You can take the wannabe gangsta out of the city, but taking the gangsta out of his sweet rebel soul is another thing entirely. Ricky (Julian Dennison) is a mound of urban teenage misery whose last stop before juvie is a tumbledown farm at the edge of the New Zealand …
Wraparound treatment of the characters from Snow White and the Huntsman (some of the story occurs before the original, some after) that isn’t exactly good, but is definitely better than might be expected. The story borrows from Frozen — semi-close sisters, one of whom has a chilly heart and abilities …
Even if writer-director Rungano Nyoni’s film were a lesser achievement — less unsettlingly complicated, less bitterly funny, less bluntly sad — it would still have the witch truck, one of the great cinematic images of this or any other year. The witch truck is an old orange flatbed, purchased by …
Director Raoul Peck takes African-American author James Baldwin’s notes for Remember This House — his unfinished “story of America” as told through the lives of slain activists Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evars — and fashions them into a freeform meditation on race and America, read masterfully …
With each passing entry in the Ice Age franchise (this is number five), the gap between the anarchic joy of the brief bits featuring Scrat the Squirrel and the plodding, on-the-trunk bulk of the film starring Manny the Mammoth & Family & Friends grows wider. (The image of a world-splitting …
There are three good things about this film. One, Scrat's relentless pursuit of acorny pleasure. Two, Sid the Sloth's venture into physical comedy when he eats a berry that leaves him a paralyzed bag of jelly. Three, the adorable army of hyraxes, never mind the silly blue facepaint indicating battle-ready …
Writer-director-producer-star Lake Bell follows her brainy woman-in-a-man’s world workplace comedy In A World with something at once more radical and more reactionary: a spirited defense of marriage. Of course, you can’t go defending something so common and square without bringing in handjob parlors, hippie communes, and sex addicts for color …
...will anyone care? That's the question posed by this friendly, gently moving documentary from Patrick Creadon (Wordplay) as it follows Matthew and Emily, a couple of designer-builders (who are also a couple), as they implement a design and build program at a high school in poverty-stricken Bertie County, North Carolina. …
The death of one animal (a faithful dog) and the arrival of another (an invading rat amid the tasteful, immaculate environs of a California bungalow) signal a change in the life of composed, content (complacent?) Chardonnay connoisseur Carol (a luminous yet thoroughly terrestrial Blythe Danner). First there's a new pool …
Or, If it Hadn't Been for Schoolboy Bullying, We Might Have Lost the Second World War. Alan Turing famously invented something like the world's first computer as part of the British effort to crack the code employed by Germany's Enigma machine. And this is the story of that, told with …
Michael Mohan delivers a fun if flawed twist on the old argument between faith and science — specifically, which one gets to save the world, and what exactly salvation looks like, anyway. It helps that it’s lovely to look at, and not just because of big-eyed star Sydney Sweeney. (If …
Director Tarsem Singh (The Fall, The Cell) has been called a visionary, which presumably means he has an eye for interesting visuals. And that’s almost enough to carry you through this bit of buff, burnished bloodshed, a mashup of 300 (invading barbarian army against civilized Greeks), Troy (immortality through deeds …
A talky talking-heads documentary, but one that spins a tale dizzying enough to keep the drama going (with a little help from old home video and dramatic re-enactment). When Nicholas Barclay was 13, he disappeared from the streets of San Antonio. Three and a half years later, his family gets …
Pedro Almodovar's latest is a drawing-room sex comedy set in the first-class cabin of Peninsula Flight 2549. The flight is in trouble — caused, don't you know, by ordinary, heterosexual, procreative sex between a couple on the ground. (She has morning sickness and crashes a luggage cart; he rushes to …
Sharp little showbiz story about Carol, a woman seeking to follow her famous father into the world of movie trailer narration. The King — gravel-voiced god Don La Fontaine — is dead, and the industry needs a new voice to tell the world about its latest girl-friendly action epic. Dad …