A power surge on an International Space Antenna nearly knocks career astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt, in his earnest, Robert Redford mode) out of commission. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that Ad Astra, Latin for “to the stars,” is Apocalypse Now in space — there’s a lot of Capt. Willard …
Black comedy for kids, specifically those too young to remember the mid-Sixties television sitcom of the same name. The pattern of inversions is simple to grasp -- the bouquet of rose stems with the blossoms snipped off, the children holding a TV antenna outdoors in a lightning storm -- and …
They had me at Uncle Fester’s nipples. And kudos to Nick Kroll for restoring Jackie Coogan’s insensitive lisp to the character! Much closer in spirit to Charles Addams’ ghoulishly byzantine etchings (Lurch was indeed an escapee from a home for the criminally insane) and the '60s sitcom it spawned than …
America fell in love with Uncle Fester’s nipples. Why else would a topless Fester be there to greet audiences at the outset, the first big guffaw in a rapidly narrowing field of laughs? The press release promised “many new kooky characters” before asking “What could possibly go wrong?” New kooky …
Monotony in nothing flat. The Addamses have a new addition (a mustachioed bundle of gloom named Pubert), and the two jealous older kids are packed off to summer camp, and the hired nanny is actually a black-widow serial killer who has set her cap for Uncle Fester. In the nanny …
James Franco plays a writer who needs a chemical bump to help him focus and produce. Pamela Romanowsky directs.
Conscienceless romantic revenge comedy about a couple of rejected lovers who team up to spy on and sabotage the love nest of their respective exes. (The setting-up of a camera obscura as a surveillance device is a nice scene on purely technical grounds.) Meg Ryan, with punkish dark roots and …
A modern-day vampire tale with a rock-song soundtrack ("You're my sanctuary./ Baby, let me in./ You're my addiction"). Always a flexible metaphor, the blood-thirst in this instance is not just a synonym for drugs, as the title might imply, and as the hypodermic syringe bears out, but an all-purpose synonym …
A reasonably engrossing documentary portrait of behavioral researcher Victor DeNoble, the first person to blow the whistle on the American tobacco industry’s efforts to manufacture a “maximally addictive” cigarette. Kudos to director Charles Evans Jr. for shying away from scare-tactic closeups of diseased lungs, but his reliance on rudimentary animation …
A shoe salesman and avid bandoneon player is forced to emigrate to Germany, but then he meets a beautiful but foulmouthed taxi driver as his tango band gets a new singer. Directed by German Kral.
Indian mythological film based on the Hindu epic Ramayana. Directed by Om Raut, starring Prabhas, Saif Ali Khan, Kriti Sanon, and Sunny Singh.
Indian mythological film based on the Hindu epic Ramayana. Directed by Om Raut, starring Prabhas, Saif Ali Khan, Kriti Sanon, and Sunny Singh.
Indian mythological film based on the Hindu epic Ramayana. Directed by Om Raut, starring Prabhas, Saif Ali Khan, Kriti Sanon, and Sunny Singh.
A mondo-bizarro movie: spare, precise, neatnik images of uniformly loopy characters. ("I wanted to make a film," director Atom Egoyan has stated, "about believable people doing believable things in an unbelievable way." Batting average: .333.) The title character is an insurance-claims adjuster who is worshipped as "an angel" at the …