Jeff Bridges is pretty much the whole show, and a generous show it is. His Bad Blake, given name to be held back for the gravestone, is an over-the-hill and down-on-his-luck C&W singer still living the life of a C&W song, four marriages behind him, long lonely drives and cheap …
Unctuous liberalism and clumsy manipulation on the broad subject of illegal aliens: Mexican, Australian, Iranian, Korean, Nigerian, the whole rainbow, in multiple plotlines with a Crash-like incidence of coincidence. (The physical beauty of the female aliens helps, of course, to fuel liberality.) Embarrassment eclipses enlightenment. Harrison Ford, Cliff Curtis, Ray …
Oddly focussed docudrama, riddled with capriciously off-balance compositions, on a disastrous interlude in the illustrious career of English football manager Brian Clough, his runaway ambition and runaway confidence in his rivalry with fellow manager Don Revie ("I wouldn't say I'm the top manager in the country, but I'm in the …
This privileged peek inside the Paris Opera Ballet — more than a peek, a thorough probe — ought to be catnip to anyone interested in classical and modern dance, or for that matter in artistic creation in any form, the process of bringing execution in line with conception. Veteran documentarian …
Did you hear about Did You Hear about the Morgans?? Well, it’s not as bad as you may have heard. The premise of a splitsville Manhattan couple whisked away together to wild, wild Wyoming in the witness protection program is no worse than that of many a screwball comedy of …
Neo-apartheid in South Africa: a million ghettoized extraterrestrials from a stalled spacecraft over Johannesburg. The documentary affectations, discontinued at convenience, make it seem initially a joke rather than a reality. And not a funny joke, either. The aliens — pejorative as well as descriptive term, “prawns” — are well visualized, …
Sort of a kinky thriller, which is to say definitely kinky but only sort of a thriller, re-enacting the ostensibly “true events” of a self-mutilating married woman finding on the Internet a compatible sadist willing for a fee to put her out of her misery. Director Johan Renck, rather than …
Sam Raimi horror film for those who like their sadism to be gleeful. An old-fashioned gypsy curse, cast by an old gypsy of unprecedented repulsiveness (rotten dentures, coughed-up phlegm, milky eye, etc.), falls upon a girlish loan officer (Alison Lohman) who already has enough troubles in her life — a …
Entertaining enough game of industrial espionage, kicked off, behind the credits, with a slapstick soundless slo-mo fight on the tarmac between the ungainly Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson. The repeated doubling-back in time proves to be more exasperating than clever, but writer-director Tony Gilroy, going light after Michael Clayton, hasn’t …
The circle of life, all around the globe, arctic to tropic, desert to ocean, illustrated everywhere in luscious calendar art, crystalline in digital projection. The Disney nature documentary allows some survival-of-the-fittest brutality, but none of the gore that would accompany it. “Yes,” concludes narrator James Earl Jones, “it’s full of …
One in a rash of fires lit on screen for the environmental movement. Documentarist Robert Stone, stepping back for the long view, gathers his fuel from the origins of the movement, the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the mobilization that led up to the first Earth Day …
Brit aristocrats infiltrated, through marriage, by a classless American flapper. A flat soufflé from a Noel Coward seriocomedy, previously filmed in the silent era by, of all people, Alfred Hitchcock. The jouncing Jazz Age music keeps trying to convince us it’s a romp, with no success. Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, …
Globe-hopping paranoia thriller, tethered everywhere to cellphone and computer: Bangkok to Prague to Moscow to a fiery finish in (brace yourself) Omaha. Paralyzingly routine. With Shane West, Edward Burns, Ving Rhames, Tamara Feldman, Martin Sheen, and Jonathan Pryce; directed by Greg Marcks.
Irish ghost story, slow, quiet, tasteful to a fault, easy to overrate for its avoidances. It deserves credit, even so, for regarding ghosts as a part of life instead of as part of a mere genre. The photos on the kitchen wall and in the bedroom efficiently fill in the …
A precocious English schoolgirl of 1961 (a cellist, a Francophile, a devotee of the Pre-Raphaelites, a sneaky smoker for sophistication), on track for Oxford, gets rerouted by a shady older man who shows her the finer things of life: a Ravel concert, a Christie's auction, nightclubs, Paris. The foreseeable end …