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 …
A couple of Iowa missionaries in China take the long and scenic route home on the Beijing-to-Moscow rail line, and the along the way fall in with drug runners. Director Brad Anderson tames his shaky camera for some recognizably Hitchcockian suspense sequences. With Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson, Eduardo Noriega, Kate …
In Ruben Östlund’s new comedy, social hierarchy is turned upside down, revealing the tawdry relationship between power and beauty. Celebrity model couple, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), are invited on a luxury cruise for the uber-rich, helmed by an unhinged boat captain (Woody Harrelson). What first appeared instagrammable …
Shoot-from-the-hip political satire about a cooked-up conflict with innocuous Albania in order to deflect attention, two weeks ahead of the election, from a Presidential sex scandal. We briefly hear, never clearly see, the President himself; the principal players are his damage-control trouble-shooter (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin …
The 20th Century Fox fanfare (with CinemaScope addendum) is performed on jungle drums and didgeridoo. Sometimes, a film earns points even before the opening credits hit the screen; other times, a variation on a studio logo is as avant garde as it gets. War's two predecessors handily proved the gimmick …
Sanctimonious sojourn in what is authoritatively called "the fourteenth worst place on Earth." (The worst? "L.A., of course.") The narrative framework is the well-worn one of the development of conscience in the objective journalist, determined in this instance to lead an exodus of orphans out of the war-torn Balkans. This …
A savvy commercial calculation that takes the sport of basketball down to its grass roots: the pickup game on the urban playground, where anyone might aspire to be a Larry Bird For A Day. Woody Harrelson, as a big fish in a small pond, is nothing if not common: the …
It’s happened to all of us at some point, whether riding on a bus, seated in a waiting room, or standing in line. The seemingly harmless-looking person next to you unexpectedly launches into an unhinged stream of consciousness monologue that s/he hopes will pass for conversation. Such is the life …
Nerdy, neurotic Jesse Eisenberg, the unlikeliest Texan, narrates a postmodern post-apocalyptic road trip through a population of secondhand flesh-eating zombies, in the company of the only three surviving humans east of Bill Murray’s mansion in Beverly Hills: the Twinkie-craving Woody Harrelson and two scamming sisters, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. …