A heavy-on-the-sugar recipe for an irascible but lovable old Polish baker: Peter Falk in a latex Halloween mask like something out of a Gahan Wilson cartoon. D.B. Sweeney is the fine young man (and gifted physician) into whom the baker raises his parentless grandson. By the end, you're expected to …
Todd Haynes's personal baptism in the commercial mainstream. It starts out as if it could be an extension of one of the three plot strands in his 16mm black-and-white homoerotic undergrounder, Poison -- the science-fictional strand to do with a "Leper Sex Killer on the Loose." An AIDS metaphor, unmistakably. …
Infidelity, homosexuality, incest, madness, and murder among the Bakelite heirs. Fact-based story, unconvincing in period (mid-Forties through early-Seventies), performance, dialogue, staging. Filmmaker Tom Kalin’s sophomore effort shows little advance over his freshman Swoon. His graduation falls behind schedule. With Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne, Hugh Dancy, and Elena Anaya.
True Grit, R.I.P.D., The Giver, and now this schlocky bit of medieval Young Adult adventure. At this point, it's tempting to wonder if Jeff Bridges accepts roles chiefly on the basis of whether or not he'll get to sport grizzly facial hair and talk funny. Here, he plays a spook: …
Sharper opens with close-ups on the gear assembly of a Rolex watch — perhaps a promise to the viewer that what follows will be a masterpiece of intricate moving parts, providing a precise, satisfying experience with understated elegance. But alas, the Rolex that actually appears in the film is a …
From the E. Annie Proulx novel about a widower named Quoyle who returns with his daughter Bunny to his Newfoundland roots, and becomes (among other things) the ace reporter on a local rag called The Gammy Bird. A tall tale, a dark tale, a droll tale, arch, sardonic, grotesque, gaudy, …
Robert Altman shuffles together several Raymond Carver short stories, or at any rate several sets of characters from them, and in so doing transforms pithiness into garrulity -- three hours' worth. At the same time he has upped the levels of kookiness and smuttiness, and lost touch with Carver's common …
Adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel detailing the planned last day of a homosexual English professor (an exquisitely tortured Colin Firth) grieving his dead lover, anally-compulsively tying up loose ends, saying his guarded goodbyes, practicing the proper posture to shoot himself in bed, laying out his burial attire with the …
Still Alzheimer’s. Were there preventative measures to follow that might help ward off dementia, it would be a lot easier to excuse this type of glossy, high profile disease-of-the-week Oscar bait. There aren’t, and the only reasons films like this exist are for actors to rack up as many awards …
It may be possible — perhaps by squinting and turning your head just so and maybe crossing your eyes a touch — to see why director George Clooney juxtaposes, at a climactic moment, the sick comedic violence of a man finding himself unable to extract his golf club from the …
That culture-vulture, James Ivory, circles this time around a book without cachet, a disreputable bit of scholarship by Arianna Huffington. The cachet resides entirely in its subject, the Big Cubist, the very embodiment of Modern Art, reduced here to a woman-devouring monster, reduced additionally to a scenery-chewing villain in the …
Relationship comedy revolving around a quartet of enviable New Yorkers, a sister and brother (Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup) and their respective mates (David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal), all of whom are, or have been, engaged in fruitful creative pursuits: a celebrated actress of stage and screen, a couple of writers, and …
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, as adapted by David Mamet, as staged by Andre Gregory, as filmed by Louis Malle. The key features of the theatrical production, along with the complete cast minus the late Ruth Nelson, are preserved on screen: no artifices of costume and décor, just ordinary modern-day dress and …
A fairy tale of divorce, one that imagines an blissful way out of the trauma brought on by Mom and Dad putting a bullet in the love that gave rise to your existence. Julianne Moore is a comically narcissistic aging rocker; Steve Coogan is her gotta-ramble mate, and Onata Aprile …
Evelyn and her oblivious son Ziggy seek out replacements for each other as Evelyn desperately tries to parent an unassuming teenager at her shelter, while Ziggy fumbles through his pursuit of a brilliant young woman at school. From writer/director Jesse Eisenberg and starring Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard.