Writer-director José Maria Cabral lets dialogue and visuals win over plot and character in his tale of love behind bars in the Dominican Republic, but his casting, setting, and medium-shot storytelling are so good that it almost doesn't matter. So yeah, it's not entirely clear why new fish Julian (Jean …
“It’s a kids’ movie!” Well, no, not quite, not when the theme is middle-aged obsolescence and finding meaning beyond personal achievement. Not when the unhappy fate that horrifies star racecar Lightning McQueen is forced retirement and transformation into a brand. And definitely not when more effort shows in the photorealistic …
Director Matthew Heineman documents the lives of two vigilante group leaders, one on each side of the US-Mexico border: Tim "Nailer" Foley of Arizona Border Recon, and Dr. Jose "El Doctor" Mireles of the Michoacan Autodefensas. Both are fighting the Mexican drug cartels — though Mireles' struggle has the urgency …
Will Ferrell deadpans his performance in a semi sendup of Spanish telenovelas (yes, it’s in Spanish), and his unwinking commitment to the role makes all the surrounding silliness enjoyable. It’s all there: florid themes, cheap production values, goofy technique, hack dialogue, and awesome ranchero ballads. The weakest stuff is the …
If they’d put as much love into the story as they did into the liquid, hand-colored look of things, this story of a sad little girl, a thief, and the cat who divides his time between the two would be a triumph. As it is, A Cat in Paris still …
The premise is an agreeably loopy take on the notion that no good deed goes unpunished: when chubby teenager Robby Weirdicht (Dwayne Johnson) gets tossed naked and wet in front of a school assembly, superstar senior Calvin “Golden Jet” Joyner (Kevin Hart) lends him his letterman jacket for coverage. Twenty …
Artists are a famously difficult bunch: if they’re not wreaking havoc as they wrestle their demons into something fit for public consumption, then they’re plundering everyone and everything around them in service of their precious art. It may be edifying to admire the result, but would you want to grow …
Luca “Director of Desire” Guadagnino’s tennis movie isn’t really about the sport, you see, because as the lovely but perpetually frowning Zendaya points out early on to co-stars and fellow racketeers Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, tennis isn’t a sport, it’s a relationship. To the point where, while she’s putting …
Why doesn’t this story of lively little Louise Brooks’ escape from Wichita for the cosmopolitan pleasures of New York City and modern dance (before she heads off to become one of cinema’s early It Girls) work? It ain’t the fault of Haley Lu Richardson, who plays Brooks like the sassy …
Director Neill Blomkamp goes back to the single-city, small-scale sci-fi of District 9, but keeps the super-sized ambition of Elysium in this story of a busted police droid who becomes the world's first sentient robot, thanks to nerd God Dev Patel. The result is frequently messy to the point of …
Like the outstanding 2011 documentary Project Nim, Chasing Ice tells the story of a man's quest to do something extraordinary while at the same time telling the story of the man himself. Unlike Project Nim, the biography portion of the story is here served up not as a sly counterpoint, …
Animator Bill Plympton trades the surreal for the fantastical and the satirical for the sincere with this story of, yes, true love tested and triumphant. (What he doesn't leave behind is frank physicality; it's a rare film about sweetness and romance that features so much pneumatic action.) Jake and Ella …
Very light French foodie comedy, seasoned with a touch of romance, that never quite boils over into farce. The ingredients are utterly traditional — gifted nobody (a sweetly sincere Michael Youn) who needs a break, aging master (a comfortable Jean Reno) worried about his career in a world of changing …
It must have made a great pitch: send the standard bunch of young, attractive Americans on an extreme tourism adventure to Pripyat, the town next door to Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear accident in history. Tweak the real-life mutant horrors brought on by the fallout, and let the Russian …
Iranian musician Nasser Ali Khan has haunted, buggy eyes, an unruly mustache, a broken heart, a wife he does not love, two children he does not know, and a mysteriously stalled career. But Nasser Ali is a great violinist who believes that art guides us through the darkness of existence, …