Buster is a happily married (if not entirely happy) young dad working the night concierge desk in a remote mountainside hotel. He’s also a bearded crank who breaks into luxury homes and calls in to radio shows to rant about "the coming inversion." He’s also lost at sea and daring …
Woody Allen gives a tour of Woody Allenland, complete with gentle and largely unnecessary narration. Unnecessary for the movie, that is. But it’s just possible that this is something else: a primer of sorts, a re-introduction of the old guy’s schtick to a generation that’s only ever read about him …
Dark and mysterious New Girl in Malibu Chloe lures a trio of bright and shiny California kids into her dark and mysterious and just possibly dangerous world. The fun part is that, if you Google this film, the info box gives its title as Leashed, and the lead character's name …
A fine performance — and a good character — in search of a story. Silken-maned Robert Carlyle plays an aging former rocker, haunted by the death of his brother (his old band's frontman) and living in self-imposed exile on a farm in California. It's a tolerable, static, hidden sort of …
Director Luca Guadagnino’s sunnily seductive ode to eros tells the story of a summer romance between 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet, looking 15) and 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer, looking 30). Or rather, it explores the dynamics between them, operating at a cool remove from its own frank depiction of desperate teenage …
Calvary presents the viewer with a very particular week in the life of a small-town priest in modern Ireland. Father James — played with thickened, toughened, but still lively and sharp-witted humanity by Brendan Gleeson — labors, as we all do, under a sentence of death. The difference in his …
At the outset, cinematographer Kirsten Johnson asks us to consider this collection of footage she shot for various documentaries as her memoir, because while only a few actually depict her personal life (as mother to twins and as daughter of an Alzheimer’s sufferer), she says that “these are the images …
Melissa McCarthy’s bid for dramatic cred is just nasty enough to be enjoyable, thanks hugely to Richard E. Grant’s gleeful turn as a dimwitted but high-spirited end-of-the-line party boy who befriends our heroine just as she touches bottom. (Financially speaking, anyway; she’s still got a ways to go morally.) McCarthy …
Director and co-writer Nadine Labaki gives the world a Middle Eastern The Cider House Rules — that is, a film that explicitly argues against bringing children into the world under difficult circumstances while relying for its narrative hook and dramatic effect on the heroism and resilience of a child brought …
A comic-book movie in the pejorative sense of the term, starting with the bizarre moral acrobatics required to set up the internal strife mentioned in the title. Sure, members of the Avengers saved the world a few times over, but innocents died in the process, and so someone’s got to …
Marvel continues its lightweight but well-muscled march toward the superhero ensemble piece The Avengers, this time calling on director Joe Johnston and his gift for rendering unclouded heroism and golly-gee romance. You know, olde-timey stuff, appropriate for a decent guy (Chris Evans) who gets turned into a WWII super soldier …
Whoever heard of a timely, even necessary superhero movie? And yet here is Captain America, lending a measure of old-fashioned, flag-loving, liberty-defending, patriotic virtue to the very present issues of government surveillance and pre-emptive strikes based on that surveillance. The trouble begins with a factual bit of ignominy: Operation Paperclip, …
Maybe Marvel’s latest is meant specially for women — in particular, women who have been told all their lives that being a woman meant they weren’t good enough, weren’t strong enough, weren’t fast enough, etc. — and so its journey of self-discovery through self-recovery was not designed, executed, and polished …
If you can get past the bombastic score and the wavering, seasick camera and what is perhaps the hackiest, laziest opening-scene conversation of the year, you might find something remarkable in Captain Phillips: a quietly scathing critique of American exceptionalism, wrapped in a story of American survival. Captain Richard Phillips …
The easy descriptors for Todd Haynes's take on Patricia Highsmith’s tale of socially unacceptable female relationships during the early ’50s are words like “sumptuous,” “ravishing,” and maybe “entrancing” (that last thanks to a command performance from Cate Blanchett as a failed wife, loving mother, and motherly lover). But the more …