For your Mafia fix, a fictionalized factual story from the fatherland, focused on (at the start) the ten-year-old daughter of a soon murdered mob boss, slowly simmering her revenge for seven years under instruction from her older brother, keeping meticulous diaries the whole while, never letting on her intentions to …
Adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel detailing the planned last day of a homosexual English professor (an exquisitely tortured Colin Firth) grieving his dead lover, anally-compulsively tying up loose ends, saying his guarded goodbyes, practicing the proper posture to shoot himself in bed, laying out his burial attire with the …
A heartbreakingly lovely Honduran emigrant (Paulina Gaitan) makes her perilous way, with father and uncle, through Mexico en route to Texas and New Jersey, her path converging with that of a sensitive, pensive Mexican gangbanger (Edgar Flores), a teardrop tattoo by his right eye, who runs afoul of his blood …
Resourceful low-budget imagining of future relations with Our Neighbor to the South: the border closed, water rights protected by armed guard, anti-terrorist airstrikes as reality TV, and cheap Mexican labor by remote-control robotics (hence the coinage, “cybraceros”). The grainy, gritty digital image constantly pulls you back, and down, to present …
A Los Angeles Times columnist (Steve Lopez by byline) finding a story in a homeless schizophrenic classical musician, and making something of it, is quite different from a team of filmmakers finding the same story predigested. What they chiefly make of it is a couple of outsized performances by Robert …
A seventeenth-century English mercenary embraces a nonviolent strain of Christianity after he learns that his bloody ways have earned him a reserved seat in hell. But his vows are tested when evil overruns his homeland. With James Purefoy, Pete Postlethwaite.
Intended to sell corporations on the virtues of sustainability, this green-energy promotional video (signed by a quartet of green directors) was erroneously assigned a theatrical release. There will be no star rating. Two attempts to make it through this tree-hugging infomercial and both times I passed out. If you happen …
Would-be rollicking comedy concerning the funky characters in and around a Hamburg greasy spoon made over into a hip and happening nightspot. Fatih Akin, saturnine director of Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, lightens up and loosens up (quite literally in the wanton wide angles), but the comedy, if often …
Grainy documentation of the three-day music festival, African and African-American, organized to accompany “the Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire in 1974. The fight was postponed, but the sideshow went on: James Brown, Bill Withers, B.B. King, the Spinners, Miriam Makeba, et al. Muhammad Ali still gets his share of …
Narcissistic sexual parasite, tricked out in skinny suspenders and rolled-up pant cuffs, inches along the road to self-discovery. Slick, almost slimy survey of soulless Los Angeles, and although Ashton Kutcher seems scarily suited to the central role, Anne Heche and Margarita Levieva (among others) fail to illuminate their susceptibility. Directed …
The coming-out of the “Australian Coen brothers” (director, editor, co-producer Nash Edgerton and co-star, co-writer, co-producer Joel Edgerton), an apt analogy as long as the scope of discussion is limited to first films. Apart from the fraternal collaboration, similarities to the Coens’ debut, Blood Simple, can be sensibly confined to …
Enjoyable prequel, thirty years after the same-named debut of the series on the big screen. The chaotic and incoherent prologue might somewhat smother the emotional punch of the birth of James Tiberius Kirk at the same moment as his father’s death, but the reintroduction of the old familiar characters — …
The Americanization of a BBC miniseries qualifies as a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, and from more than one type of headline: the political sex scandal, the privatization of the military, the death throes of newspapers. The topicality inevitably gives rise to some soapboxing, and along with it some playing on the pieties …
Over-obvious suspense film, resurrecting the unctuous psycho from the 1987 original, tips its hand immediately and slows its predictable progress (to a dissatisfying new ending) only to ogle the body of the husky-voiced sex doll, Amber Heard. With Dylan Walsh, Sela Ward, Penn Badgley, Paige Turco, and Jon Tenney; directed …
Endeavoring to drive a wedge even further between Western and Middle Eastern cultures, to foster misunderstanding and foment hostility, filmmaker Cyrus Nowrasteh tells the inflammatory “true story” of the execution of an Iranian wife falsely accused of adultery by a cheating husband who doesn’t want to pay for a divorce. …