A child may be dying of cancer. We get to suffer along with his pretty French parents, the child’s agony mercifully under shown. Director Valérie Donzelli wants poignant sincerity, and her actors occasionally oblige. But her riffs through the old New Wave playbook (notably Jules et Jim) mixed with music-driven …
Another masterwork of British nostalgia, again haunted but more urgent than before, from director Terence Davies. Adapting the play by Terence Rattigan, he gives Rachel Weisz one of her finest roles as Hester. Buried in marriage to a stuffy judge (Simon Russell Beale) ruled by his prig-snob mother, she finds …
Alexander Payne’s film is on Hawaiian time and floats well below his Sideways. George Clooney is the rich Honolulu lawyer whose faithless wife has crashed into a coma. He is also trustee for a huge patch of Kauai that excites his greedy relatives and his wife’s lover. His trip with …
A pretentious mess from Tony Kaye (American History X). Lean, saint-faced Adrien Brody plays a school teacher rightly cynical about the dismal system. He compounds the daily crisis by encouraging the fantasies of a neurotic girl and nurturing a nymphetic drug whore (Sami Gayle). The story is alarmed gibberish, providing …
Motor “visionary” and motormouth Vince Vaughn hedges about asking lover Jennifer Connelly to marry him and instead invades the privacy of his chum and biz-partner Kevin James, whose wife (Winona Ryder) has secret heat with a stud muffin (Channing Tatum). Shallow Chicago images, fill-in music, male bonding via sports and …
A tale of a tail. The dolphin is Winter, a sea critter that lost its tail in a crab trap, was rescued by humans, then fitted with a prosthetic for use in its new Florida home. Charles Martin Smith (the actor from American Graffiti and Never Cry Wolf) directed with …
For all the posh trappings of Ye Olde Haunted House and a Guillermo del Toro script, the horror is hokum. Guy Pearce is too busy fixing up the mansion to notice that his daughter (Bailee Madison), traumatized by his divorce, is losing her mind. She is also terrorized by tiny, …
Russian actress Kseniya Rappoport has a lovely, vulnerable intensity as Sonia, a chambermaid in Turin, Italy, who falls for a sensitive ex-cop (Filippo Timi, who was Mussolini in Vincere). Her soulfulness can’t save a moody jam-up of various genres utilizing robbery, two suicides, two loves, a dating club, brain injury, …
A tricky, unsettling, often riveting film, shot in a coldly glowing L.A. by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Ryan Gosling, an update on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, has magnetic mystery as the lean, terse “hero” who drives hard, can fox-out criminals, and may be a sociopath. His shy interest …
Nicolas Cage, ripping down highways to avenge his daughter and recover his grandchild from a satanic-cult preacher (Billy Burke), joins with a kick-ass waitress (Amber Heard) and is pursued by Hell’s suave, deadly emissary (William Fichtner). The violence, nudity, crashes, trash talk, and hocus-pocus could make you yearn for the …
Donald Sutherland sags into his Roman toga when his soldier nephew (Channing Tatum) goes almost solo from Britannia into dark, primeval, 2nd-century Scotland to retrieve (great Caesar’s ghost!) the gold eagle of his dead father’s decimated legion. Though a limited actor, Tatum has the brawny force of meat on a …
Michael Webber’s documentary about people fixated on owning wild, often dangerous animals (lots of TV news clips and talking heads). The heart of it is the connection between Tim Harrison, an Ohio cop who cares equally about people and “pets,” and Terry Brumfield, a man emotionally fixated on his caged …
The Parisian johns served by two young, clever prostitutes never quite see them as people. But the women are so intensely observed by magazine writer Anne (Juliette Binoche) that their risky lives lift her from middle-aged blahs as a mom and wife. They eroticize her imagination, not just her feminism. …
Honorable simplification. In Icíar Bollaín’s film, Gael García Bernal is the idealistic director and Luis Tosar the tough producer of a film being made in the Bolivian Andes. Modern villagers play the Carib Indians subjugated by Columbus, and as politics invade the production, themes arrive on tracks of editorial cinema: …