A tricky, unsettling, often riveting film, shot in a coldly glowing L.A. by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Ryan Gosling, an update on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, has magnetic mystery as the lean, terse “hero” who drives hard, can fox-out criminals, and may be a sociopath. His shy interest …
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 …
Whatever quantity of soap froths up Thomas Vinterberg's presentation of Thomas Hardy's novel, it does nothing to fade out the lush colors that stain his gorgeous depiction of the author's English countryside. A lean and dimpled Carey Mulligan plays Bathsheba Everdene, a woman comfortable with solitude who still finds herself …
Brash title for a movie not about Muhammad Ali and not remotely great, only goodish. First-time writer and director Shana Feste has devised a sticky situation — the parents of a highway fatality open their home to the boy’s pregnant girlfriend — and she uses it to anatomize the different …
Director Baz Luhrmann finds a suitable subject for the riotous excess of his directorial style in the riotous excess of the Jazz Age. By the time the onscreen parties lurch to a halt, you may feel a little buzzed yourself. Unfortunately, there's still rather a lot of movie remaining at …
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: …
David Hare's play about a young man who is sad because the girl who used to live with him — and who he regarded as a sort of older sister — left his life after it was discovered that she was sleeping with his dad. It's all very English, and …
Low-profile science fiction, so light on the hardware, the décor, the couture of the genre, so mundane in all its trappings, as to skirt classification, operating in a borderland, a no-man’s-land, occupied by the likes of On the Beach, Lord of the Flies, maybe Daniel Petrie’s Resurrection, maybe Todd Haynes’s …
Somewhere, Joan Rivers is rolling in her grave. While on her way to becoming a household name in 1973, the comedian conceived the story of (and along with Agnes Gallin, co-scripted the teleplay for) a black comedy about a young meeskite (Stockard Channing) who undergoes plastic surgery after a car …
Less a film than an attractively illustrated chronicle of sexual pathology. Brandon (Michael Fassbender) needs sex and lots of it — with whores, with pickups, with his hand. Pretty much anything, really, as long as the encounter is impersonal. The pathology does not tolerate humanity. But humanity arrives in the …
Carey Mulligan and Emmy nominee Zoe Kazan star as New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who together broke one of the most important stories in a generation, a story that shattered decades of silence around the subject of sexual assault in Hollywood and impelled a shift in …
Director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan can’t find a story amidst the forest of directives so instead mount a stern, monochrome, relentlessly depressing video lecture to supplant the historical fundamentals our parents and public school teachers failed to instill within us. Sufferin’ Suffragette! Were it not for this picture, …
Twenty-three years after he first visited the scene, Stone weighs in (thud!) on recent developments in the stock market, another chapter in his career of heavy breathing over epochal events. Gordon Gekko, his most memorable fictional creation (not to compete with Nixon, W., or Alexander the Great), out of prison …