Another behind-the-scenes, semi-biographic glimpse into Hollywood’s past, along the lines of My Week With Marilyn. Up-and-coming Life magazine photog Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) is prescient enough to sell his editor on a layout featuring a relatively unknown, yet divinely dynamic youngster named James Dean (Dane DeHaan). (Stock thinks the youngster …
Mike Myers, with an unfunny funny voice and a dime-store false beard, plays an American-born, Indian-raised self-help prophet (the Number Two man behind Deepak Chopra), whose path to the Oprah show goes through the locker room of the Toronto Maple Leafs. The hockey fan and the Hindu follower might be …
We are dealing with a bona fide case of mistaken identity here. No, we are dealing with a bogus case of fakeout -- a crime story with an apparent innocent (Josh Hartnett) caught in the machinations of two rival gangs, African-American and Jewish, or "Darkies" and "Skullcaps" in copspeak, headed …
The Ivory-Merchant team, straight from their treatment of E.M. Forster's Room with a View, have moved on to his posthumous novel about a proper English gentleman who gives in to "the unspeakable vice of the Greeks" (or "Oscar Wilde's disease") while at Cambridge in 1909, loses his initiator to a …
Under the command of director Chris Weitz, this Twilight of the Adolf Eichmann saga begins with Oscar Isaac overseeing a team of secret agents assigned the task of tracking down the architect of the Holocaust. “Weitz power!” “I like Eich!” The mob of mock alt-right poster-blurbs that waltzed through my …
Skullduggery in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, centered around a seedy little secret agent more Kafka than Graham Greene, occupying a remote Aegean island, faithfully filing reports to the Sultan and hearing nothing in return for twenty years, and now caught up in a plot that he (and we) …
Arabian Night-ly video game of computerized desertscapes, an all-over rosy glow, a magic dagger than can turn back time, a pretentious and presumptuous plot parallel to the present-day search for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq, and a British-accented Jake Gyllenhaal to fit in with Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina, and Gemma Arterton, …
David-and-Goliath court-martial: David a divorced, drinking, limping, emotionally fragile ex-Marine, ranked sixty-seventh in his law class at Georgetown, now called upon to defend his old Vietnam buddy for opening fire on a crowd of protesters outside the American embassy in Yemen; and Goliath a State Department bad guy who, by …
Steven Spielberg's (mostly) black-and-white, three-and-a-third-hour Holocaust film. And the nearest thing to a feel-good Holocaust film that a Holocaust film can be. (The real-life hero -- a gentile businessman who spared over a thousand Jews by keeping them employed in his pots-and-pans plant -- is a reassuring figure for American …
A you-can-have-it-all inspirational tale. More precisely, you can be a seven-year-old chess prodigy (Max Pomeranc) and still be "decent," have fun, study simultaneously under two teachers of radically differing philosophies, go fishing for two weeks prior to the national championship tournament, walk off with the trophy. The movie goes through …
Ben Kingsley's obtrusive accent at the opening may signal that Self/Less is a B movie, but B movies have their very real virtues. Despite its sort of sci-fi premise — what if you could shed your worn-out body and transfer yourself into a newer, healthier model? — the film is …
A misleading title, except perhaps in tone, for a British caper picture that perches on or near the same edgy edge as Guy Ritchie's Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. A gagster's gangster film. The big difference, however, between Jonathan Glazer's debut film and either of Ritchie's is …
“Disturbing” would be one word, maybe the best word, for Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Fifties-period Dennis Lehane detective novel. Nothing, let’s be clear, in the list of ingredients — the Alcatrazzy asylum for the criminally insane, the locked-room mystery of a vanished female inmate, the dreamland visitations from the …
Happy-go-lucky espionage caper about a motley team of security experts (aging Sixties activist, conspiracy theorist, black man, blind man, young man) who are hired -- blackmailed, actually -- by generic Bad Guys to steal a little "black box" that contains a master key to every computer code in the U.S.A. …
Time-travel brainteaser of passable intellectual complexity, based on a Ray Bradbury short story (respectable s-f pedigree), and directed by Peter Hyams (Timecop, 2010, Outland, among others in the genre). The year is 2055, and a moneymaking enterprise called Time Safari arranges hunting expeditions into prehistory to gun down the same …