Writer-director-producer Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen offers a verbally frank take on the horrors of adolescence — difficult parents, difficult siblings, difficult romantic interests, and even difficult best friends — gentled just enough to provide solid entertainment. (Especially if you liked John Hughes’ teen oeuvre.) An illustration: when …
What if you woke up inside a video game? Specifically, what if you had to go through the brutal grind of dying over and over and over again in order to reach your final objective, learning just a little bit more each time before starting again at the beginning? That's …
Emma Thompson picks up her Victorian-era pen to take on the based-on-a-true story of John Ruskin (Greg Wise), a certain sort of aesthete — you know, the kind that might fall in love with an innocent girl, only to find himself horrified by her eventual womanhood and its dirty, dirty …
A year in the life of the world’s most celebrated restaurant, chef Ferran Adrià’s now-closed temple of molecular gastronomy, El Bulli. After only a single sentence of introduction, the viewer is plunged into the restaurant’s Barcelona food lab, where ordinary foodstuffs (sweet potatoes, mushrooms) are subjected to extraordinary trials (vacuuming, …
Once, Pixar made us cry, because there is sadness in life. Now, Pixar gives us a character who cries, because that’s funny. A character whose family plays a game where the object is to make each other cry. “Butterfly. Windshield wiper. Half a butterfly.” Ho ho — recreational emotional manipulation, …
A good soldier used to leading his team of supercops against Rio de Janeiro’s worst offenders gets kicked upstairs. Suddenly, a man used to following orders and accomplishing his mission must wrestle with why the orders are being given and who benefits from them. A satisfying, sometimes thrilling mix of …
Historical flight of fancy suggesting that if only Nixon could go to China, then perhaps only Elvis could go to Nixon: a rock ’n’ roller beloved by America who loved America right back, right down to her squaresville commander-in-chief. In 1970, the King surveyed his dominion and was dismayed: riots, …
The reason for black and white — or one of them, anyway — in Cero Guerra’s tale of dual Amazonian explorations is clear from the get-go: the lack of color allows texture and light to come to the fore in spectacular fashion. The film can be savored (and almost entirely …
An admirable film, well cast, that seeks, Graham Greene-like, to poke around in the smoking aftermath of World War II: Now what? Now generals must behave like politicians, including Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur (a craggy, cagey Tommy Lee Jones), who appears intent on a full conversion to political life …
Watching writer-director Sam Mendes’ latest, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that he fell in love with the setting — an achingly beautiful old movie house/general nightspot in an English seaside town — and set out to make a movie around it. Because while the place looks fantastic — Roger …
Chinese family (melo)drama, played out against the backdrop of the financial world circa 1899. There are epic aspirations at work here; it’s hard not to see traces of the Karamazovs in the interaction of Old Master and his four sons: the mute Buddhist, the violent hothead, the simpleton, and the …
Brilliant young tactician Ender Wiggin is called upon to defend earth from nasty foreign invaders — and you know what they say about what makes the the best defense. Not for nothing does space commander Harrison Ford say that "What we need is a Julius Caesar, a Napoleon." But while …
A lo-fi gem from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (they star and co-direct, and Benson writes) about brothers Justin and Aaron, damaged escapees from a San Diego back country cult/commune, caught in a toxic dynamic. Justin is the controlling, protective older brother who saved them, while frustrated younger brother Aaron …
Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky continues the fantastical memoir he began in 2013’s The Dance of Reality. But where that first film made a tragic-absurdist hero out of young Alejandro’s fierce father, Poetry necessarily casts him as the villain. Alejandro must come of age, and that means breaking with Dad and …
Remember novels? How about tape recorders? Wait, wait — what about famous writers? In 1996, the writer David Lipsky got Rolling Stone to let him join David Foster Wallace on the last leg of the author's book tour for his Big Novel, Infinite Jest. The article never ran, but Lipsky …