J.K. Simmons plays a nice, wonky engineer who expels his hippie son in the late ’60s for loving rebel rock. Years later, the grown kid (Lou Taylor Pucci) returns with a benign brain tumor, soon removed. But he’s mute, and only those groovy old tunes can open him up for …
Ex-Muscovite Robin Hessman’s vivid documentary on Soviet-era schoolmates, now grown. With wistful or embittered insight, not nostalgia, they recall their youth in the dying USSR. There are two jaded teachers, a weary subway musician, a cynical venture capitalist, a charming wage slave, and a delightful teen named Mark who prefers …
Over four hours of the last great achievement of prolific, Chilean-born master Raúl Ruiz (the Euro-TV version has six hours). A flowing tapestry of stories set in 19th century Portugal, from a classic novel, it involves mostly a young boy, a priest and a dense, Catholic, convulsing society that (like …
Not Sinatra, no way. Rival marathon runners, one Japanese and one Korean (when Korea was ruled by Imperial Japan), bond through hellish service in the Japanese Army, are captured by the Red Army, and then captured by the Nazis who send them as slave soldiers to France. The hyped editing …
A gossipy peekaboo based on Colin Clark’s memoir as an assistant on the English set of 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl. He has a crush on Marilyn Monroe, who reciprocates voluptuously (this may be mostly imagined), while costar and director Laurence Olivier fumes. Eddie Redmayne is appealing as coltish …
Do we believe in famously tough Russell Crowe asking, “Show me where the bullets go”? Hardly, but Crowe has haggard moral weight as a Pittsburgh teacher whose wife (Elizabeth Banks) is imprisoned for murder. Director-writer Paul (Crash) Haggis, retooling the French Pour elle, details Crowe’s increasingly criminal effort to free …
A fall below past form for expat Vietnamese visionary Tran Anh Hùng (The Scent of Green Papaya). His visual elegance and delight in deep moods are tangled in the murky weeds of Haruki Murakami’s novel. A nice, dull, passive student (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) fixates on a suicidal friend’s sexually neurotic “lover.” …
The opening wit is “Can I finger you?” Next are the oral sex jokes, penis jokes, condom jokes, and the many meet-cutes of Natalie Portman (who opts for sex only) and Ashton Kutcher (who will take whatever he can get). Kutcher, who cannot act, takes his clothes off frequently. Portman …
The full title is Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (the Schulberg/Waletzky Restoration). The official film of the postwar Nuremberg war-crimes trial, which was released in Germany but not in America, is a captivating testament starring one of the supreme rogues’ galleries. Suave Albert Speer, odious Hans Frank, morosely bored Hermann …
Clemente (Bruno Odar) is a handsome, churlish money-lender in a poor section of Lima, Peru. His dull, cash-driven life changes when a baby is left to him (as payment?), and he recruits a devoutly Catholic debtor (Gabriela Velásquez) for childcare. Set during an October holy festival, this austerely observant, rather …
A fictional but deep treatment of French Cistercian monks whose peaceful life in rural Algeria runs afoul of armed Muslim militants. Their attempt to maintain piety and humanity is arrestingly specific, rooted, and charitable but not sanctimonious. Xavier Beauvois directed with a perceptive lucidity that echoes films by Rossellini and …
Pro-tribal, pro-animal messages slip in easily, because Lavinia Currier’s film has Kris Marshall as Larry, based on real ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno. It also has equatorial Africa and the Pygmy people of the rain forest, so alive and rooted. The jungle, music, critters, not-too-generic natives, and Marshall’s casual but committed charm …
Emily Watson, in her best work in years, plays the English social worker Margaret Humphreys, whose dutiful life suddenly became a crusade when the case of a woman sent in childhood to Australia leads Humphreys to find the awful truth: 130,000 unwanted (often stigmatized as “illegitimate”) kids dispatched Down Under …
Katie Pofahl, aspiring marine biologist, spends her half year at Monterey Bay helping to save an adorable, orphaned otter pup, with crucial help from the famous aquarium. The attempt at narrative framing, its Facebook touches applied like girlish mascara, is feeble. But the tireless otter world is opened up for …