Movies starring Giovanni Ribisi

The majority of this review is taken from what I wrote in 2009. I have tweaked and edited it to update it for 2022. Following the main review are a few new comments written following my re-watching of the film on September 23, 2022.Avatar has been d...

The original Ted was an engagingly ribald comedy that worked in large part because the gimmick was fresh. After all, Teddy Bears, even on those rare occasions when they talk, don't normally curse, smoke weed, and engage in sexual pantomime. At th...

Selma offers a warts-and-all snapshot of half-century old American history: events beginning around the first of January 1965 in Selma, Alabama and culminating with the triumphant third march to Montgomery and President Johnson's introduction of ...

It would be inaccurate to claim that A Million Ways to Die in the West is devoid of humor. It isn't. However, Seth MacFarlane's hit-and-miss spoof of Westerns has far more "misses" than "hits" and the actor-director-writer (Ted) doesn't seem to rea...

There seems to be little doubt that Ruben Fleischer, the director behind the well-received Zombieland and the less well-received 30 Minutes or Less, is a Brian De Palma fan. How else to explain the kinship that exists between Fleischer's latest, Ga...

Ted is essentially a one-joke movie. Okay, it's a very funny joke, but it's still only one joke. As a short, this could have been brilliant - hilarious, irreverent, and blisteringly satirical. I laughed a lot during the first half hour, not as much...

Contraband is the kind of thriller that offers just enough in the way of effective elements to assemble a two-minute trailer. When it comes to a 110-minute feature, however, the sketchiness of the plotting and the director's lack of sure-handedness...

There are times when the story behind the making of a film is more interesting than the finished product. This is one of those occasions. The Rum Diary was written by Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s but was not published until 1998, after actor Joh...

Screened in standard (non-IMAX) digital 3D. Avatar has been described as a "game-changer," and perhaps it is. I'll leave that for future historians to determine. What I can say with some assuredness is this is the most technically amazing motio...

Simply put, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is an amazing motion picture. There may be some controversy over whether she truly wrote the screenplay on her own (there are sequences that argue that she at least had help from someone with a littl...