A bright young man at a fancy tech company (Domhnall Gleeson) gets picked to visit the company’s founder (Oscar Isaac) in his country home, er, homey concrete fortress. There, he is introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), a sweet and pretty robot who might just be the world’s first Artificial Intelligence. …
Funereal toga party commemorating the culture clash in a majestic computer-generated Alexandria, pre-Islam: pagans, Christians, Jews. It is no surprise — although given the locale, and given the drift of current events in the region, it is an undoubted provocation — that the Christians, out from under the Roman sandal, …
Lust for Life reimagined by Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh and Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin.
The war on terrorism, or anyway a single battle against terrorism, conducted with slickness and razzmatazz, and time for romance too. Leonardo DiCaprio continues to breathe hard in his efforts to be an action hero; the steel-haired Russell Crowe, in a desk job, plays peekaboo around his glasses frames; both …
A bright young man at a fancy tech company (Domhnall Gleeson) gets picked to visit the company’s founder (Oscar Isaac) in his country home, er, homey concrete fortress. There, he is introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), a sweet and pretty robot who might just be the world’s first Artificial Intelligence. …
A morality tale of curdled love and corrosive guilt that works, because the morality arises from within - within the characters, within their dealings with each other, within the dim, desperate world they inhabit. Everyone comes in for a measure of sympathy (though sometimes, it's measured out with a heavy …
The Coen brothers, as successful a pair as any in show business today, consider the fate of a '60s folk duo after one of them jumps off a bridge. (This being the Coen brothers, it is of course the wrong bridge: the George Washington instead of the Brooklyn). Surprise, surprise: …
No, not a re-release of the Roger Ebert doc, but another well-intentioned romantic drama from Dan Fogelman. With: Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, and Annette Bening.
The gasoline should have hit the typewriter while this one was still in the pre-production stage. While on a suicide run through the desert, a tortured but terminally hip filmmaker (Garrett Hedlund) meets his evil twin in the form of Dennis Hopper-impersonating spree-killer Oscar Isaac. The nine minutes of Hedlund’s …
...need not make for a most violent film. Case in point: for his third feature, J.C. Chandor leaves behind the existential crisis of All is Lost and returns to Margin Call's explorations of morally murky moneymaking in New York City. This time, instead of toxic assets, there's an actual, physical …
A bearably dull Christmas worship service, fully supernatural in its vision (the voice of God, a luminous Messenger, an avian Holy Spirit), yet full of luxuriously tactile costumes, solid sets, atmospheric locales, and earthy Mediterranean faces. (The half-Maori Keisha Castle-Hughes, though harmoniously olive in complexion, seems a bit overwhelmed in …
Under the command of director Chris Weitz, this Twilight of the Adolf Eichmann saga begins with Oscar Isaac overseeing a team of secret agents assigned the task of tracking down the architect of the Holocaust. “Weitz power!” “I like Eich!” The mob of mock alt-right poster-blurbs that waltzed through my …
The Promise follows The Ottoman Lieutenant and Queen of the Desert as the third film in almost as many weeks set in the Ottoman Empire near the end of World War I. They saved the best for last. When the Turks learned that former studio head Kirk Kerkorian planned on …
The fifth collaboration between director Ridley Scott and leading man Russell Crowe (Body of Lies, American Gangster, A Good Year, Gladiator, count ’em) won’t satisfy your craving for the legend, but perhaps your craving, if any, for Dark Age dreariness, savage combat (shot in that skittery long-lens style that looks …
It's not a subtle move to open your story with a tour guide (Oscar Isaac) leading a group around some sun-drenched ruins and telling site-specific stories from the Greek myths. (In this case, the story of how Theseus lost his dear old dad Aegus after killing the Minotaur.) But it's …