As a smart, dressy, but not upscale lawyer whose main office seems to be his Lincoln (a very L.A. touch), Matthew McConaughey has a career high. He defends a pretty-boy heir (Ryan Phillippe, having his own peak) who is into sordid kinks with prostitutes. That torques into an old murder …
Laura (Jenna Fischer) has always been pretty and dreamy, but now she drinks too much in her weak marriage to Bob (Chris O’Donnell). As change shocks her drifting life, she must find a way forward with her son (Daniel Yelsky, often stone-cold funny). Michael J. Weithorn’s film flirts with sitcom …
Scum in orbit. Visually monotonous, turgidly violent, inanely scripted, it concerns a 2079 revolt of convicts in space-ship prison, the President’s abducted daughter (Maggie Grace) — who still looks great after taking a syringe in her eyeball — and a special agent (Guy Pearce) who keeps flipping zingers as his …
At 50, Kristin Scott Thomas’s impeccable bone structure and diction (French, English) ratify her cool, rapacious “charm” as a business power schemer, in a Parisian complex of offices that recall the glassy city of Jacques Tati’s Playtime. Too soon, she’s gone (imagine Meryl Streep exiting The Devil Wears Prada early). …
A pretty Marine (Zac Efron) returns from un-pretty service in Iraq to seek out the pretty blonde (Taylor Schilling), whose pretty photo he felt was his lucky charm in combat. In pretty Dixie, she is the widow of another Marine, with a pretty son and a still-pretty mom (Blythe Danner). …
The first 35 years of Brazil’s popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, like bricks piled up: poverty, saintly mother, violent father, school, factory work, the great love, the lost love, the new love, rise as a labor leader fated for greatness. Rui Ricardo Diaz is grown-up Lula, charismatic …
Gerard Butler plays the life-based Sam Childers, an ex-con hellraiser who catches some gospel piety from his wife (Michelle Monaghan). He hauls the family to Sudan, where children are being brutalized (or doing the brutalization), and in the name of God he puts his violent skills to work as a …
Sally Hawkins squeezes her skinny bod and zippy charm into bouffant-haired Rita O’Grady, a shy Ford-plant worker who rallied her English, female colleagues (aided by a union steward, played by Bob Hoskins) to demand equal pay. Their daring, 1968 strike shook up Britain and Detroit. Although Nigel Cole’s movie forklifts …
Almost a French Brief Encounter, with (briefly) a train station. Quietly appealing Vincent Lindon is the construction worker with a fine wife (Aure Atika) and child, drawn to a lonely teacher. She (Sandrine Kiberlain) is what Westerns once called a “schoolmarm,” and the shy, pensive feelings build to her poignant …
Sloppy, amusing, often engaging documentary using long-hidden color film of the since-fabled 1964 cross-country bus trip by writer Ken Kesey and his frequently buzzed (or bored) Merry Pranksters. Motormouth macho hipster Neal Cassady is often stoned and often behind the wheel. Also seen: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Jerry …
Carl Colby traces the life of his father William, who rose from OSS paratrooper to major CIA “spook” during the Cold War and Vietnam, going deeper into the secretive maze that finally consumed him as the agency’s head during the scandals of the Nixon/Ford era. Despite strong file footage and …
Wrongly sent to prison, a cop (Sam Worthington) breaks out, then pretends to risk suicide on a skyscraper ledge as a media and police distraction so that his kid brother and the bro’s Latina hottie can complete a nearby (and highly implausible) heist. This makes him a folk hero to …
Anna Paquin, who gave a great kid’s performance in The Piano, offers a great adolescent performance as Lisa. Bright, snarky, spoiled, and neurotic about her broken family in New York, she drives her decent mom (J. Smith-Cameron) nearly crazy by becoming a drama diva. The cause is her role in …
Not bad, if you want the 2008 financial collapse reduced to an adrenalized ego showdown in f-wordy debt to David Mamet. Kevin Spacey is the greed pig who squishes best. Jeremy Irons is the predator who heads the investment firm, seeming to welcome disaster with a shark’s appetite. Writer-director J.C. …
Pious but not sanctimonious, Kevin Macdonald’s documentary on Jamaican-reggae-god Bob Marley hits all the high points and some low ones. It is rich in concert and interview material and maintains a sexy pulse of Caribbean affirmation, thanks to the nectar of goodwill in most of Marley’s songs. And in him. …