Documentarist Alex Gibney, director, writer, and narrator, takes as his starting point the death of an Afghan cab driver in U.S. detention at Bagram Air Field, and the fall guys are talking to him on camera. The path of investigation, from there, stretches out to Abu Ghraib (the familiar photos …
If this doesn’t give us what we expect and want from a French thriller, part of the reason must lie in its source, an American mystery novel by Harlan Coben. Convoluted and contorted beyond resemblance to organic life on Earth, concocted and cockamamie beyond the realm of all probability, it …
Moses v. Pharoah: WHO WILL WIN? Ben Kingsley narrates; Christian Slater is Moses; Alfred Molina is Pharoah, and Elliot Gould is the voice of God.
Based loosely, so they say, on Oil!, a muckraking, boat-rocking, banned-in-Boston novel by Upton Sinclair (a writer partial to exclamation points in his titles), this is a kind of anti-epic, an anti-Giant, about a miserly, misanthropic, nothing short of murderous American oil man in the first decades of the last …
The loss of a spouse (post-fire), measured in a nonlinear narrative that eclipses our feelings of sorrow with feelings of mere irritation. Once the widow reaches out to her husband's heroin-addicted best friend, the narrative straightens out, but the striven-for naturalness never rings true. With Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, …
Exposé of sex trafficking in the Cyberspace Age, centering on an abducted thirteen-year-old Mexican girl (Paulina Gaitan) and a duped Polish immigrant and single mother (Alicja Bachleda), transported from Mexico City to New Jersey for an Internet auction, and on the ad hoc rescue team composed of the Mexican girl's …
Cocksure blockbuster with a grainy digital image and a jokey juvenile narrative, revolving around good and bad extraterrestrial shape-shifting robots, light as air, loose as smoke, based (if you're too old to know) on a line of Hasbro toys: the merchandising precedes the movie. With Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh …
Five interwoven stories that occur on Halloween: An everyday high school principal has a secret life as a serial killer; a college virgin might have just met the guy for her; a group of teenagers pull a mean prank; a woman who loathes the night has to contend with her …
Comic-pathetic tale of a stolid Mongolian shepherdess angling to set up life to her satisfaction: finding an able-bodied new husband willing to care for her disabled former husband under the same roof. The suitors line up, but it’s a tough sell, for the viewer as well. Director Wang Quan An …
An eighty-minute minimal thriller about a divorcing couple (Kate Beckinsale, Luke Wilson) brought close again by "one last great adventure together." Returning from the anniversary celebration of one pair of parents, they stray from the interstate, experience car trouble in the middle of nowhere and dead of night, and bed …
In essence a spoof of Walk the Line, to do with a sort of cut-rate Johnny Cash (a Johnny Wampum maybe), although the protagonist's music branches out further than the real Cash's into the groves of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, punk rock (ahead of its time), trend-setters and -followers in …
Patongo Primary School, from the rebel-infested war zone in northern Uganda, qualifies for the National Music Competition for the first time ever. Glossily photographed documentary (with an overreliance on warping wide-angle lenses), but very skimpy in its coverage of the actual competition. And after an hour’s worth of horrific war …
A fatherless lad during WWII finds the egg of "the rarest of all creatures" -- only one on the planet at a time -- and nurses the hatchling into the Loch Ness Monster, easily mistakable for a Nazi submarine. Spectacular scenery (New Zealand supplementing Scotland) as the backdrop for a …
The sexual stirrings of the jeunes filles of synchronized swimming. The aquatics do spruce up the adolescent banalities, if only occasionally. And the ambiguity of the “pretty girl,” a virgin reputed to be a slut, rises slightly above banality. With Pauline Acquart, Louise Blachère, Adèle Haenel, and Warren Jacquin; written …