Jonathan Hensleigh reheats the old pasta of Coppola and Scorsese gangster films. He adds meaty Irish stew: Danny Greene, a slab-fitted Cleveland thug and “friend of the working man.” Ray Stevenson plays him with steamroller force, though his sensitive eyes make him seem like an odd merger of Colin Firth …
Documentary of an elite cooking competition in Lyon, France. In this highly pressurized event, chefs create sweet treats of Proustian nuance and flamboyant kitsch. The fall of a confectionary sculpture feels almost like a national tragedy. Along with sugar, the star is the tight fraternity of cooks, and the movie …
As masters of speech, British actors stutter superbly (think of Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius). This lovably intricate, humane film from Tom Hooper and writer David Seidler dramatizes how the unexpected king, George VI, overcame his handicap in uneasy 1936. There is wonderful acting rapport between Colin Firth’s stiff, shy, …
The title means “liberty.” The story’s Roma (Gypsies) feel their nomadic freedom being trapped in rural Vichy, France, as Nazis tighten the noose. Local bigots want them eradicated, but some citizens realize that their spirit incarnates, in primal form, the freedom that France has lost. Tony Gatlif continues his cycle …
Despite touches of brutality, this dramatized salute to tireless Burmese freedom leader Aung San Suu Kyi is too ladylike. Michelle Yeoh plays her like a cross between Gandhi and Audrey Hepburn, and Luc Besson’s direction often seems like a civics lesson. David Thewlis plays the heroine’s almost equally suffering British …
An ego kiosk and shrine altar for Pierre Bergé, longtime lover and business enabler of the great Parisian couturier Yves Saint Laurent, and also for their lavish homes, expensive collections, and the massive auction of goodies after YSL’s death. Bergé is solemn, tasteful, vain, and not very informative with his …
A glossy but visceral “National Geographic entertainment” in which we follow a lioness in Botswana, exiled from her pride and desperately hunting for her three cubs (they don’t all make it). Stunning images in the wild but also a heavy hand of drama pressed along by Jeremy Irons’s grave, pompous …
Keira Knightley makes the men around her seem like disposable utensils. Sam Worthington is stuck playing her dull husband, whose interest crazily drifts to sultry, big-lipped Eva Mendes. Their drab one-nighter alternates with sexy Keira’s New York dangling of a former love, played by Guillaume Canet like a buff baguette. …
At 50, Kristin Scott Thomas’s elegant face seems freshly vitalized as Suzanne, a stifled bourgeois wife liberated by sex with a Spanish worker (Sergi Lopez). Her spouse (Yvan Attal) responds with the spite of a Molière cuckold, minus the wit. The engaging, lusty lovers make foolish, desperate mistakes, and director-writer …
Frederic Lilien, an aimless Belgian, found his mission by seeing and then keeping photographic vigil on Pale Male, a great hawk that nests on prime real estate facing New York’s Central Park. Lilien’s documentary is padded with music and sage thoughts about life, but the bird is glorious and the …
Total French charm in the port city from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. A hard-drinking old noir guy (splendid André Wilms) helps a fugitive African kid (stoical Blondin Miguel) escape the authorities, aided by his social-solidarity neighbors in a retrograde zone of Le Havre. Vapors of past French masters (Clair, Pagnol, …
A quiet, beautiful, persistently visionary film about life in the large sense of Life (but not The Tree of Life). Using hills and a village in Southern Italy — also a herdsman, goats, bells, a dog, a giant tree, a kiln, a potion, a Catholic (but almost pagan) ritual, and …
A National Geographic production presented by the Scotts (Ridley, Tony), spliced from short videos made by amateurs in many countries on one day (July 24, 2010). There are some remarkable shots and events (a giraffe’s birth, a boy’s first shave, a storm, sky diving, a lethal crush of fans at …
A loosely tossed romance, with hand-held camera work almost trying to hold our hands. Felicity Jones is the young Brit student in L.A., Anton Yelchin the aspiring furniture maker wowed by her. Their love hits a snag with her visa problems and other issues, but director Drake Doremus keeps it …
A preening, fairly addictive movie about addiction. Bradley Cooper is Eddie, a blocked New York writer who takes mystery pills from an untrustworthy man. They give him fabulous powers, and Manhattan becomes the cracked mirror of Eddie’s rise to power. Of course, his real drug is ego, and Cooper achieves …