Art-house fare in America, but on its merits hardly more than grindhouse fodder, cheaply and shoddily made, to do with three girls from Leeds on holiday in Mallorca, who hook up with four guys from home for a seafaring night of illicit drugs, rough sex, and accidental homicide that spirals …
Mutant Mad Max. “Same shit, different era,” as somebody says. All but wiped out by the Reaper Virus, walled off in quarantine for twenty-five years, Scotland in 2035 retains two hostile clans, heavy-metal cannibals and retro-Medieval knights in armor. Enter, from the English side of the wall, a one-eyed kick-ass …
From the prize-winning stage play by John Patrick Shanley, an ambiguous drama of possible priestly pedophilia at a Catholic school in the Bronx. The playwright, perhaps best known to moviegoers as the writer of Moonstruck and writer-director of Joe versus the Volcano, handles the direction of his own work on …
Homeless army deserter answers a want ad to bodyguard a fat kid, skinny kid, and shrimpy kid from the high-school bully. The jokes arrive predictably, the laughs lag badly. With Owen Wilson, Nate Hartley, Troy Gentile, David Dorfman, Alex Frost, and Leslie Mann; directed by Steven Brill.
Fine costume piece. Well, the costumes anyhow are fine. The piece as a whole is only fairish, a predigested potage of 18th-century sexism, blueblood cold-bloodedness, paramours, bastards, the mandatory male heir, all of it “based on a true story.” Rachel Portman’s music, much more than Saul Dibb’s direction, creates the …
Shabby little comedy about a doo-wop group that time forgot (“In 1963 we were on top of the world”), three of whose members attempt a gold heist at a dental lab to finance a restaurant. Emotionally flat, despite the constant propping-up by golden oldies. The climactic concert raises more questions …
Political paranoia thriller so utterly preposterous that it has the opposite effect and reassures us we have nothing to worry about. (And so pell-mell in presentation that we can barely follow it.) Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, as ordinary citizens under the eye, thumb, and puppet-strings of Big Brother, are …
Rueful Irish marital drama, the chill getting chillier on the tenth anniversary. The working-class surroundings are vividly filled in; and even if the common-folk actors (Aidan Kelly, Eileen Walsh) are often indecipherable, they well communicate the general drift. Written by Eugene O’Brien; directed by Declan Recks.
An aging but actively tomcatting Columbia professor develops an erotic obsession with a “thirty-odd-year” younger Cuban student, who, in his eyes, resembles Goya’s Maja. (Penelope Cruz, the student, actually played Goya’s Maja in Volaverunt, and here repeats the desnuda pose.) Isabel Coixet’s rendition of the Philip Roth novel, The Dying …
What will the cultured couple do with themselves after the last chick has flown? A common midlife problem, approached with sensitivity and sense of humor, but neither the element of fantasy nor the Argentine locale can evade banality. With Oscar Martínez and Cecilia Roth; written and directed by Daniel Burman.
In miles at least, Werner Herzog has never travelled farther in search of a lunatic fringe: the dwellers in Antarctica, the bottom of the globe. His wide-angled camera finds some interesting interview subjects, “dreamers,” misfits, seekers, in addition to interesting nature footage: underwater beneath the ice, at the rim of …
Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell, absent from American screens for a quarter-century, and perhaps best remembered for the early-Seventies diptych of The Emigrants and The New Land, returns with another period piece, the period of pre-WWI, a period that appears to predate color, in an all-brown, almost sepia palette. The faithful …
Grind-it-out sports bio on Ernie Davis, the running back who took over Jim Brown’s position and jersey number at Syracuse University and went on to become the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy. Good efforts from Rob Brown in the lead role and Dennis Quaid as his old-school coach, …
Ho-hum Hollywood re-do of a Hong Kong horror, wherein a blind classical violinist receives corneal transplants and, along with them, blurry visions of the world around her, other worlds, past happenings, ghosts, and whatnot. (Is it normal, doctor, to see the souls of the departed being escorted by shades to …
Animated anthology of tales of the macabre, in a variety of styles and shades of black-and-white. More disjointed than it needed to be, what with the intermittent interruptions from a continuing charcoaly chronicle of Dog Bites Man and a geometrical abstraction narrated by a torturously introspective female (“I’m scared of …