David Ayer resumes his self-appointed role as police watchdog, this time as director in addition to screenwriter (Training Day, Dark Blue). The man he has his eye on, a very disturbed veteran of the action in Afghanistan, is not already a policeman but soon hopes to be. When, however, he …
Director and co-writer Scott Cooper re-teams with his Out of the Furnace star Christian Bale to tell the story of Captain Joseph J. Blocker, a man of war facing a violent transition — physically and otherwise — to peacetime living. After a lifetime spent killing people because those were his …
Hayao Miyazaki, the doyen of anime, creates here a dreamworld that doesn't so much pull the spectator into it as push him towards his own: more snore than howl. It certainly doesn't lack for imaginative detail. On the contrary, it could have made do with a little less. The titular …
Hayao Miyazaki, the doyen of anime, creates here a dreamworld that doesn't so much pull the spectator into it as push him towards his own: more snore than howl. It certainly doesn't lack for imaginative detail. On the contrary, it could have made do with a little less. The titular …
Hayao Miyazaki, the doyen of anime, creates here a dreamworld that doesn't so much pull the spectator into it as push him towards his own: more snore than howl. It certainly doesn't lack for imaginative detail. On the contrary, it could have made do with a little less. The titular …
Hayao Miyazaki, the doyen of anime, creates here a dreamworld that doesn't so much pull the spectator into it as push him towards his own: more snore than howl. It certainly doesn't lack for imaginative detail. On the contrary, it could have made do with a little less. The titular …
Todd Haynes blows another cloud of mist into the mystique of Bob Dylan. The filmmaker, who once enlisted Barbie dolls to tell the Karen Carpenter story, now borrows a gimmick used by Todd Solondz in Palindromes, employing a rotation of dissimilar actors to play a single role, a multiplication of …
At one point in Terrence Malick’s heady huffing of the sour stink of success, his protagonist (a skull-faced Christian Bale) muses, “So much love inside us that never gets out.” So many words, too — like nearly every line of any importance here, the observation remains unspoken. It’s probably for …
A psychiatric intern brings his upper-crusty East Coast fiancée (at work on her dissertation on the reproductive activities of the fruit fly) to stay in his mother's house in the Hollywood Hills. But his mother, a free-as-the-breeze record producer, hasn't yet vacated the premises as agreed, along with the British …
A preening, fairly addictive movie about addiction. Bradley Cooper is Eddie, a blocked New York writer who takes mystery pills from an untrustworthy man. They give him fabulous powers, and Manhattan becomes the cracked mirror of Eddie’s rise to power. Of course, his real drug is ego, and Cooper achieves …
Feministically enlightened treatment of the Louisa May Alcott chestnut -- reason enough to remake it, though it's still a little insipid and nicey-nice. (Ultra-conservatives, however, can take away a rationale against charity for the poor: you might catch something deadly at their door. ) Trini Alvarado's Meg and Kirstin Dunst's …
Christian Bale, doing a Raging De Niro in reverse, put himself on a Dachau diet and lost in the neighborhood of sixty pounds — and for what? A suspenseless psychological thriller about a factory worker with a distorted reality. The distortions are eventually explained, if anyone's still interested. Director Brad …
Shakespeare's supernatural sex romp re-set in Tuscany in the age of the bicycle and the Victrola, with all attendant discord and discomfort. (Why would Tuscans have names like Theseus, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander? Why, prithee, would they still be talking like that?) It doesn't help that the major roles are …
Hey, let's put on a show! -- a Disney musical about child labor, union organization, and strikebreaking in New York City at the turn of the century. And let's have it be in muted, monochromed color (for social, historical realism). And let's have a cast of thousands, hundreds, at least …
Hey, let's put on a show! -- a Disney musical about child labor, union organization, and strikebreaking in New York City at the turn of the century. And let's have it be in muted, monochromed color (for social, historical realism). And let's have a cast of thousands, hundreds, at least …