Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

The unintentional laughs come early and often in the ersatz CIA thriller “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.”

Anna Karenina

I had Joe Wright’s “Hanna” on my top-ten list last year, and he’s done all he can to bring visual flair to Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (by way of Tom Stoppard), imaginatively transposing the Russian love story to an elaborate, ever-shifting, multi-layered stage set. And Keira Knightley, who’s become highly reliable and occasionally (as in last year’s “A Dangerous Method”) quite bold and risk-taking, puts passion into the title role of a government minister’s wife cast out of society by virtue of an injudicious affair before ever really entering it.

Stars in Shorts

Shorts HD has released an anthology of seven short films with the highly imaginative title “Stars in Shorts” (maybe it is imaginative – has Julia Stiles been a star anytime in the last 15 years?). It’s all downhill after the first short, a mildly amusing trifle called “The Procession” with Lily Tomlin and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a mother and son reluctantly at...tending the funeral of a friend of Ferguson’s sister that neither of them knew. (Perhaps nobody else could give quite the same line reading when Ferguson asks, “Oh, that’s terrible. I’m sorry…who is Susan?”) When a red light leaves half the procession too far ahead for them to find and half blindly following them, all they want to do is exit stage left.

One Day on Earth, The Woman in the 5th, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

One Day on Earth

The Woman in the 5th

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

The collage film “One Day on Earth,” which consists of snippets of video footage shot around the world on a single day (10/10/10), follows on the heels of last year’s identically-conceived “Life in a Day.” I enjoyed the new film, which includes material from every country on Earth, more, but perhaps only for the fun of mentally ticking off 20 seconds in Andorra, and Djibouti, and Dominica, and Oman. Each film struck me as a solution in search of a problem – or, to the point, as mental masturbation. A day later, I’m at pains to remember a single moment from “One Day on Earth.” Nothing resonates. It’s all an exercise.