The Stars in Judd Apatow’s Universe.)

Sandler's George Simmons—who, like Sandler, stars in some terrible comedies—recruits Rogen to write jokes for him and ultimately forms a bond with his funny apprentice, all while trying to win back the girl who got away (played by Mann, Apatow's real wife.) Jason Schwartzmann, Eric Bana and even Eminem (in a cameo) also appear in the so-called "cancer comedy." Travers says Sandler delivers his best performance yet, which is quite a feat when you factor in the underrated Punch-Drunk Love. Apatow, meanwhile, stills shows "a maturity that still allows for dick jokes," Travers adds, and thankfully the dick jokes are great.

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At The Movies With Peter Travers: "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" and "(500) Days of Summer"

July 16, 2009 9:09 PM

Magic wand in hand, Peter Travers takes on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in this week's At the Movies. Rolling Stone's movie critic is a fan of the sixth film in the Potter series, which again stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. But it's the bad wizards that have captivated Travers: the wondrously sneering Alan Rickman as Snape, whose role is increasing in importance; and Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy, the bully with a crisis of conscience. The film is shot spectacularly, and Travers is hopeful that Potter may knock Transformers 2 out of Number One at the box office and become the summer's most successful movie.

(Click here to watch Tom Felton on the latest episode of "Off the Cuff with Peter Travers")

Also out this weekend (and worth a trip to the theater) is (500) Days of Summer, a romantic film that really works. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a greeting card writer who falls in love with his boss' assistant, Zooey Deschanel, and their break-up is traced over a period of time that comes in spurts — each scene is a random day.

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At The Movies With Peter Travers: "Bruno," Plus "I Love You, Beth Cooper"

July 9, 2009 5:40 PM

Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen is back to wreak havoc in America this weekend as Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers is At the Movies with Brüno. This time around, Cohen stars as a gay Austrian fashionista looking to find fame in the United States. By now, you've seen the commercials, and we don't want to ruin any of the gags, so we'll keep the plot summary at a minimum. "This guy to me is doing the type of comedy that this country needs more than ever," Travers says of the must-see film. "This is shocking, but shocking in a good way."

(Read Peter Travers' full Brüno review here.)

Like Borat, Brüno confronts many of America's most controversial subjects, except this time in addition to attacking the bigots and racists, Cohen is taking potshots at the entire culture of celebrity worship. An unsuspecting Paula Abdul is just one of the unsuspecting pawns in Cohen's comedy. While some will say Cohen is just copycatting the Borat formula, Travers compares Cohen's work to that of the great satirist Jonathan Swift. Cohen is "holding up a mirror to us," Travers says, imploring everyone who might be reading this to go and see Brüno immediately.

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At The Movies With Peter Travers: "Public Enemies" and "My Sister's Keeper"

July 1, 2009 4:18 PM

It's Fourth of July weekend, and At The Movies with Peter Travers brings the fireworks with a fantastic new release: Public Enemies, in which Rolling Stone favorite Johnny Depp plays the great 1930s criminal John Dillinger. One might argue that the elongated weekend will give moviegoers a chance to see the utter crap that is Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen a second time, but then they'd be missing Public Enemies, a film Travers says is "made by a real filmmaker — Michael Bay, Michael Mann, you don't confuse the two."

Depp gives a electric, layered performance as Dillinger, with Christian Bale taking the role of Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent looking to end Dillinger's blitzkrieg of bank robberies. These are complex men leading corrupt lives in a Depression-era setting that mirrors our own times. You know what you're getting with Mann, who previously helmed Heat, Collateral and The Insider, and Public Enemies is just the latest riveting piece of cinema in the director's oeuvre.

For every great summer film, however, there's five lousy ones, and this week Travers places the cryfest that is My Sister's Keeper in his overfilled Scum Bucket.

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