Michael Almereyda’s docu-biography never once attempts to fool the gullible into thinking the footage assembled is anything but fictive. In the mind of the film’s subject, Hampton Fancher, his life and his work are inseparable to the point one might just as easily speak on behalf of the other. Fancher …
The title refers to Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist famous for an experiment on obedience to authority in which participants administered electric shocks to subjects who answered questions incorrectly. (Or at least, they thought they did.) But while the film does give us plenty of Milgram's life, it's the experiment …
After a reign of three brief years, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is overthrown as the worst Hamlet in screen history. It was no problem to modernize the setting by moving the action to the Hotel Elsinore, New York headquarters of the multinational Denmark Corporation; but we are still stuck, even in …
A gentle story that is no less profound for being so. Michael Almereyda directs and adapts Jordan Harrison’s play about memory — and also, what it means to be a person. Put less abstractly: various members of a wealthy, melancholy family spend time chatting with holographic computer simulations of deceased …
Slow, arty, pretentious vampire film, but hip and flip and facetious, too, a deadly blend. The lesbian menstrual midnight snack perhaps merits a footnote in studies of the genre. The restorative plasma from the blood of baby Mexican shark embryos surely does not. Shot in high-contrast black-and-white, with inexplicable shifts …