A family-man gumshoe follows the trail of an apparent snuff film (a genre originally dismissed as an "urban myth") into the S&M; underworld, with a Hollywood porn-shop clerk as his guide. Hyperbolic detective story, combining the routine barbarity and depravity of a Matthew Scudder case (Lawrence Block, novelist) with a …
An anxiety-ridden man who embarks on a surreal Kafkaesque odyssey back home after his mother suddenly dies, confronting his greatest fears along the way. From his darkest fears comes the greatest adventure. Directed by Ari Aster and starring Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix.
An anxiety-ridden man who embarks on a surreal Kafkaesque odyssey back home after his mother suddenly dies, confronting his greatest fears along the way. From his darkest fears comes the greatest adventure. Directed by Ari Aster and starring Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix.
An anxiety-ridden man who embarks on a surreal Kafkaesque odyssey back home after his mother suddenly dies, confronting his greatest fears along the way. From his darkest fears comes the greatest adventure. Directed by Ari Aster and starring Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix.
Hellerish, or just plain hellish, view of an overseas Army base in the late-Eighties: "Soldiers with nothing to kill except time," and hence the black-marketeering, the drug-manufacturing, the arms-dealing, and so on. The film's release was long postponed after 9/11, on the supposition that it wouldn't suit the nation's mood. …
A cuckold, too chicken to take revenge first-hand, kills himself in such a manner as to frame the lover for murder. (The ungrieving widow is no help: "Leave me out of this.") Black-ish, noir-ish crime comedy calls to mind the Coen brothers, or their Fargo at any rate, if only …
Shot in America European-style — 1.66:1 aspect ratio and in muted shades of black-and-white — director Mike Mills (Beginners, 20th Century Women) is clearly banking on Academy highbrows sweeping their votes in his direction. And who better to front such an ostentatious operation than Joaquin Phoenix in his first film …
Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, lest they wind up spending the rest of their lives paralyzed and in a wheelchair. With a title like this, can it get any cuter? It can — when the viewer finds Gus “I Traced Psycho” Van Sant at his well-intentioned best. From the …
Rome's greatest general, Maximus, reduced to a slave (Minimus, that would be), then resurrected as a star of the sporting arena (not necessarily Circus Maximus). Throwback historical epic with all the modern amenities: overamplified digital sound, computer-generated sets, blue-rinsed and butter-basted photography, herky-jerky hallucinatory slow-motion, time-lapse clouds, music-video-style dream scenes, …
Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are) continues his intrepid exploration of your inner man-child, this time with a barely futuristic story about Theodore, a lonely guy (played by an opaque but vulnerable Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his smart new operating system. "If you love your tech …
Righteous recounting of the internecine strife between the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda in the early 1990s, and the resulting genocide as the world twiddled its thumbs. Sort of a cross between The Killing Fields and Schindler's List, it mercilessly plays the shame game ("Rwanda is not worth a …
Marion Cotillard stars as a Polish immigrant in turn-of-the-(20th)-century New York who encounters hardships upon her arrival in the land of the free. With Jeremy Renner and Joaquin Phoenix.
Ostensible documentary on the post-acting career of Joaquin Phoenix by his brother-in-law and fledgling director Casey Affleck. One has to qualify it as “ostensible” because honestly it’s beyond belief. The mere existence of the film adds fuel to suspicions that the change of career from actor to rapper was but …
Paul Thomas Anderson takes on novelist Thomas Pynchon's take on the California detective story, and brings Joaquin Phoenix along for the trip.
Pale imitation of a 1950s soap opera, set in that actual era. The issues are solid (first love, the wrong side of the tracks, the gossip-stained reputation), and the storytelling shows good patience, and the cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, Joanna Going, Billy Crudup, Kathy Baker, Will Patton) …