George Clooney, sole American in the cast, has been enrolled to glamorize further the most glamorous profession, to go by Hollywood, in the world today: the high-end assassin. (Vampire is not a profession.) Director Anton Corbijn, a former music-video guy, places him in existential exile amid the Medieval townscapes and …
Why would a quartet of 20-year-old desperados (Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Jared Abrahamson, and Blake Jenner) choose to knock over a university’s special collections library? Try $12 million dollars in rare books, with only one old lady (Ann Dowd) guarding them. For every great documentary that’s been spun, there are …
Over the past three years, Michael Keaton has created memorable characters in Birdman, Spotlight, The Founder, and even Spider-Man: Homecoming. So maybe he’s earned the right to bluster and snarl his way through this creaky, clichéd thriller about nuclear-minded terrorists, the secretly soulful killing machines who must hunt them down, …
Sci-fi musical in black-and-white, written and directed by Cory McAbee, who also stars.
A mainstreamy, sitcommy version of Happiness, awash in splashy, trashy plot turns. Any movie whose opening line features a sulky teenage girl (in a grainy video image, but never mind that) saying directly into a camcorder, "I need a father who's a role model, not some horny geek-boy who's gonna …
Proficient "reading" of an early Mamet play with three speaking parts, an oblique examination of the pettiness of petty crooks. Flavorful; salty; but dry, very dry. With Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Franz, and Sean Nelson; directed by Michael Corrente.
So rattled was James Stern by the thought of anyone in their right mind not voting for Mrs. Clinton that he spent the six months before the election criss-crossing America trying to understand what Donald Trump’s supporters saw in him. Who was Stern’s target audience? Surely Democrats don’t want to …
Barbara Kopple re-enters the arena of her admirable Harlan County, U.S.A., that of the labor dispute. But she has not just repeated herself. The laborers this time are meatpackers instead of mine workers, but more significantly the time itself has moved on into the mid-1980s, the era of Reaganomics, and …
Michael Bolton presents this one-night-only tribute to the Motor City.
An Ohio housewife (Jobeth Williams) dashes off 2000 words in the style of the "Rebecca Ryan" series of suspense novels, and takes first prize in a writing contest. Her reward is a trip to Paris, with an unexpected bonus of a bump on the head in a traffic accident. When …
Spongy satire divides its feeble forces between the Bush Administration (à clef) and the TV talent contest, American Idol, aligning the two targets when the mush-brained President agrees to appear as a guest judge on the season finale, a showdown pitting a "white-trash girl from Ohio" against an undercover Iraqi …
In the early '60s, a racially integrated group of Northern college students decided to head south on buses, traveling from town to town, violating segregation laws, and peacefully accepting the sometimes horrific consequences.
Director Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of writer Percival Everett’s novel Erasure is not so much a comedy as it is an elaborate joke on the viewer. The marketing, which must be considered here, makes the film look like a savage satire of the publishing industry: the story of a frustrated upper-middle-class …
Steve Tesich, who wrote Breaking Away, is back in the bicycle seat again. Two estranged brothers, one a prosperous doctor, the other a med-school dropout, join up for their first bicycle race together. And their last: one of them is dying of cerebral aneurysm. The race -- billed as Hell …
Pulp thriller version of the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, based on the novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, and directed by Wim Wenders. On one level, it's a withering critique of the male camaraderie ethic (with friends like this, who needs enemies?). On another, it's a conventional underworld adventure refreshingly infused with …