A very realistic live-action little boy, acting out at suppertime and running away from home in a Halloween animal costume, sails across the sea to an all-brown imaginary land of giant hirsute Muppets, where he confronts hard truths about his own irrationality and impracticality. Spike Jonze's free-hand adaptation of the …
Petite, apathetic Ellen Page finds a new calling — as "Babe Ruthless — in the rough-and-tumble of Austin roller derby, leading to a calendar conflict between the championship game and, her mother's dearest dream, the Bluebonnet Beauty Pageant. Drew Barrymore, who plays a minor supporting part, takes to the director's …
Run-of-the-mill mystery in an out-of-the-way locale, a South Pole research center about to the snowed under for the season, and already buffeted by some blinding blizzards, partially obscuring the action. Kate Beckinsale, buffeted herself by some terrible sepia flashbacks to a past trauma, is the capable but not invulnerable detective. …
In starchy, flat, monotonic black-and-white, Michael Haneke details the unsettling goings-on — unsettlement being Haneke’s staff of life — in a Protestant town in northern Germany in the year leading up to the First World War. If the reminiscing narrator, in old man’s voice, hadn’t suggested at the outset that …
After a period of stage adaptations, Alain Resnais adapts his first novel, The Incident by Christian Gailly, with a palpable feeling of liberation. Even though his theater pieces were never less than fluid, there was necessarily a more restricted range and velocity in the flow. Here he can show off …
Explicit remake of the Coens’ Blood Simple, set in the barren Chinese backcountry, and in period: the titular pistol is “the latest technology.” The costumes are colorful, the image bright and clear, and director Zhang Yimou, always with an eye for splendor, makes a big wow of spinning out the …
Pitch-dark comedy, truly (if briefly) switching off the lights midway through, built around a hangdog high-school poetry teacher and unpublished writer, as well as around his more popular and successful rival in the English department (printed in The New Yorker on first try), his sweet-talking secret lover in the art …
The prequel seeks to answer all your questions, assuming you had any, as regards where and when and why the titular superhero got his switchblade knuckles, his leather bolero jacket, his pent-up rage, his blank memory, among other esoterica. Starting back in 1854 (heavy sigh), two mutant brothers, aging up …
Anachronism-littered buddy comedy about a hunter and a gatherer expelled from their primitive village and followed through a Biblical landscape of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Sodom but not Gomorrah: “What transpires within the confines of the walls of Sodom, stays within the confines of the walls of Sodom.” …
Documentary disinterment of a half-forgotten (or more than half), and deservedly remembered, radio and television trailblazer, Gertrude Berg, the writer and star of the approachably ethnic sitcom, The Goldbergs. Her warmth emerges even through the degraded broadcast footage (only the final 1955 season comes through sharp and clear), the degradation …
And the young Albert. (Psst, wanna see the Queen in her teddies?) The story of the first occupant of the spanking new Buckingham Palace is a story of protofeminist liberation — “Even a palace can be a prison” — and a testament to the capacity of British thespians, specifically Emily …
Slow, solemn, reverent biopic, or perhaps hagiopic, on the 13th century Japanese monk, Dogen Zenji, who imported from China the “authentic” Buddhism founded on the central tenet of a sitting meditation, Zazen. The ingenuousness of director Banmei Takahashi, not to be mistaken for ingenuity, comes through steadily in his balanced …
Nerdy, neurotic Jesse Eisenberg, the unlikeliest Texan, narrates a postmodern post-apocalyptic road trip through a population of secondhand flesh-eating zombies, in the company of the only three surviving humans east of Bill Murray’s mansion in Beverly Hills: the Twinkie-craving Woody Harrelson and two scamming sisters, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. …