Come for Arnold Schwarzenegger's wrinkled visage and grizzled beard; stay for Abigail Breslin's fine teen-facing-death pathos. The killer disease is the necroambulatory virus; she's slowly turning into a flesh-eating zombie, and everybody knows it. What to do in the meantime is hard to figure out, but the harrowing events — …
Director Steven Soderbergh checks off another box on his list of genre pics. This time, it's the showbiz story, featuring a minor star with bigger dreams (Channing Tatum), a young up-and-comer (Alex Pettyfer), a sleazy manager (Matthew McConaughey), the perils of the party life, and all the rest of it. …
Channing Tatum gets back together with his band of beefy balletic bros for "one last fuckin' ride" in the sequel to Steven Soderbergh's surprisingly sweet stripper saga Magic Mike. There's nothing at stake — their destination is a convention, not a contest, and it's not even clear they'll get to …
The title is about one-seventh right: Denzel Washington, from the moment his black-clad form rides into view over a golden ridge, is pretty gosh-darn magnificent as Chisolm, a wide-ranging lawman possessed of a carefully cultivated calm, a deadly eye, and a crazy-quick draw. Unfortunately for Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the …
"Let us tell an old tale anew, and let us see how well you know it," intones Maleficent (a waxen Angelina Jolie) at the outset of this botched Sleeping Beauty tweak-job. It's fine to tell old tales anew, and it's fine to mold them to some new purpose — say, …
For a while, near the end, this is a surprisingly solid PG war movie, full of grand-scale spectacle, fraught intimate battles, multiple shifts and twists, and violence that manages to feel significant without also traumatizing the youngsters in the target audience. Neat trick, that. Before and after, however, it’s a …
For a while, near the end, this is a surprisingly solid PG war movie, full of grand-scale spectacle, fraught intimate battles, multiple shifts and twists, and violence that manages to feel significant without also traumatizing the youngsters in the target audience. Neat trick, that. Before and after, however, it’s a …
For a while, near the end, this is a surprisingly solid PG war movie, full of grand-scale spectacle, fraught intimate battles, multiple shifts and twists, and violence that manages to feel significant without also traumatizing the youngsters in the target audience. Neat trick, that. Before and after, however, it’s a …
Some films you watch to escape from the frequently painful and/or difficult reality of life. Pacific Rim, perhaps. Some films you watch to impose a satisfactory narrative onto the seemingly random chaos of life. Casablanca, maybe. And some films you watch to enter more deeply into life — the difficulty, …
What does it say when they set out to make a Cold War caper and they wind up casting a Brit (Henry Cavill) as the American, an American (Armie Hammer) as the Russian, and a Swede (Alicia Vikander) as the...well, not a Swede? Answer: not much, which is okay, since …
Cate Blanchett expertly adopts the personas of derelict, sanitation worker, scientist, housewife, newscaster, elementary schoolteacher, punk rocker, mourner, dance troupe director, puppeteer, society matron, and businesswoman and uses them to deliver excerpts from various classics of the titular form. Many of them have to do with artists and the art …
Why would a black man from Buenaventura, Colombia want to move to Bogota, a place where "the only black people are the ones who clean the shit out of the toilets"? The answer lies in this brief, motile story of low-rent (but high-tech) drug trafficking and its inimical relationship to …
When we meet Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel, playing serious), he is scrawling equations on the floor of a Hindu temple. Because for him, “an equation has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” Take that, science vs. religion! But alas, God isn’t in the academic …
A kung-fu picture with heart — and guts. Wu-Tang Clan member RZA co-wrote, directed, and stars in the story of a simple blacksmith, biding his time in a violent village, making weapons for anyone with the money to buy them and saving up for the day when he can purchase …
How on earth do you make such an inert movie about a photographer (in)famous for a self portrait with a bullwhip jammed up his posterior, a man whose work resulted in the only time an American museum has gone to trial on obscenity charges? How do you hew so close …