Rhinestone heist thriller (a brandished DVD of To Catch a Thief establishes a standard of comparison) about a couple of high-tech jewel thieves in smug retirement in the Islands: "Now the challenge is to find joy in simple things." But then the third of the priceless Napoleon Diamonds, of which …
More disappointing than most Adam Sandler comedies because the subject was more promising: temper control. You would hardly know that that's the subject from the way the humor runs to sex, private parts, bodily functions, in short the toilet. The strong supporting cast is a sign of either Sandler's growing …
Explore the toxic interconnections of American farming policy, politics, and health, by sharing stories of destruction and healing across the United States and beyond, and how regenerative agriculture and soil health plays a vitally important role in changing these systems for the better. At it's root, it explores how people …
A plotline copied from straight-faced action films like Coogan's Bluff and Trackdown (a bit more Trackdown, but in the setting of Coogan's Bluff); a trendy soirée appropriated from Midnight Cowboy; a standard collection of hicks-in-the-city jokes: ordering a meal at the Waldorf ("You got any Popsicles?") and causing the cellist …
California-bound cosmetic surgeon gets stalled in Grady, Georgia -- "Squash Capital of the South." A small-town panegyric that hinges to an extreme degree on the town's unlikeliest citizen: a tangle-haired vegetarian divorcée who skinny-dips in the lake, pees in the forest to scare the deer away from hunters, and repeatedly …
Writer-director-producer Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen offers a verbally frank take on the horrors of adolescence — difficult parents, difficult siblings, difficult romantic interests, and even difficult best friends — gentled just enough to provide solid entertainment. (Especially if you liked John Hughes’ teen oeuvre.) An illustration: when …
Two turkeys (Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson) go back in time to try to keep turkeys from becoming a traditional Thanksgiving dish. Go ahead, take your kids. Then, on Thanksgiving, explain to them that Free Birds was a bit of doomed wishing, kind of like the fake-out ending in Brazil. Then …
Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake star as physically perfect specimens, each unable to maintain a committed relationship, who decide to use each other for sex. It’s an attempt to parody romantic comedies that quickly disintegrates into precisely what it’s spoofing. This thing stank when they called it No Strings Attached. …
The latest (and greatest) from Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12, I Am Not a Hipster) is a moving melodrama graced by an insider sense of humor that can only come from an author who endured every square inch of pain that it took in order to survive her childhood. …
Vegas poker tournament covered in a come-and-go mockumentary style. The gambling “types” — the cowboy-hatted veteran, the Internet novice, the in-your-face punk, the antisocial nerd, the tough-talking broad, the bottomed-out hophead, among others — are amusing in conception and in casting, but not so much in detail. The anticipated laughs …
Director John Lee Hancock (The Founder) mounts a valiant effort to stretch a solid genre picture into an American epic with the tale of two ex-Texas Rangers — put out to pasture because of their willingness to shoot first and say “hands up” later — who get pressed back into …
Undeniably a cowboy movie, though not exactly a Western, set as it is in New Mexico circa World War II. At many points it may look and feel like a Western, with fine nostalgic images of men on horseback, occasional (possibly too frequent) splashes of calendar-art Southwest landscape, an idiomatic …
In the future, rebel districts are punished by the Reaping: every year they have to send a couple of teenagers to the Capitol. There, the kiddies fight to the death in a regulated, televised competition. Sloppily directed by Gary Ross, it’s more games than hunger and more a comment on …