The true story (told before in a documentary, The Brandon Teena Story) of a young Nebraska woman in a "sexual identity crisis," and on the dodge from the law, who reversed her first and last names, attempted to pass as a man in a redneck corner of the state, and …
A prune-faced piece of erotica to do with a dweebish dot-commer (Peter Sarsgaard) who persuades a skinny stripper (Molly Parker) to accompany him to Vegas for a wild weekend on her terms: separate rooms, no kissing on the mouth, no penetration, four hours per night, ten G's on the barrelhead. …
A freshly paroled Billy Walker (a durable Ronnie Gene Blevins, equal parts Tom Sizemore and Peter Sarsgaard) returns to his mother’s (Lara Flynn Boyle) home in El Paso to find her weeks away from death. Dr. Perkins (Sam Daley) informs Billy that the law prohibits him from discussing his mother’s …
Screenwriter Craig Lucas, of Longtime Companion and Prelude to a Kiss, turns director as well, bringing to the screen his own stage play, a behind-the-scenes peek into the studios and boudoirs of Hollywood: the negotiations over a labor-of-love screenplay about the death from AIDS of the writer's lover (his dream …
A precocious English schoolgirl of 1961 (a cellist, a Francophile, a devotee of the Pre-Raphaelites, a sneaky smoker for sophistication), on track for Oxford, gets rerouted by a shady older man who shows her the finer things of life: a Ravel concert, a Christie's auction, nightclubs, Paris. The foreseeable end …
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 …
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 …
Airborne thriller gets off the ground in good shape, and while aloft adds another variation to the infinitude of locked-room mysteries. After taking her six-year-old daughter to stretch out in the empty back rows of a double-decker jumbo jet, the mother nods off and wakes up, midflight, to find her …
Small-screen actor Zach Braff, who also wrote and directed, as the most impassive sadsack this side of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate: impassive amid the surrounding panic of a plane-crash dream scene; impassive in the sanatorium ambience of his bedroom, lying motionless on his back and listening to the news …
Fact-based story of a near-miss nuclear disaster aboard a Soviet submarine in 1961. (A companion, of sorts, to Thirteen Days.) Full of Russian fatalism, isolationism, and hugger-muggerism, in addition to clenched muscles, sweat, and merciless music. A grind, but not unbearable. The only comic relief comes in the coda: the …
Heavy-footed biopic on the controversial American sexologist Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson, suppressing his Irish accent into something not quite American and not quite British, but adrift somewhere in the ocean between). Writer-director Bill Condon apparently felt it was vital to establish his subject's upbringing under a puritanical father ("Electricity has …
Bibulous burlesque of the espionage thriller, wherein the video-game action, the hail of bullets, the blossoms of fire, the flurry of fists, pose no threat to the impervious superspy, protected by the patron saint of stuntmen, free to behave like a total sociopath, a textbook charming one for sure, but …
The title is about one-seventh right: Denzel Washington, from the moment his black-clad form rides into view over a golden ridge, is pretty gosh-darn magnificent as Chisolm, a wide-ranging lawman possessed of a carefully cultivated calm, a deadly eye, and a crazy-quick draw. Unfortunately for Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the …