A pleasingly modest debut from writer-director Khalil Sullins: if you can't afford to depict a Tony Stark-level laboratory, you can rejoice in the fact that Steve Jobs built the first Apple computer in his garage. The (literally) hungry young inventors in this case are working on a brain patch that …
A very little chaos, and more's the pity. Kate Winslet stars in director Alan Rickman's story of a lady landscaper whose willingness to fiddle with man's imposition of order onto nature catches the eye of frustrated the Master Gardener tasked with giving the King of France a foretaste of heaven …
It’s hard to say which is a finer encapsulation of the proceedings: Robert De Niro sitting for a caricature artist at a children’s birthday party or Dustin Hoffman detonating a whoopee cushion and saying, “We have to laugh at the stuff that makes us human.” Put another way, whether you …
A study in context. Writer-director Jeff Baena adapted this story of three wayward nuns and the wayward world they inhabit from the Italian writer Bocaccio’s 14th-century collection The Decameron. And in medieval Europe, the story’s randy ribaldry among irreligious religious would be obviously (and highly) comedic. Today, it requires the …
Plot: a teenage girl develops an obsession with the group of people who murdered her mother, to the point where she falls in love with one of them after seeing him be kind to his dog. Behold the danger of improving your source material by adding backstories. The girl’s father …
Plot: a teenage girl develops an obsession with the group of people who murdered her mother, to the point where she falls in love with one of them after seeing him be kind to his dog. Behold the danger of improving your source material by adding backstories. The girl’s father …
A moody delight. Domhnall Gleeson brings his uncanny talent for communicating great storms of interior feeling through an expression almost entirely devoid of affect to Lenny Abrahamson’s post-World War II ghost story about the dangers of noblesse oblige. He plays Faraday, a doctor called to the home of the local …
Director Greta Gerwig reteams with her Ladybird star Saoirse Ronan for a cast-heavy but still nimble adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s story of sisters making a home and making a life in spite of of limited options and opportunties. (Neither Meryl Streep as stern Aunt March nor Emma Watson as …
Writer-director-star Ben Affleck goes for broke and goes bust with an American tale that mistakes muchness for greatness. He plays Joe Coughlin, a vet who learned in World War I that “the rules we lived by were lies, and didn’t apply to those who made them.” (This line, like so …
Writer Bryce Kass cobbles together every juicy detail from the many theories regarding the 1892 real-life murder of well-to-do New Englanders Mr. and Mrs. Borden, quite possibly at the hands of their adult daughter Lizzie: the forbidden yearnings between Lizzie (Chloë Sevigny) and the family maid (Kristen Stewart), Lizzie’s stigmatizing …
Werner Herzog turns his unsparing eye on the no-longer-uppercase (perhaps because of its unspecial ubiquity) internet. He starts with the good: never before have so many been able to share so much so easily. Heck, we’re crowdsourcing medical breakthroughs! Someday, we might make phone calls to a colony on Mars! …
Director and co-writer James Mangold takes another stab at the adamantium-clawed superhero (after 2013’s Japanese noir The Wolverine), this time turning him into an ailing Western hero tasked with transporting a very special youngster to safety, and winds up making the best superhero movie in years. It helps that the …
Colin Farrell, all grown up and polished smooth, plays a roughneck ex-con trying to escape the unsavory associations of his past (greasy Ben Chaplin) and embrace the associations of his decidedly brighter future (reclusive actress-in-need-of-protection Keira Knightley). The story? Hoary. But the cast is masterful, especially Ray Winstone as a …
Somewhere along the line, it may occur to you that Babak Najafi’s sequel to 2013’s president-in-peril pic Olympus Has Fallen is a sly attack on America masquerading as a celebration of same. It’s more than the one-man-army absurdity of aging security chief Gerard Butler as he winningly fights the war …
Director Julia Loktev’s adaptation of Tom Bissell’s claustrophobic short story, set in a place that is anything but: the Caucasus Mountains. At issue is manhood, or at least, how a man responds in the moment. Alex (a bearded Gael Garcia Bernal) and Nica (a redheaded Hani Furstenberg), adventurous and engaged …