American documentary filmmaker Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) has here directed and photographed, shakily, a fiction film in Hindi, centered around a spaghetti-thin menial at a hotel in Goa who greedily eyes a paradisiacal pool house, longs for a rightful dip in the pool, wangles part-time employment there …
Fuckin’ cop film of fuckin’ good cops and fuckin’ bad cops, some of both types in the same fuckin’ family of New York Irish cops, Edward fuckin’ Norton, Colin fuckin’ Farrell, Noah fuckin’ Emmerich, and Jon fuckin’ Voight. With a literally and constantly fuckin’ script by Joe Carnahan of fuckin’ …
Consistently amusing comedy, once or twice hilarious, of two doofusses in competition for the manager’s post at the new Donaldson’s grocery store: “The Leader in Quality Foods.” (The one certain point of hilarity: the “black apples” scene. You’ll know it when you’re laughing at it.) There is no clear advantage …
The first true sequel in the twenty-odd entries of the James Bond series, picking up our Blond Bond (Daniel Craig) on the trail of vengeance after the death of his ladylove, Vesper, at the end of Casino Royale. (This was a trail closed off to the newly widowed Bond at …
A sort of Rainbow Coalition wedding weekend: the father of the Jewish bride had remarried a black, the bride too is marrying a black (it might be noted that Sidney Lumet, the father of first-time scriptwriter Jenny Lumet, had remarried a black himself), and the theme of the wedding is …
As if to concede his depletion of ideas, Sylvester Stallone, star and director, has not troubled to think up a new title for the resuscitation, after twenty years’ slumber, of his embittered Vietnam vet (“Fuck the world”), settling for the title of the second film in the series, minus its …
Educational and affecting documentary, in illustration of the Lynn Nicholas book of the same name, about the Nazi acquisition of art and the heroic counterefforts to preserve it and recover it. Plenty of material to fill two hours without padding or repetition. Narrated by Joan Allen; produced, written, and directed …
Stephen Daldry’s tight and trim adaptation of the Bernhard Schlink best-seller on German war guilt and the filial estrangement of the postwar generation. It begins in 1995 in the frigid colorless antiseptic Berlin apartment of Ralph Fiennes, lit by way of Vermeer, but soon it retreats to his adolescence in …
David Mamet’s two cents on the Mixed Martial Arts craze. His first film since Spartan, four years before, again brims with Spartan machismo. “Control your emotions.” “A man distracted is a man defeated.” “Conquer your fear and you conquer your opponent.” These directives, and others out of the same playbook, …
Comedian Bill Maher, the smirking skeptic, travels the globe to goad and taunt, and talk behind the backs of, believers of many stripes (not Far Eastern), all in an effort to galvanize the silent minority of Americans — 16% by latest count — who profess to be atheists and agnostics. …
Darren Lynn Bousman saws off more than he can chew with this campy horror musical.
Tantalizing if ultimately unsatisfying thriller by Austrian writer-director Götz Spielmann. An ex-convict employed as a custodian in a Viennese house of ill-repute is carrying on in secret a heartfelt affair with an immigrant Ukrainian sex worker deep in debt to the slave-driving owner. The ex-con, on a dutiful visit to …
Director Sam Mendes returns to the suburban stamping ground of his filmmaking debut, American Beauty, but at the very opening of that territory in the 1950s, at the inception, that is to say, of all the clichés of cookie-cutter conformity, Little Boxes, the Lonely Crowd, lives of quiet desperation, and …
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino share a lot more screen time than in Heat, though they’re both thirteen years droopier as past-retirement-age homicide detectives on the case of a cop serial killer (not a serial cop killer), a plot of transparent tricksiness. Jon Avnet’s main directorial idea is, one …
Tangled intrigues in the London underworld, given the Guy Ritchie treatment, derivative, flashy, shallow, callous, utterly resistible. Depression, setting in early, deepens sharply at the finish: a written pledge of a sequel. With Gerard Butler, Mark Strong, Tom Wilkinson, Thandie Newton, Idris Elba, Karel Roden, Toby Kebbell, and Jeremy Piven.