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 …
…needs lots of American worker bees to make it, a roving swarm that labors for the sake of preserving the hive and comforting the queen, and thinks of nothing else. (If that analogy seems a bit much, just take note of the preponderance of bugs through this captivating film’s generous …
A heaping helping of period pleasure from director David O. Russell. Irving Rosenfeld (a gutty Christian Bale, resplendent in combover and ascot) is a '70s Jay Gatsby without the class anxiety, a man comfortable with the notion that everybody is, like him, working the con — getting along by lying …
Tom Cruise breaks out his best shit-eating grin (and accompanying bad-boyisms, mooning included) to play Great American Barry Seal for director Doug Liman. Good thing, too, since he winds up eating an awful lot of it: a lil’ cigar-smuggling while working as a commercial pilot leads to the CIA hooking …
Ewan McGregor's directorial debut (he also stars) takes on nothing less than the fragile impermanence of the American Dream — dreams, after all, being things up from which you must ultimately wake — even going so far as to imply that the seeds of its destruction are sown even as …
Director Clint Eastwood continues his quiet critique of the moviegoer's deep delight in cinematic violence. In this case, that means great swaths of gripping, based-on-a-true-story wartime action centered around Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper in full strong-silent-Texan mode), a good ol' boy who becomes a great old sniper for the Navy …
Having smeared a handful of real-world muck on the practice of giving superhero status to damaged people (orphaned Bruce Wayne, narcissist Tony Stark, etc.) with Chronicle, screenwriter Max Landis sets out to give the same treatment to the amnesiac superspy of The Bourne Identity. Here, he becomes Mike Howell, a …
Director David O. Russell returns from an extended absence (after the oddflop Joy) with an extended...well, it’s hard to say what, exactly. A spoof on the hard-boiled works of Humphrey Bogart? That would explain the Maltese Falcon voiceover, the Big Sleep meetup with the rich family trying to control its …
The story is painfully straightforward: a nine-year-old English girl named Amy Winehouse is devastated when Dad breaks up with Mum. She takes up with boys, dabbles in drink and drugs, develops an eating disorder, and begins the slide toward disaster. What makes it noteworthy are the girl's incredible talents, both …
Having romped around the harmlessly inane world of local television news in the original, well-coiffed anchorman Ron Burgundy & Co. (Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, David Koechner, and Paul Rudd) enter a world that is much more serious and in much more need of lampooning: the nightmare of infotainment, pandering, and …
Writer-director Alex Garland continues his assault on human specialness (and humanity in general), this time going so far as to loop in the self among the parts of us subject to genetic malleability. He does a neat job of it, noting that we die naturally because of a fault in …
Writer and co-director Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion animated film is a very fine portrait of the despair at the heart of a comfortable middle-aged white man in America circa right about now. British-born Michael Stone (voiced with great sympathy by David Thewlis) has, by most standards, made it. He lives in …
The hackers are coming! Director and co-writer Akan Satayev’s tale of an immigrant's son who starts off clicking for dollars and winds up orchestrating a stock market panic plays like a highly competent student film and looks like an expensive episode of basic cable television. Everything feels requisite, from the …
Writer-director Sean Baker’s latest foray into the private lives of people who make their privates public opens brilliantly, as New York City stripper/escort Anora (a gung-ho, all-in Mikey Madison) grinds her way through her daily grind, making nice with a steady procession of customers, one replacing another so seamlessly that …
Director and co-writer Anthony Powell is one of the few hardy souls who lives in Antarctica year-round. And because he has a tinkerer's knack for camera setups and a love of time-lapse photography, he is uniquely qualified to share the experience with you — though from a certain distance. The …