Lifeless bisexual love triangle out of a Michael Chabon novel. The musty bookishness begins with the nagging first-person narration of a good-looking dullard (“After you’ve thrown up in the topiary and rinsed your mouth out with cheap vodka, you really don’t want to talk to anybody”), but it continues even …
Adoption nightmare wherein an affluent suburban couple, parents of two children already, immediately replace their stillborn baby with a nine-year-old Russian of cute accent and evil intent. Outside of a committed performance from Vera Farmiga as the troubled mother, it’s all very routine until the dilly of a surprise twist, …
A prequel to 2009's Orphan finds 25-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman stepping out of a time machine to once again play Esther Albright, the 31 year-old woman born with proportional dwarfism, a physical disorder that allows her to pass for 12. The first thing you notice about the Estonian hospital that houses …
It’s tough to make a compelling character out of someone suffering from mental illness; ultimately, all you can do is look on with pity and horror. (And also sympathy, thanks to some hammer-subtle backstory.) It’s even tougher to make a national hero out of one. But when it’s 1972 and …
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 …
In the not-too-distant future, a retired jewel thief in the early stages of dementia is given a robotic servant by his children. The gift is intended to place the kids' minds at ease while at the same time assisting the old curmudgeon through his golden years. Initially resentful, Dad warms …
Florid, gaudy, tricksy, anything-for-attention neo-noir about a speed freak and stool pigeon who in his former life was a blissfully married blues trumpeter. "Keep your eyes open," he advises us straightaway in voice-over. "Nothing is as it seems." Just as good a reason to keep them shut. Val Kilmer, Vincent …
The re-enacted downfall of up-and-coming journalist Stephen Glass, twenty-seven of whose forty-one pieces for The New Republic in the mid-Nineties turned out to have been fabricated in whole or in part. No great shakes as a movie, clumping along in the talking-heads style of a TV docudrama, the writing and …
Dilapidated mansion in the bayou. Walls without mirrors. A secret room in the attic. Strange hoodoo rites. Long-ago deaths by violence. It's all there but the magic. Southern Gothic hysterics with no involvement. Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard; directed by Iain Softley.
In telling the story of a “room tuner,” director and co-writer Michael Tyburski keeps things, fittingly enough, quiet. Even its most impassioned moments avoid the raised voice and, with one sad and telling exception, the dramatic gesture. Or perhaps “muted” is a better word, given the emotions that roil beneath …
Offbeat comedy (meaning that the audience is not orchestrated into fortissimo laughter, but left, as it were, to play by ear) revolving around a fortyish dog-loving spinster who loses a dog, acquires and loses another one, acquires and loses fifteen more, and finally finds a new self. Part of that …