The 1966 sci-fi joker Mars Needs Women is Disneyfied by director and writer Simon Wells. As pop entertainment, his movie is slick but also superior, a charming 3-D animation about a boy who goes to Mars to rescue his abducted mom. Kids probably won’t get the nods to Reagan and …
Martha strives to recover from a grungy cult group. Director Sean Durkin intercuts timeframes and creates a twilight sadness. The cult leader (John Hawkes) sings like Charles Manson trying to be Leonard Cohen, and as part of Martha’s “cleansing” he provides rape. As morose, inarticulate Martha, Elizabeth Olsen (sister of …
A sympathetic take on highly imaginative Mark Hogancamp, an Upstate New Yorker whose 2000 trauma (loss of memory and more, due to a vicious beating by bar louts) led him to create a therapeutic world of military dress-up dolls and sexy little vamps. Their WWII in Marwencol, a toy-scale Belgian …
A brooding Western, gaunt as a desert bone, made by Kelly Reichardt with writer Jonathan Raymond and her favorite star, Michelle Williams. As a bonnet-topped gal rich in grit, Williams challenges the dazed males (Will Patton, Paul Dano, Bruce Greenwood) whose little wagon train is lost in 19th-century Oregon. Taciturn …
At a swank European estate that is mainly a golf course, bored heiress Kirsten Dunst wanders, frets, bathes, and has sex in a sand trap (but not with her dull new groom). Her impish father (John Hurt) steals silver spoons. Kiefer Sutherland has tantrums, Charlotte Rampling is bitter, Charlotte Gainsbourg …
A final scoop of franchise gravy ten years after the last one with good critters and effects, the gee-golly style again directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Will Smith as agent J is getting too mature for his bouncy boyishness, and Tommy Lee Jones as sullen, snarky K is looking pickled by …
One of Woody Allen’s mostly smoothly enjoyable entertainments. Like Stanley Donen’s Funny Face and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, it is a devotional candle of the American love of La Belle Paris. The blond wick who lights up for joy is Owen Wilson as Gil, a “Hollywood hack,” aspiring novelist, and …
Fausta (Magaly Solier) has a pretty face made somber by poverty and pain, including rape and other horror in her family past. Claudia Llosa’s Peruvian debut feature, set mostly in a harsh Lima slum, shows this Lady of Constant Sorrow slowly emerging from spiritual trauma by way of music, flowers, …
A great film based on a masterpiece. Polish director Lech Majewski uses Pieter Bruegel’s grand The Procession to Calvary in Vienna to open up its world. At the same time, the actors and vignettes seem to fold into the painting, achieving a hybrid beauty and late-medieval power. Not much talk, …
A drama of Palestinian survival, mostly about the founder of a rescue home for girls, played as a stern medallion of courage by Hiam Abbass, and one of her students (Freida Pinto). Julian Schnabel’s movie, partly rooted in fact, becomes a drab collage of filming choices: news clips, trembling camera …
A rare sports movie with a brain. Brad Pitt does perhaps his best star acting as Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager who, sick of being looted of talent by big-money teams like the Yankees, opted for a “sabermetrics” approach using computers ands the adviee of a smart, chubby …
From French Canada, a stirringly direct, human film about an émigré Algerian who talks his way into teaching at a Montreal school. He helps repair the traumatized morale of students and staff after a loved teacher commits suicide. In the fine cast (the kids are beyond just acting), Mohamed Fellag …
Bookended by Benjamin Britten’s stirring “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” this is the most subtle, supple, deftly stylized fantasy from Wes Anderson. It happens on an island where scouting sets the tone of life. Brainy, dreamy kids (Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward) flee camp and home to share a wee …
A subtle, atmospherically skillful vampire movie directed with care by Mary Harron...until the final fall into generic obviousness (blood, flames, etc.). Appealing Sarah Bolger is a prep schooler whose best friend is lured into the dark spell of a new oddball (space-eyed Lily Cole). The softly eroticized story is teased …
Using members of his own family, director René Féret shows us the Mozart family as an exploited traveling act, gathering crumbs from the rich. He also seeks to elevate Wolfgang’s sister Nannerl (Marie Féret) as feminist martyr, her gifts quashed by the father’s preference for genius. A contrived plot involving …