Claudio Giovannesi directs, cowrites, and composes the music for this story of an Italian Muslim youth of Egyptian extraction who must navigate adolescence, heritage, and religio-cultural-romantic entanglements. In Italian with English subtitles.
Generation Y gets its web-slinger, and as cash-grab reboots go, it’s not bad. This time, high-school dweeb Peter Parker isn’t such a nice guy at the outset: he’s a New Yorker, after all, and on top of that, he’s an orphan with a dad-shaped chip on his shoulder. And he’s …
A flippant but turgid sequel. The American Pie gang comes to a reunion, the “men” still quite juvenile, the women a touch jaded. The body-function gags lack a ruling brain, and a Brothers Karamazov joke seems to be from another planet. This is stamped plastic for people who find Jason …
So far, Michael Haneke has specialized in focusing his clinician’s eye on tests of morality that arise during life’s deeply unsettling transgressive moments. A film about losing one’s spouse to Alzheimer's seemed to be a logical progression. Selecting French acting legends Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva to star as the …
That's the name for the Scotch that gets lost due to evaporation during aging. No word yet on the Devil's Share, though presumably that's the part that gets drunk. A cheerful little heist film, just right for these whiskey-drenched times.
Admittedly, yours truly is not the most informed critical voice to heed when it comes to assessing stodgy British costume dramas. (I tend to side with Francois Truffaut, who once referred to "British cinema" as an oxymoron.) Still, soon after the bits of choreographed slapstick at the film's opening, it …
West Hollywood, 1979. A carefree female impersonator (Alan Cumming) and a closeted D.A. (Garret Dillahunt) engage in a one night stand, and in no time they’re a couple immersed in a custody battle to adopt a 14-year-old (Isaac Leyva) with Down Syndrome. (The boy’s mother is serving time for drug …
By way of a review, Scott Marks presents the How to Make a PG-13 Horror Film Checklist: Spooky house, pre-credit flashback to Super8 footage, two attractive teenage-ish leads, a Kristen Stewart replica, paranormal security-cam footage, a first-time director manning the till, a plot that crumbles faster than a piece of …
Director Nicholas Jarecki sets out to make you sympathize with a scumbag, and comes very close to succeeding. Yes, his protagonist is a rich Wall Street bastard, trying to game the system in the age of Occupy and Bernie Madoff. Yes, he's a philanderer, waxing familial at his birthday party …
Oscar-bound dramatization of the far-fetched but true story of six Americans who managed to escape the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and find shelter in Canada by pretending to be actors in a big budget Hollywood space opera. Ben Affleck directs and stars as the CIA “exfiltration” expert who comes …
Who's up for an existential road trip in an old Mercedes convertible? Colin Firth turns in an understated performance as Wallace Avery, a thwarted, once-promising golfer who sets out to make a new self for himself somewhere else. (Small wonder: he lives in Florida, but it feels like someone hit …
A former FBI agent (Christian Slater) is brought in to track down a terrorist-killing vigilante. Also stars Donald Sutherland and Elika Portnoy.
In Russia, war movie with skinny blonde heroine and bizarre mecha elements watches YOU.
First-time writer-director Alice Winocour obviously sees room for feminist revisionism in Augustine, a fact-based period drama that pits a 19th-century French neurologist (Vincent London), skilled in the art of hypnosis, against his star patient, a 19-year-old servant girl (Soko) sentenced to life in an asylum after a dinner-disrupting seizure leaves …
A labor of love on the part of über-geek director Joss Whedon, if not necessarily a labor of art. The genius here shows not in the story (magic geegaw!), nor in the performances (Mark Ruffalo’s embittered Bruce Banner/Hulk excepted), but in Whedon’s ability to juggle six disparate comic-book heroes while …