Strained chipperness in the face of tragedy: the innocent-bystander shooting of an imminent bride-to-be. (Not just the characters are strained, but writer-director Brad Silberling most of all.) What the victim's parents do not know -- Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon -- is that their daughter had already broken off the engagement; …
Nightcrawler bolsters a fear that’s rattled my core since first it became clear that digital was here to stay: every schmuck with a video camera thinks they can direct. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Louis Bloom, a determined drifter who taps his inner-video journalist to become a successful network news stringer. …
A vile, vulgar nightmare of a movie that amounts to little more than a dirty garbage bag filled with closeups. Tom Ford’s (A Single Man) latest begins on shock with a quartet of naked Mrs. Grapes go-go dancing and quickly plummets. Ford intercuts two stories — the life of cauterized …
From the first images to the last -- the opening series of beautiful blackout shots of a dark, dismal, backward coal-mining community as it absorbs the news of the ascent of Sputnik in the fall of 1957, and the closing clips from charming old home movies of the real people …
High-tension CEO Tilda Swinton announces, during the bonkers opening scene set in her dead father’s infamous subterranean factory, the “discovery” of miracle superpigs and a decade-long contest to raise the most super pig of all. (Yes, their faces look more canine than porcine, but who wants to look a gift …
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, …
Grueling, downbeat, and ultimately indulgent thriller starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, the former a self-reliant Christian father who decides to take an investigation into his daughter's disappearance into his own (bloody, torturous) hands, the latter a twitchy Masonic cop who's handling the case. The story is heavy on symbolism …
Director John Madden puts on the Pulitzer Prize play by David Auburn, a hoked-up sort of mathematical mystery thriller, not so much a whodunit as a whoprovedit, centered around the mentally shaky daughter of a mentally crumpled math genius: two beautiful minds. (With Philip Glass-y motor-gunning, engine-revving background music by …
The title alludes to the U.S. policy of "extraordinary rendition" (hatched under the Clinton administration, we're informed, just to dirty the hands on both sides of the aisle, but not abused until the Bush administration), which allows for terror suspects to be whisked away in secrecy, without due process, to …
Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard knows that the old west’s big open spaces make room for the asking of big open-ended questions, and the biggest one he asks here is, “Can a man change?” Can he break from what origin and circumstance have made him, and actually choose a better …
A sci-fi thriller, but not scientific and not thrilling. Chicago glows like Oz as semi-dead war hero Jake Gyllenhaal wakes up on a commuter train in another man’s body. He is a time-tripping projection of the Source Code project run by chill dorks (Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright). Michelle Monaghan is …
Rocky III's rebuilding-the-champ drama meets Cinderella Man's Daddy struggles, with a dash of The Fighter's neighborhood grit and some Eminem on the soundtrack for the beefcake training montage. A cut Jake Gyllenhaal (so, so good in last year's Nightcrawler) does a lot of quality mush-mouthed mumbling as a punched-up boxer …
Inspired by classic adventure stories, a famous family of explorers. the Clades, attempt to navigate an uncharted, treacherous land alongside a motley crew that includes a mischievous blob, a three-legged dog, and a slew of ravenous creatures. The voice cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal as Searcher Clade, a family man who …
Inspired by classic adventure stories, a famous family of explorers. the Clades, attempt to navigate an uncharted, treacherous land alongside a motley crew that includes a mischievous blob, a three-legged dog, and a slew of ravenous creatures. The voice cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal as Searcher Clade, a family man who …
Had anyone other than David Gordon Green been attached as director, this story of a Boston Marathon bombing victim would most likely have gone unreviewed in these pages. Jake Gyllenhaal stars, in what may be his most physically and emotionally challenging role to date, as Jeff Bauman, an unremarkable man …