aka, people sure do love kitten videos, aka, keeping it real by keeping it...unreal. A suburban dad (Keegan-Michael Key) and his slacker friend (Jordan Peele) go undercover as gangsters in an effort to recover the slacker’s new kitten. (It seeks him out after escaping a slo-mo drug massacre in a …
"We're all niggers now," says bruised Georgia peach Augusta (Brit Marling), early on in Daniel Barber's (Harry Brown) rather literal take on Sherman's rape of the South. What she means is, when the menfolk are gone and the living's precarious, everybody's got to pitch in and do the dirty work, …
There was a decent idea here: what if a couple of international superspies (Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot, appropriately fabulous to behold) were forced to go undercover in the subtle social labyrinth of American suburbia? A place where you risked blowing your cover by not knowing which dress to wear …
Boy (Thure Lindhardt) meets boy number two (Zachary Booth) while dialing for hookups, boy hooks up with boy number two and is then told not to get his hopes up, since boy number two has a girlfriend. But whaddya know, the boys eventually get together, and everything would be great …
Queasy-making "real-life superhero" story, not so much for the graphic, nasty violence (though there is plenty of that) as for its roller coaster of tonal shifts. Emotionally shattering events — the murder of a father, the accidental killing of a mother, the slaughter of ten policemen in broad daylight on …
What a waste. Director Gary McKendry pulls together action god Jason Statham, genuine star Clive Owen, and a surprisingly subdued Robert DeNiro in an international espionage thriller based on a true story, and then turns around and makes this shoddy, shaky, seemingly endless parade of cliches, incoherent action, and generally …
In order to hammer home its point about American morality with regard to money as manifested on the macro level by the 2008 financial crisis and on the micro level by the machinations of some truly unpleasant urban lowlifes, Killing Them Softly asks the audience to believe that the patrons …
Director and co-writer Eugene Jarecki’s documentary tells the story of Elvis Presley in America — or rather, Elvis Presley as America. To wit: a youthful phenomenon, the likes of which the world had never seen, rocketing up from humble, hardscrabble beginnings into the stratosphere on the strength of talent, energy, …
Guy Ritchie takes his Guy Ritchiefier to the tale of Uther Pendragon’s son and his magical sword, thus ensuring that the lad (eventually played by Charlie Hunnam) will grow up in a whorehouse where he learns to be kind to whores and mean to bullies, that he will become an …
A lurid dimestore novel come to life. Also a nearly perfectly orchestrated murder thriller set in the time after the internet made pornography — in this case, the gay variety — widely available, but before it made it free. Though based on a true story, it’s presented with none of …
AKA The Rise and Fall of Studio Ghibli? Yeah, probably, at least if you listen to cofounder and chief director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle). “The future is clear,” he intones with an old man’s matter-of-factness as he smokes in the studio’s rooftop garden, “it’s …
Or, Heavy Hangs the Head That Used to Wear the Crown. For 40 years, starting in 1970, chef Georges Perrier held court in his private, prosperous kingdom: Le Bec Fin, a classic French restaurant in Philadelphia. The kind of place where the sauce is everything, and butter and cream are …
A detailed, compelling timeline of Operation Weserübung — the German takeover of Denmark and Norway in 1940 — largely seen from the perspective of Norway’s King Haakon VII. (It’s less a war movie than a story about politicians in wartime, and the few battle scenes are made all the more …
Director Matthew Vaughn’s first Kingsman movie succeeded through planned adolescence, from the lad in need of a dad who served as its hero, to the James-Bond-on-meth action and humor, to the clever-kid nihilism of saving the planet through the mass culling of humanity. If it was puerile and reactionary and …
Director Matthew Vaughn’s first Kingsman movie succeeded through planned adolescence, from the lad in need of a dad who served as its hero, to the James-Bond-on-meth action and humor, to the clever-kid nihilism of saving the planet through the mass culling of humanity. If it was puerile and reactionary and …