Isabel (Michelle Williams), the manager of an Indian orphanage, travels to New York to pick up a generous endowment check. She soon learns that the daughter she thought was put up for adoption at birth by her ex Oscar (Billy Crudup) is alive and well and living with her father …
The world's No. 1 hitman, contemplating retirement, going soft, refusing to kill innocent bystanders, developing an amorous attachment to his latest "mark," has been targeted for elimination by the ambitious, amoral No. 2. (Where are these rankings published? Soldier of Fortune magazine?) Something so silly ought to be more fun. …
Robert De Niro unloads his gnarly, scowling, old-crank routine again as a self-deluded “genius,” sort of Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver as a nutty dirtball. His son (moon-eyed Paul Dano) dislikes him but helps him at a homeless shelter. Marginal in Paul Weitz’s moody, drifting film are Julianne Moore and …
Intolerably twee romance that fudges the border between madness and daffiness. A clinical nutcase (breakfast of milk, peanut butter, Cap'n Crunch in the blender) "wins" a semiliterate, Chaplin-and-Keaton-emulating clown during a poker game, and discovers in him a true soulmate (cheese sandwiches grilled by clothes iron, potatoes mashed by tennis …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
Serious-minded science fiction, allegorical as you like, about an epidemic of “the white sickness,” a new form of sightlessness that plunges the sufferer into blinding light instead of traditional darkness. We experience this from the point of view, so to speak, of several dozen people left to their own devices …
Minor Madonna (assuming there's anything that could be called major Madonna). So, what, then, was the lure? The role of an S&M; mistress (hair and makeup styled at the Eva Braun Beauty Salon) on trial for the murder of her weak-hearted lover -- allegedly screwing him to death after spiking …
A movie that needed, that cried out, to be made: a hefty slice of heretofore unsampled cultural history, carved out of the San Fernando Valley, cradle of the porn-film industry. The precise snippet of the timeline -- sufficiently lengthy to qualify as "epic," especially at a two-and-a-half-hour running time -- …
If you've got a taste for terror, steer far afield of this beggarly Xerox job. Topicality alights in the form of a Tim Tebow reference, Mom as a born-again cutter, and the “plug it up” humiliation captured on smartphone. The rest is chapter and verse DePalma. Chloë Grace Moretz knowingly …
The basic idea — from a novel by P.D. James, a departure from her detective fiction — of a worldwide plague of female infertility, even though not at all original (see The Handmaid's Tale, as a prime example), remains nevertheless a potent metaphor for that science-fiction staple, the End of …
A renaming and reworking by Atom Egoyan of the French film Nathalie by Anne Fontaine. Despite the pedigree (Egoyan, if you need reminding, has signed such tony items as Ararat, The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica, among others), this would fit comfortably on the Lifetime Movie Network: a suspicious wife sics a …
Robert Altman tarries a while longer in the Deep South, idly tracing the stereotypical loopiness of the natives. If the movie lacks the pervasive weather of The Gingerbread Man, it is thickly atmospheric all the same, settling into the locale as into an overstuffed easy chair: Holly Springs, Mississippi, at …
What fun: a romantic comedy based on genuine human folly instead of some high-concept absurdity. Julianne Moore is a middle-aged woman adrift, so much so that she slips out of her marriage (to Steve Carell) and into another man's bed. Pathos ensues, with many of the laughs arising from moments …