Short, sharp, smart drama from writer-director David Freyne stitches together a big Irish quilt of political themes — discrimination, reconciliation, activism, protest, terror, etc. — to wrap around the story of a few sorry souls navigating the aftermath of the Maze virus, which turns its victims into a zombie horde. …
Sarah (star and cowriter Brit Marling) is a rising star at a private espionage agency who gets assigned to infiltrate the titular domestic protest organization. The East does punishment-fits-the-crime work: flooding the home of an oil exec with the same crude that his company spilled all over a coastline, etc. …
Thonggrrrl14 makes a chat-room date with Lensman319, which is to say a fourteen-year-old, pixie-haired schoolgirl and a professional photographer eighteen years her senior, but predator becomes prey in this simple-minded, long-drawn-out ritual of revenge, essentially a two-character piece, an interminable tennis volley of his-and-hers faces, grueling, fatiguing, suffocating. With Patrick …
Deborah Kampmeier’s quasi Carson McCullers coming-of-age tale, set in rural Alabama in the late Fifties, attained some small notoriety, too small to amount to a full-blown controversy, as the Dakota Fanning Rape Movie. That boils it down a bit too far. Needless to say, thirteen-year-old girls have been known to …
A major snow job from fair-haired filmmaker Christopher Nolan, nominally a science-fiction thriller focussed on some sort of psychic superspy (Leonardo DiCaprio, fully earning the furrow between his brows), an expert in the gentle art of “extraction,” the stealing of conscious ideas from people when their guard is down in …
Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, and Ellen Page in an indie misfit comedy in an academic setting, which enables the viewer to feel more virtuous when not laughing than when not laughing at a low-brow Hollywood comedy: “My fun’s just a little more cerebral than your fun.” …
Ellen Burstyn, as the headstrong protagonist of the Margaret Laurence novel, reviewing her life at its end, hits many authentic notes but finds no one and nothing to harmonize with. And the dominating flashbacks of the first half, substituting Christine Horne as her younger self (well matched physically), shut her …
At first blush, Woody Allen's latest entry into his grand European tour bears a close resemblance to Monica, the character played by Ellen Page in the film: very pretty to look at and just smart enough to suggest hidden depths, but ultimately a trifle shallow and self-centered. Unlike Monica, however, …
Petite, apathetic Ellen Page finds a new calling — as "Babe Ruthless — in the rough-and-tumble of Austin roller derby, leading to a calendar conflict between the championship game and, her mother's dearest dream, the Bluebonnet Beauty Pageant. Drew Barrymore, who plays a minor supporting part, takes to the director's …
Shohreh Aghdashloo, Ellen Page, and Sandra Oh give voice to Ann Marie Fleming's animated tale of a young Canadian poet with Chinese and Persian parents who travels to Iran to perform at a poetry festival.