There are nine high C's in the aria "Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!" Nine!
An operetta about international finance. Really! A government conspires to keep a rich woman in the country (and the economy afloat) by finding her a native husband.
Writer-director Michel Gondry mashes up a coming-of-age story and a road movie by sending his titular pair (the first is small enough for his age to be mistaken for a girl, while the second smells of his time spent tinkering with old engines) off through the French countryside in a …
Miles Davis biopic, less about making art than it is about everything that gets in the way of that —mostly commerce, but also relationships: some old (a lost love), some new (a pesky journalist looking to tell a comeback story), and some ongoing (an even more pesky recording industry looking …
Support your local filmmakers! For most of his life, executive producer, cowriter (along with wife, Betty), and star Sid Burston has had an obsession with jazz great, Miles Davis. Often described as a Davis lookalike with a mustache, squint a little and one can’t help but see a little of …
Over 50 writers and performers were interviewed for this “laughing heads” documentary, and the cumulative decades' worth of advice they have to offer makes it more a handbook for budding comics than the contemplation on the amount of pain required to make it to the pros that the title suggests. …
A scattershot but intriguing account of a year or so in the life of the artistic community in Edo during the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate. When we meet O-Ei, she is a young woman living with her father Hokusai, a (real-life) great painter who is not a great …
Brad Bird’s resolutely buoyant Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol repositioned a series of otherwise contrived money-spinning sequels on top of the summer tentpole, making it easy for an inevitable predecessor to sock out of the park. It’s back to business as usual when Cruise Factory gag-writer-turned-contract-director Christopher McQuarrie (Valkyrie, Jack …
Another story about death that’s been done to death. Toni Colette goes full-cancer, Drew Barrymore acts the part of concerned BFF, and between them, the barbed one-liners metastasize almost as quickly as the tears. Though the outcome remains the same, if given the choice, in cases of terminal illness sagas, …
A winning, slightly screwball investigation of the fraught relationship between writer and subject, or maybe artist and muse, or maybe both. The second collaboration between Greta Gerwig (star and co-writer) and Noah Baumbach (director and co-writer) — the first was the cheerfully modern Frances Ha — tells the story of …
Oh look, we took two movies that we made out of one book and put them together to make one movie!
The gasoline should have hit the typewriter while this one was still in the pre-production stage. While on a suicide run through the desert, a tortured but terminally hip filmmaker (Garrett Hedlund) meets his evil twin in the form of Dennis Hopper-impersonating spree-killer Oscar Isaac. The nine minutes of Hedlund’s …
Wuershan directs this Chinese action-horror adaptation of Ghost Blows Out the Light by Tianxi Bachang. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Tombs will be raided!