Spider-Man meets X-Men in the story of an outcast high-school kid who gains incredible powers and ultimately decides that he’s now better than all those regular people who used to put him down. But the best part of the story is what comes in between those events: a growing friendship …
Disney's live-action version of the Grimm fairy tale about humble endurance and the joys of ball-going isn't perfect. (For one thing, Helena Bonham Carter's Fairy Godmother is slapsticky and silly in a way befitting wicked stepsisters and no one else. For another, some of the personal and political machinations are …
A real-life international espionage thriller centered around the eight days that filmmaker Laura Poitras, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden spent in a Hong Kong hotel room while the NSA domestic surveillance story broke. It provides a rare experience: as Poitras has put it, “the …
An important story that loses something in the telling. There is, admittedly, something shocking in saying that a documentary which includes footage of a man being executed via crucifixion lacks any kind of immediacy and/or viscerality. (To say nothing of the shock involved in seeing such a thing at all.) …
The Gold of the title is Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize–winning populist food critic for the L.A. Times. The city is Los Angeles, a place that is, in Gold’s words, “less a melting pot than a great, glittering mosaic” whose multitudinous urban centers boast an even more multitudinous array of restaurants, …
The Wachowski Manifesto, or maybe just their apologia. Together with co-director Tom Tykwer, the W siblings have taken David Mitchell's multi-story, mutli-genre novel and made it into one (very) long and earnest plea for individual freedom and dignity in the face of oppression, whether it's gays oppressed by polite society, …
Writer-director Olivier Assayas (Demonlover) puts Juliette Binoche on the rack as an actress coming to grips with the ravages and passages of time. She plays Maria Enders, a grande dame who came to fame by playing a brash young thing who seduces and then abandons her (female) boss. At a …
There’s a moment in director Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear when said bear, having gone a little too long without cocaine, passes out atop a dude who then reveals that the bear is a she. He knows this, he says, because “her vagina is pressing against my face.” It’s a telling …
Pixar has dealt in the themes of memory and/or family for so long that it’s a wonder it took them this long to hit upon The Day of the Dead as a setting. A whole holiday dedicated to honoring and remembering your ancestors, complete with the visual splendor of ofrendas …
Brief, humane, and (literally) visceral documentary about the ER at LA County Hospital. (The title refers to those increasingly frequent times when the combination of patient load and acute emergencies demand maximum effort and attention from the doctors on duty.) Director Ryan McGarry opens with a flurry of life-or-death activity, …
James Ward Byrkit completes his journey from storyboard artist (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest) to story man (Rango) to writer-director with this overextended but mostly enjoyable trip into the Twilight Zone. (The writing is sharp and clear; the direction tends toward jittery-jumpy, with frequent fades to black thrown …
Dustin Hoffman said it in Stranger than Fiction: if you’re in a tragedy, you die; if you’re in a comedy, you get married. Viewers will have to decide for themselves exactly what sort of story they are getting from director and co-writer Pawel Pawlikowski’s handsome, gorgeous, heartbreaking, heart-thumping romance. Handsome: …