The problem: geek culture has ascended to the point where it's difficult to portray, say, college guys who do a capella renditions of pop songs as lovable losers who have to triumph over their own peculiarity to win the respect of their peers. Even if they're not the Big Men …
It's hard to put hunger onscreen. Starvation, sure, that's easy: the visible ribcage, the distended belly, the face stretched tight over the skull. But a hungry person can look very much like a full person - can even look like someone who eats too much. Directors Kristi Jacobson and Lori …
At last. A French sex comedy about a couple of married dudes who can't stop running around on their wives, but who can take a moment now and then to wax philosophical about the situation.
Play keep-away! Jessica Biel's reward for her brief, vanilla-flavored performance as Vera Miles in Hitchcock is a lousy dye-job and a starring role opposite a wrong man in this feculent rom-com. Gerard Butler stars as Biel's ex, a once-mighty sports figure whose recent run of bad luck finds him coaching …
A churning, driven French film about a child-protection unit of the Paris police and how the harsh impact of their work (re: prostitution, violence, abandonment, pedophilia) lacerates their lives even as it bonds them. The director Maïwenn cast herself as a photographer who falls for the unit’s sensitive hothead (vivid …
From Abby to The Possession, studios with an "anything for a buck" attitude have spent over 40 years dutifully repackaging The Exorcist. Director Ole Bornedal's (Nightwatch) based-on-factual-events entry in the pea-soup cavalcade of horror tells the tale of a young girl (the simply dreadful Natasha Calis) who purchases a Dybbuk-in-the-box …
It's a fun premise: take a practitioner of a universally loathed profession — New York City bike messengers, a group that treats traffic laws and those who follow them as little more than video game obstacles — and make him a hero, a guy whose Special Delivery can literally deliver …
Somebody took a perfectly good black comedy and grafted a fairy tale onto it. The results aren’t pretty. What could have been a delicious dissection of one poor bastard’s attempt to become cool by whoring out his upscale home for party-fueled destruction winds up as an affirmation of true love …
A long-planned, crushingly filmed prequel to Alien, with director Ridley Scott again insulting his high achievement in Blade Runner. Many borrowed themes get rummaged together with absurd effects, dismal violence, and self-administered surgery by a scientist (Noomi Rapace) that seems both for and against abortion (in this ugly, loopy vision, …
A natural gas salesman (Matt Damon, not director Gus Van Sant) uses the economy as a bully stick to convince a small town into accepting his company's offer for drilling rights to their properties. He is opposed by a charismatic stranger (John Krasinski) who takes advantage of an open-mic night …
Good acting has seldom been more excellent than in this, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut. Dusty lives up to his nickname with a whiskered senior moment of a movie. (It’s best that Hoffman started late in the game; audiences won’t have to put up with too many more vanity projects like …
If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby had married Daisy — if the middle-class Midwestern boy’s dreams of achieving happiness through wealth had all come true — you might have wound up with something very close to the story told in this fascinating and intimate documentary about what does and does not …
Sordid action sludge, pumped for dumb payoffs. Indonesian SWAT cops, with no plan but “kill,” assault a drug kingpin’s high-rise full of ambush traps and collateral (civilian) damage. Giving death and enduring pain are the measures of machismo. The reunion of opposing brothers is ludicrous, and redemption is nowhere to …
Built like a bullet, yet with his mind a cage of wormy lust, greed, and bigotry, cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is far below the LAPD’s finest. Oren Moverman directed as if fiercely merging Colors and Bad Lieutenant, while chief writer James Ellroy overplays his slumming zeal for lowlife crud. …