A triangle tale related in reverse chronology, starting, that is, with the breakup of the pertinent marriage and working backwards nine years to the first extramarital embrace. The effect of this arrangement is to ensure that every step of the way we know more, and better, than the principal trio. …
A child's animated primer on the chicanery, skullduggery, and social gamesmanship so dear to the heart of the grownup world, and a gentle affirmation of genuine family life as the antithesis of and antidote for same. Ben Kingsley is simply great as Archibald Snatcher, a noisome, ill-bred schemer who dreams …
Siegel, that is -- the vain gangster, the "visionary" gangster, the lovesick gangster, the henpecked gangster, the moonstruck, the loony, the buggy gangster. He makes a wide-ranging acting portfolio for the narrowly talented Warren Beatty, but he never really comes into focus as a character. And the movie on the …
Nicholas Hoult, an American expat/ex-car thief living in Germany, comes out of retirement to bankroll a kidney transplant for Felicity Jones, his girlfriend of 30 days. Much of Hoult’s acting style consists of covering his face to deflect shards of laminated safety glass, while Academy Award-nominee Jones bleached her hair …
Roman Polanski comes as close here to his avowed ideal of the one-character movie as he has come since his feature debut, Knife in the Water: three characters. His third feature, Cul-de-Sac, came close also, and the isolated seaside surroundings of this one, coupled with Ben Kingsley's shaven pate (almost …
An aging but actively tomcatting Columbia professor develops an erotic obsession with a “thirty-odd-year” younger Cuban student, who, in his eyes, resembles Goya’s Maja. (Penelope Cruz, the student, actually played Goya’s Maja in Volaverunt, and here repeats the desnuda pose.) Isabel Coixet’s rendition of the Philip Roth novel, The Dying …
Well, at least they got the biblical proportions right: the massive Egyptian monument industry, the vast peoples and vaster landscapes, and most importantly, the God-sized plagues and waves. Otherwise, Ridley Scott's take on the great contest between Moses and Pharoah is underwhelming and ill-conceived. First, the underwhelming: nearly everyone — …
The project that Richard Attenborough tried to bring to fruition for twenty years turns out to have gotten done in the style of twenty years earlier, the style of a David Lean roadshow: there are no reserved seats, actually, and no musical overture or souvenir program, but there's an intermission, …
The house in question, a modest bungalow within a stone's throw of the Pacific, has been inherited by a subsistence-level housecleaner currently undergoing drug rehab, who gets evicted through a bureaucratic error and her own neglect to open her mail. It is then bought for a song at auction by …
Martin Scorsese goes to town (Paris) with CGI effects and 3-D and the fantasy story from Brian Selznick’s book about Parisian orphan Hugo Cabret. Asa Butterfield is Hugo, maintaining the clocks in a train depot in 1930. Lonely, brilliant, and cute, he wins the friendship of a girl (delightful Clöe …
Writer-director Martin McDonagh, in his feature debut, dispatches two British hit men to lie low, after a job with messy collateral damage, in the “fairy-tale” Medieval town near the coast of Belgium, where one of them (the tousled Brendan Gleeson) is interested in seeing the sights while the other (the …
A hot mess. Iron Man 3 does what a third installment tends to do: revisit the themes of the first (personal failings giving rise to public disasters), make everything bigger and more complicated, and then deliver some kind of grand resolution. And while director Shane Black brings a manic energy …
A hot mess. Iron Man 3 does what a third installment tends to do: revisit the themes of the first (personal failings giving rise to public disasters), make everything bigger and more complicated, and then deliver some kind of grand resolution. And while director Shane Black brings a manic energy …
In rural Pennsylvania, a man's quiet life gets upended when a UFO crashes in his backyard. As he befriends the mysterious extraterrestrial, things start to get complicated when two neighbors discover it and the government quickly closes in. Directed by Marc Turtletaub, starring Ben Kingsley, Harriet Sansom Harris, Jade Quon, …
Patricia Clarkson (Cairo Time) stars as a recently ditched book critic bumping up against the fact that she never learned to drive. (She had a husband for that.) Ben Kingsley (Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb) co-stars as a recently arrived Sikh driving instructor/taxi driver who never learned …