Perhaps there really is such a thing as a fickle Muse; a spirit of genius that sometimes alights upon the artist like a butterfly upon a leaf, but then, suddenly and inexplicably, flies off again. How else to explain writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s decision to sully two fine films that …
Perhaps there really is such a thing as a fickle Muse; a spirit of genius that sometimes alights upon the artist like a butterfly upon a leaf, but then, suddenly and inexplicably, flies off again. How else to explain writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s decision to sully two fine films that …
A neatly nasty cautionary tale about the dangers faced by the artist when he undertakes to speak for the common man. Richard Jenkins (Killing Them Softly) is spot-on as an old-school, Studs-Terkel style newspaper columnist drunk on the notion that his city is universally grateful to be immortalized in fishwrap. …
There are reports that director Michael Dougherty’s sequel to Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot had a budget of $200 million dollars. That’s not normally the sort of thing you would mention in a review, but when you see a film that is almost entirely driven by spectacle and you keep marveling …
Director John Sayles (remember Lone Star?) understands that characters are crucial. He has given us a couple of good ones in Bernice and Fontayne (Lisa Gay Hamilton and Yolanda Ross, both relishing the opportunity), former high school besties reunited in middle age when Bernice is assigned as Fontayne's parole officer …
Gold — or, Mr. Wells Goes to Wall Street. Stephen Gaghan’s gussied-up treatment of a true story about a struggling salesman (Matthew McConaughey, fat, bald, and snaggletoothed) and a rogue prospector (Edgar Ramirez at his most mysterious) and their mad quest to find gold in the jungle is, like its …
The title refers to a painting, but the subtitle —The Story of a Stolen Life — has to do with protagonist Theodore Decker, a child (and later in the film, a young man) whose development is arrested by the death of his mother in an explosion. And by his father’s …
A long and twisty argument for the notion that somewhere along the way, talented, high-style director David Fincher stopped liking people: the characters onscreen, the souls in the theater, even the abstract mass of humanity. Pathology still interests him, though, and so we get toxic parents, toxic lovers, toxic siblings, …
Alan Milne (a battened down Domhnall Gleeson) was a happy, witty West End playwright, until the bombardments and horror of World War I ruined his peace and drove him into the country, there to work on a book about peace. His son Christopher (Will Tilston) was a happy, clever dramatist …
Three years after Brave, Pixar gets around to making a film that’s actually about bravery, aka the right response to fear. The setup: dinosaurs never went extinct; instead, they turned into people. That is, they became farmers who keep chickens and store up crops, and also cowboys who guard their …
It's a tricky business to treat emotionally devastating subject matter — say, the orphans of genocidal violence — without stumbling into overwhelming horror or unrealistic cheer. The Good Lie very nearly walks the line in telling the story of four refugees from war-torn Sudan: Mamere (Arnold Oceng), Jeremiah (Ger Duany), …
More than a soundtrack in search of a movie, though Daniel Lopatin’s propulsive electronic score displays an excellence and precision that most decidedly does not come through in cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ beyond-extensive use of closeups. Star Robert Pattinson can act, and he’s not hard to look at. But to …