A tight, trim, grueling police drama about a homicide investigation that turns into a drug bust that turns into a nasty game of cop-hunt. It's the future, so naturally, things are urban, wasted, and awful. Overmatched officers in full body armor patrol a city that stretches along most of the …
Makes the case that the medium isn't just the message, it's the magic. Specifically, there's a reason why a painting on a movie poster can do a better job of capturing the spell-casting power of cinema than a photograph can. At least when the painter is humble workaday genius Drew …
A sexed-up (if not exactly sexy), sassy, and ultimately slight crime comedy/road movie from Ethan Coen, who co-wrote the script with his wife Tricia Cooke. The setting is 1999, when gay marriage was still a matter of where you lived — worth noting when your protagonists are lesbians living in …
Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski: hunched and shuffling, folded in on himself both physically and otherwise. When we meet him, he's tending bar at his cousin Marv's (a ponderous, sullen James Gandolfini) old place, a neighborhood joint now run by Chechen gangsters who sometimes use it to receive unbankable cash …
Yes, it means what you think it means — but also more! Jack Black commits, wholeheartedly and straightfacedly, to the part of Dan Landsman, a Midwestern guy with an admiring boss, a great wife, and a good kid who is nevertheless obsessed with having some bros. Guy friends, like the …
Despite the '70s arthouse softcore vibe, there's little in the way of sex and/or nudity in this deeply felt BDSM romance. Instead, writer-director Peter Strickland makes the viewer squirm in the presence of naked emotional intimacy. Cynthia is a gently aging entomologist; Evelyn is her young and willing slave. Or …
Lawrence of Arrakis meets Dr. Sandworm, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bene Gesserit. Paul Atreides, who left the green and pleasant land of his home planet for the desert wastes of Dune, finds himself eager to avenge the death of his royal father at the …
Lawrence of Arrakis meets Dr. Sandworm, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bene Gesserit. Paul Atreides, who left the green and pleasant land of his home planet for the desert wastes of Dune, finds himself eager to avenge the death of his royal father at the …
Lawrence of Arrakis meets Dr. Sandworm, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bene Gesserit. Paul Atreides, who left the green and pleasant land of his home planet for the desert wastes of Dune, finds himself eager to avenge the death of his royal father at the …
A happy match of style and subject: Christopher Nolan’s genius for treating movies like chess matches — the careful, methodical combination and orchestration of events and characters to produce an inescapable conclusion — is brilliantly employed in this account of the British (and French) attempt to retreat across the English …
How can Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood’s documentary meditation on stand-up comedians, which features a murderer’s row of talent — Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Gary Shandling, Jerry Lewis, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, Kevin Hart, et. al. — be almost entirely unfunny, and more than a little dull? It starts with …
Documentarian Otto Bell’s titular huntress — a 13-year-old Kazakh named Aisholpan who hails from a family boasting generations of champion (male) eagle hunters — is impossible not to like and/or root for. She’s cheerful, natural, diligent, sweet, and full of dreams about following in her father’s footsteps. So Dad consults …
Totally not a remake of Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. For one thing, there's no absent father. For another, the titular alien is a cute robot instead of a lumpen critter. For still another, he doesn't need to phone home. Rather, he needs to assemble the key to his ride, …
Sarah (star and cowriter Brit Marling) is a rising star at a private espionage agency who gets assigned to infiltrate the titular domestic protest organization. The East does punishment-fits-the-crime work: flooding the home of an oil exec with the same crude that his company spilled all over a coastline, etc. …
An aftermath story, following up on the events of 2012's worlds-colliding drama Easy Money. Lanky Swede JW (a befuddled Joel Kinnaman) is about to score his first supervised release from prison after his violent stint as a coke dealer. Now that he's trying to go straight, he's got something to …