For his directorial debut, star Michael B. Jordan dips back to Rocky III for the “challenger from the streets vs. civilized/retiring champion” story (plus a little “rebounding from personal loss”), and also back to the original Rocky for the “give a bum a chance” bit, mashing them together into the …
Crispin Glover is good at being odd. So good that they let him make a movie about it.
Easy Rider for a decadent generation, Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus and 2012 is a smart but sour South American road movie that doesn't know what to do with its drug-fueled revelations. Say this for star Michael Cera — he's willing to play unlikable. Here, he's Jamie, an ill-mannered …
Short, sharp, smart drama from writer-director David Freyne stitches together a big Irish quilt of political themes — discrimination, reconciliation, activism, protest, terror, etc. — to wrap around the story of a few sorry souls navigating the aftermath of the Maze virus, which turns its victims into a zombie horde. …
Director Gore Verbinski takes the campy dread of Hammer horror films (Horror of Dracula, et alia) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. Yes, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. But despite …
Hey, what if art imitated life? Or rather, what if we made some art in which a famous real-life work of art — Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac — was little more than a funhouse reflection of real life, crafted practically on the fly by a frustrated poet-dramatist who (we're …
Matthew McConaughey plays a bag-of-bones, good ol' boy piece of sex-addled trailer trash who has the misfortune to bang the wrong (female) intravenous drug-user (HIV+) in the wrong way (sans condom) in the wrong place (darkest Texas) at the wrong time (the panicked, unmedicated '80s). Suddenly, he's cast out among …
A mere 23 years after his last feature, Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) returns to the screen, older and yes, possibly wiser. The loony-goony visuals are still in play, but there's a sympathy for the audience, a desire to put things to good and even meaningful …
World-champion ballroom dancer Pierre Dulaine returns to the city his family was forced to leave in 1948 on a mission: to get Israeli Jewish kids and Israeli Palestinian kids to dance together. "When a human being dances with another human being, something happens," he attests at the outset. "You get …
The story of Gerda, a struggling portrait painter (Alicia Vikander) who loses a husband but gains a compelling subject — there’s nothing like a broken heart for inspiration! Of course, the losing and gaining are all of a piece, born from her man Einar’s (Eddie Redmayne) conclusion that while nature …
A cup of weak tea indeed from director Joe Wright, one that sorely needs a shot of something stronger to brace it for the unenviable task of manufacturing drama out of the question of whether Prime Minister Winston Churchill will take Britain into war with Germany or sit down for …
Another teen dystopia franchise first chapter, notable chiefly for its willingness to be honest — even “good” teens can and will do very bad things when scared or upset or just full of adolescent emotion. No, dude, it’s not romantic when you use your telekinetic powers to drag a girl …
The final installment of director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is long and loud and chock-full of his great love for plotting and abstraction. Sometimes, it works, but often, it doesn't, and the honest interaction of characters is ground under the wheels of storytelling necessity. The film might feel like an …
It didn’t have to end this way — in such thoroughly standard smash ‘em up fashion, with minor heroes dutifully duking it out with faceless hordes for punchy-power bolt minute after punchy-power-bolt minute until the mayhem quotient has been met and the principals can finally square off for their climactic …