A galaxy's worth of nihilism buried under a '70s Velveeta topping, the Planet of the Apes series stands today as a dark marvel of pop cinema, a group of wildly variable films that combine to form a giant inescapable kiss-off to the human race.
It doesn't take a Nostradamus to see that the interconnected lives in Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger are going to be troubled indeed--and yet the clairvoyant hired by newly divorced Helena (Gemma Jones) fails to predict the complications to come. Well, then there wouldn't be a movie, would there? Helena's restless old goat of an ex-husband, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), has taken up with a loud hooker (Lucy Punch, Dinner for Schmucks), who he somehow believes to be his dream girl.
Danny Boyle (Sunshine) directed this wildly energetic, Dickensian drama about the desultory life and times of an Indian boy whose bleak, formative experiences lead to an appearance on his country's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Jamal (played as a young man by Dev Patel) and his brother are orphaned as children, raising themselves in various slums and crime-ridden neighorhoods and falling in, for a while, with a monstrous gang exploiting children as beggars and prostitutes.
