At the Movies With Peter Travers: ‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’
Avoid Twilight Saga: Eclipse this weekend, and instead check out the second film in a series of books RS film critic Peter Travers calls “the smart person’s best-selling trilogy”: The Girl Who Played With Fire . It’s the follow-up to the mega-selling Swedish novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in Stieg Larsson’s “Millenium” trilogy. Noomi Rapace is extraordinary, returning as the hacker with a photographic memory. Although American remakes are due out in the future, “in this horrible summer, it’s worth reading the subtitles,” Travers says.
Two other worthwhile movies are arriving this weekend, too: The Kids Are All Right , a comedy starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple who introduce their two teenage children to their birth father, played by Mark Ruffalo, who’s as good in this film as he’s ever been. And Despicable Me stars Steve Carell (and his thick Hungarian accent) voicing “the world’s meanest person” as he plots to steal the moon.
It’s only July, but there’s a new favorite for Worst Movie of the Year — or the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Award — and it’s M. Night Shyamalan’s “excruciating” The Last Airbender, which has easily been the worst reviewed film of the year. M. Night’s film, based on a Nickelodeon cartoon series, is so bad that it’d be unfair to the terrible movies already in the Scum Bucket to share room with Airbender. So Travers presents his new Super Scum Bucket just for The Last Airbender, a sluggish movie with the “worst 3-D” that bored Travers breathless.
Read All of This Week’s Reviews:
• The Girl Who Played With Fire
• The Kids Are All Right
• Despicable Me