“Dear Uncle, why should we want to live?” writes Buddhist priest Ittetsu Nemoto in a letter to the man who killed himself while Nemoto was a boy. It’s an especially poignant question, because it’s one that he answers every day, over and over and in various ways, in his life’s …
Harmless fun, like a machine gun that shoots jelly. The plot is as innocuous as the most cookie-cutter sitcom - former bad guy Gru must go undercover to expose current bad guy, and must also deal with personal issues. (One of his daughters wants a mom, another falls in love.) …
To paraphrase Capote’s line about the author and his murderous subject growing up in the same house, with one walking out the front door and one out the back: Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder starred in the same 1994 rom-com, Reality Bites, and it’s as if one day, he strolled …
Something is making the wrong people burst into flame prior to the Empress’s inauguration, and Detective Dee is summoned to crack the case. Like a good modern detective, he rejects supernatural explanations for the deaths, instead focusing on the thrillingly mundane realms of chemistry, zoology, and political intrigue. Unlike a …
In a happier world, Detention would be the last meta-movie, the one that took the practice of referencing previous movies (both in general and particular) to such a ridiculous and self-defeating extreme that the exercise lost all its appeal. In the meantime, there are so many layers to the self-consciousness …
Remember the torture, er, enhanced interrogation scene in Zero Dark Thirty? The one that produced good intel that ultimately aided in the detection and subsequent elimination of Osama Bin Laden? Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are happy to repeat the theme here, as light-skinned folks once again abuse …
What a premise: goodhearted, patriotic Iraqi soldier gets forced to serve as body double for the drug-addled, trigger-happy, horndog son of Saddam Hussein. A genuine existential crisis — how do I do my job without losing my very self? — with sex and violence to keep things rolling. Sadly, both …
Pregnancy can be hell — hey-o! You know what would have made Rosemary's Baby so much more awesome? Found footage and more special effects. Yeah.
There is a kind of achievement in (graphically) depicting a sexual relationship between an adult man (Alexander Skarsgard) and his girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter (Bel Powley) in a way that makes it feel neither predatory nor twisted, just oddly matter-of-fact. Whether it is a thing worth achieving is another question. The …
A brave dramatic premise: as the Allies approach Nazi-occupied Paris, the German military governor of the city prepares to follow his orders and blow up the City of Lights. But before he does, the Swedish consul-general pays him a surprise visit to plead for mercy. You probably know the ultimate …
Director and star James Franco’s ode to artistic ambition and invention — two things which, it should go without saying, have no necessary connection to artistic excellence or triumph. Indeed, if you really want to examine them in their purest form, you’re probably better off focusing on a failure — …
Director and co-writer Sebastián Leilo’s story of a black sheep’s return to the pen (though not the fold) hits three notes of a religious chord: faith rejected, faith endured, and faith tested. The first sounds clean and clear, embodied with captivating grace and power by Rachel Weisz as a rabbi’s …
A young woman trains as a warrior in the first installment of a series set in a dystopian future, eventually finding herself in conflict with the sinister Powers that Be. Divergent fairly begs to be measured against the Hunger Games series, right down to the sibilant similitude of the heroines' …
Inert entry in the YA dystopia franchise about a post-apocalyptic Chicago where people are divided by chief character trait — candor, erudition, courage, etc. (And where some people “diverge” by embodying all of them.) By this point, the city’s order has collapsed: the bad old boss is dead, but the …