The title for Garret Price’s documentary about gone-too-soon actor Anton Yelchin is carefully chosen. It’s how the immigrant's child closed his frequent and heartfelt letters to his fiercely devoted mother Irina, and the film plays a bit like her loving reply: a tribute to the son whose grave she still …
Director and co-writer Andrey Zvyagintsev fixes his unblinking, pitiless eye on the way that, in the words of the film’s miserable wife (who is also, what do you know, a miserable daughter and miserable mother), “love and happiness lead to pain and disappointment…a miserable heap of shit.” The heap in …
What is there to say? That Kristen Stewart can act — that she can inhabit a character perhaps more naturally than any actress of her generation? Okay. That if you want some raunchtastic talk and desperate, grindy onscreen sex in the current cinecultural climate, you’re more likely to find it …
If you're going to do a biopic of Brian Wilson, the musical mind behind an unconventional album like the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, you probably ought to break convention, even if it's just a little bit. Director Bill Pohlad serves up a healthy portion of the standard stuff: bad dad, …
Debra Winger and Tracy Letts are miserable marrieds in writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ acidic dramedy, each in the midst of an affair and on the brink of asking for divorce. It’s not quite clear at the outset why they can’t stand each other; they seem to have reached the point of …
The curious death of troubled painter Vincent Van Gogh (what sort of person commits suicide by shooting themselves in the stomach and then walking into town?) gets investigated — reluctantly at first, but with mounting interest and suspicion — by the son of the postman who used to handle his …
A triumph of casting: the magnificently gaunt and haggard John Hawkes as talented, horse-addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany, and the touchingly vulnerable and longing Elle Fanning as his daughter Amy Jo. (Glenn Close also gets in some fine licks as Joe’s long-suffering, tough-but-tender Mama.) A triumph also of visual mood: …
Ralph Fiennes is the big name and the star of this hit English production of the Scottish play that has made the jump across the pond, but he’s not the engine that drives the action. This is clear almost from the outset: something in his posture, the way his shoulders …
Director Robert Rodriguez overworks a good joke. The Mexican superman Machete started out as the star of a gag trailer in a grindhouse homage, then grew - like a grapevine from a cutting, or a starfish from a single severed arm - into a full-fledged feature, starring Danny Trejo's magnificently …
Or, You Can Go Home Again, But Would You Really Want To? The lion, hippo, giraffe, and zebra who escaped the Central Park Zoo and got back to Africa decide that they miss life in the Big City. They wind up joining a broke-down circus in hopes of landing a …
Add another name to the list of talented and charismatic young actresses of color making auspicious debuts of late: Helena Howard, star of director and co-writer Josephine Decker’s simultaneously attractive and repellent mindjob. Attractive because of Howard’s convincing portrayal of the mentally fractured titular teenager: the periods of near-normalcy that …
Quick: when you're trying to forge a new civilization from the ashes of the apocalypse, what's the most important element for making sure it endures? That's right: babies. And in a world where the test tubes have all been smashed, if you want babies, you need women: their wombs, their …
Quick: when you're trying to forge a new civilization from the ashes of the apocalypse, what's the most important element for making sure it endures? That's right: babies. And in a world where the test tubes have all been smashed, if you want babies, you need women: their wombs, their …