After ten years of marriage, Karen leaves her macho husband to start an independent life in Bogota in this film exploring “contemporary social issues in Colombia in a fresh light.” In Spanish with English subtitles.
What a waste. Director Gary McKendry pulls together action god Jason Statham, genuine star Clive Owen, and a surprisingly subdued Robert DeNiro in an international espionage thriller based on a true story, and then turns around and makes this shoddy, shaky, seemingly endless parade of cliches, incoherent action, and generally …
After a contract killing goes wrong, a hitman hired on spec takes a 14-year-old virgin as his “retainer.” This is director William Friedkin’s second film with playwright Tracy Letts; their first pairing, Bug, turned out to be an effective gut-wrencher that never once felt like canned-theatre. You’ll need a Rival® …
Jonathan Hensleigh reheats the old pasta of Coppola and Scorsese gangster films. He adds meaty Irish stew: Danny Greene, a slab-fitted Cleveland thug and “friend of the working man.” Ray Stevenson plays him with steamroller force, though his sensitive eyes make him seem like an odd merger of Colin Firth …
The title means “liberty.” The story’s Roma (Gypsies) feel their nomadic freedom being trapped in rural Vichy, France, as Nazis tighten the noose. Local bigots want them eradicated, but some citizens realize that their spirit incarnates, in primal form, the freedom that France has lost. Tony Gatlif continues his cycle …
More animated martial arts and loveable Chinese-bear antics in Jennifer Yuh’s sequel. Voices by Jack Black, Gary Oldman, Dustin Hoffman, Seth Rogen, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme.
An ego kiosk and shrine altar for Pierre Bergé, longtime lover and business enabler of the great Parisian couturier Yves Saint Laurent, and also for their lavish homes, expensive collections, and the massive auction of goodies after YSL’s death. Bergé is solemn, tasteful, vain, and not very informative with his …
Tom Hanks cowrote, directed, and stars in this novel pleasantry about a 50-something, all-too-amiable employee of the month. Hanks’s title character is fired at the film’s outset for his lack of education, prompting him to enroll in community college. Enter Julia Roberts as a frustrated speech professor in the midst …
Harvey Keitel plays an aging Mafia don who decides the time is right to train his middle-aged, mildly retarded son (writer/director Hyung-rae Shim) as his successor. The only thing that kept me watching this period-genre parody was the schizophrenic production design — it’s impossible to pinpoint in what part of …
A glossy but visceral “National Geographic entertainment” in which we follow a lioness in Botswana, exiled from her pride and desperately hunting for her three cubs (they don’t all make it). Stunning images in the wild but also a heavy hand of drama pressed along by Jeremy Irons’s grave, pompous …
Keira Knightley makes the men around her seem like disposable utensils. Sam Worthington is stuck playing her dull husband, whose interest crazily drifts to sultry, big-lipped Eva Mendes. Their drab one-nighter alternates with sexy Keira’s New York dangling of a former love, played by Guillaume Canet like a buff baguette. …
Big-budget remake of the 1994 Jet Li film Fist of Legend, which was itself a remake of the 1972 Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury. Beneath all the fists and feet, the story is nothing more than a piece of idealized nationalism. Donnie Yen (donning a Kato costume) plays the …
Total French charm in the port city from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. A hard-drinking old noir guy (splendid André Wilms) helps a fugitive African kid (stoical Blondin Miguel) escape the authorities, aided by his social-solidarity neighbors in a retrograde zone of Le Havre. Vapors of past French masters (Clair, Pagnol, …
A quiet, beautiful, persistently visionary film about life in the large sense of Life (but not The Tree of Life). Using hills and a village in Southern Italy — also a herdsman, goats, bells, a dog, a giant tree, a kiln, a potion, a Catholic (but almost pagan) ritual, and …