What if Casablanca was set in Marseilles, and Rick was a famous writer and also dead, but a fugitive Jew (Franz Rogowski, a remarkable blend of Woody Harrelson and Joaquin Phoenix) had assumed his identity? Why fugitive? Why else? the story is set near-ish the modern day, but there are …
The movie itself was rather overwhelmed by the advance announcement that its star, Joaquin Phoenix, was hereupon retiring from acting to pursue a career in hip-hop. It is a movie easily overwhelmed, an intimate little indie directed and co-written by James Gray (The Yards, We Own the Night, both with …
Oliver Stone makes a stomach-lurching return to his worst Natural Born Killers style. Provided, that is, "style" can describe an indiscriminate hodgepodge of manic mannerisms from music videos, half-minute commercial spots (soft drinks, jeans), and "reality"-based TV shows (NYPD Blue, ER, et al.). Nowhere in his repertoire of cinematic hiccups, …
Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan painted himself into a corner with The Sixth Sense, and has climbed the walls ever since: Unbreakable, Signs, and now this. His outsized initial success seems to have given him an inflated sense of self-importance, an inflamed sense of mission: not simply to top the sensationalism …
The same line, that would be, as the previous year's Ray, a musical biopic on a recently fallen giant of popular song, C&W; instead of R&B;, Johnny Cash instead of Ray Charles, two years dead instead of mere months, but the same backstage tale of early poverty and tragedy, meteoric …
The old story, with new operatic embellishment, of brothers on opposite sides of the law (Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix), plus a father firmly on the lawful side (Robert Duvall), and Russian drug dealers so ruthless and repugnant as to straighten out the bent brother. All pretty obvious and overstated, although …
Modestly budgeted little crime film traces the well-worn path of the ex-con who wants to go straight but who veers off under bad influence -- in this case into the unsexy world of corruption in the commuter-rail industry around New York City: bribery, kickbacks, intimidation, and, when necessary, rougher stuff. …
Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a sociopathic veteran who earns cash by tracking down kidnapped girls and butchering their abductors. Sadly, it seems as though everything director Lynne Ramsey has to submit on the horrors of parenting was already covered by her deeply unsettling We Need to Talk About Kevin. Taxi …