The old story, with new operatic embellishment, of brothers on opposite sides of the law (Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix), plus a father firmly on the lawful side (Robert Duvall), and Russian drug dealers so ruthless and repugnant as to straighten out the bent brother. All pretty obvious and overstated, although …
Anand Tucker’s adaptation of a memoir by British writer and poet Blake Morrison, probing his uncomfortable relationship with his blustering, bluffing, bulldozing dad, reviewed in flashback from the cancer-racked end. You can recognize some universal truths, but it’s a distant recognition. The particulars do not strongly pull you in — …
Middle-age-crazy road comedy about four Cincinnati suburbanites who head out for Los Angeles on their recreational choppers, hoping to reclaim their freedom as well as their manhood, coping along the way with weak prostates, a gay cop (horrors!), an angry bull, and an angrier gang of pseudonymous Hell's Angels. None …
Buddy movie, road movie, romance movie, set in a mundane afterlife exclusively for suicides, no smiling allowed: "Everything is the same here; it's just a little worse." A lifeless (literally, but also figuratively) fantasy, difficult to recognize or remember as fantasy. With Patrick Fugit (looking a bit like an undergraduate …
A sentimental, in the sense of maudlin, education. A young boy from Belo Horizonte, dropped off in the Jewish section of São Paulo to live with his grandfather while his dissident parents go underground, discovers that gramps has just died and he’ll have to watch the 1970 World Cup in …
Offbeat comedy (meaning that the audience is not orchestrated into fortissimo laughter, but left, as it were, to play by ear) revolving around a fortyish dog-loving spinster who loses a dog, acquires and loses another one, acquires and loses fifteen more, and finally finds a new self. Part of that …
Francis Ford Coppola's first film in a decade (The Rainmaker, just to jog your memory), although in truth he hasn't been a force since the decade of the Seventies. His comeback, or anyway his return to action, should secure his position in the margin: an English-language (variously accented) art film, …