Pop musical from the Australian stage: Aborigines, hippies, vagabonds, a German-accented racist priest, out on the open road, circa 1969. It does not, let’s just say, travel well. Broad as the Pacific; grotesquely, gruesomely overplayed. With Rocky McKenzie, Jessica Mauboy, Ernie Dingo, Missy Higgins, Tom Budge, and Geoffrey Rush; directed …
Crime drama treats what would be an historically bad week for the NYPD as simply the average run. Amid a series of racially charged shooting incidents, three diverse policemen (the brink-of-retirement beat cop, the stressed-out undercover cop, the off-the-rails rogue cop) pursue their individual paths on what we come to …
Hitler killed off SA leader Ernst Röhm, not only for his ambition but for his brazen, risky gayness. The erotic love and fear simmering in a macho ideology that exalts male bonding and butch brutality gets vivid examination in Nicolo Donato’s film. A smart but alienated youth (Thure Lindhardt) is …
Your opportunity to see a praying mantis eat a fly's head in IMAX. These are wondrous times we live in.
Gimmicky thriller whose single gimmick, if you have not been tipped off beforehand, dawns on you with a mounting sensation of hopelessness and resignation. Ryan Reynolds, in a word, is to be the only human being to appear on screen for the duration, entombed underground in a wooden coffin in …
Christina Aguilera plays Ali, a cute-as-pie Iowa waitress with aspirations of Sunset Strip stardom. She finds herself as part of the act in a Los Angeles club, catering to the tastes of the Moulin Rouge, until the club’s owner, Cher, hears her sing. Aguilera does not so much steal the …
First time in the Middle East for a contented American working wife, now facing Empty Nest Syndrome with two children flown, planning to meet up with her husband in Cairo to see the pyramids together. The husband, a United Nations emissary overseeing a refugee camp in Gaza, is detained incommunicado …
As scandalous lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Kevin Spacey opens with a funny wallop of vanity and profanity, like a bursting boil. But raffish riffs about D.C. corruption and satirical performances by Spacey, Barry Pepper, and Jon Lovitz only skim the moral and political toxins. It’s like Tom Wolfe material converted to …
The story of the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff — “the number one lobbyist in Washington” — ranges far and wide (the Republican Revolution, the Mariana Islands, Angola, Hollywood, Indian casinos, Tom DeLay, John McCain), but the message stays single-track: the sellout of democracy, with clips of James Stewart …
An is-it-or-isn’t-it documentary on the perils and pitfalls of Facebook friendships, or anyhow one particular one between a New York photographer (Nev Schulman) and a supposed eight-year-old Michigan girl who makes paintings of his photographs. That doesn’t sound like much of a subject for a documentary, and you’re asked to …
If they’d put as much love into the story as they did into the liquid, hand-colored look of things, this story of a sad little girl, a thief, and the cat who divides his time between the two would be a triumph. As it is, A Cat in Paris still …
Wall-of-the-Roman-Empire epic, set in the early 2nd Century A.D., the wall being the figurative one the Romans ran into among the Picts in Northern Britain and the literal one Hadrian built further to the south, the outer boundary. In essence Cavalry-and-Indians in skirts and breastplates, the narrative centers on seven …
Sentimental, even goopy, ghost story about a promising young yachtsman whose near-death car wreck leaves him with the ability to See Dead People, most particularly and regularly, every day at sunset for a game of catch, the adoring younger brother who perished in the passenger seat. (The first time he’s …
A renaming and reworking by Atom Egoyan of the French film Nathalie by Anne Fontaine. Despite the pedigree (Egoyan, if you need reminding, has signed such tony items as Ararat, The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica, among others), this would fit comfortably on the Lifetime Movie Network: a suspicious wife sics a …