“Unstoppable”
*** (out of 4)
Denzel Washington is a father, a husband, a train-engineering veteran facing a very bad day on the rails. He teams up with his go-to director Tony Scott for an action flick without an enemy. Instead, the adversary is a behemoth of a train let loose by accident, carrying volatile materials and headed for a tight curve in a blue-collar Pennsylvania town. “Unstoppable” is not the “The Taking of Pelham 123: Two.” There’s no malice involved. Instead, there is Washington and Scott, each clearly digging what the other affords him, in an adrenaline-spiked ode to the American worker. Will the 777 take out another locomotive carrying kids on a train-safety excursion? Will the “missile the size of the Chrysler Building” slam into a hardscrabble burg? PG-13. 1 hour, 40 minutes. Lisa Kennedy
“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”
** (out of 4)
Woody Allen’s 40th feature is shopworn to the bone. His movies are always communicating with one another. But even by the relaxed standards we apply to his recent work, this film lacks a reason. The characters each suffer frustration. Sally (Naomi Watts) wants a baby, her own art gallery, and for husband Roy (Josh Brolin) to give up writing and return to medicine. She also wants her married boss (Antonio Banderas) to want her. Roy wants the soon-to-be-married music-student beauty (Freida Pinto) who lives across the way. The movie’s central concerns are trust, fraudulence, reversed fortune and mortality. Alas, we will all meet a tall, dark stranger. But Allen is in too light a mood to take the film to some more sinister realm where it probably would have thrived. PG-13. 1 hour 38 minutes. Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
“Waiting for Superman”
*** 1/2 (out of 4)
Many documentaries make you cry. But Davis Guggenheim’s scathing, moving critique of American public education makes you actually want to do something after you dry your eyes. Guggenheim structures his film around the stories of several children across the country who are participating in the highly competitive lotteries that take place every year in successful schools for a limited number of openings. Some of the kids the film follows will get in. Most won’t. We get to know all of them. Their hopeful faces — and the looks of frustration when some of them don’t make it — are crushing. PG. 1 hour, 20 minutes. Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post
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