Like a Christopher Guest comedy less rigged for pat satire, Miguel Arteta’s film is about a naïve insurance salesman (Ed Helms) who goes to a convention in Iowa and learns from a sly roommate (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and an amiable vulgarian (John C. Reilly) how to grow up in a …
Sam (Michael Angarano) is a charming, boyish goof up. He crashes the wedding weekend of his great ex-love (Uma Thurman). She towers over him, as does her suave, posh fiancé (Lee Pace), a vain preener who seems unthreatened. Director Max Winkler (son of Henry) pulls off small comic nuances, but …
The first feature outside Iran by suavely tricky director Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry). Operatic baritone William Shimell plays an art writer whose main theme is originality vs. duplication. In Tuscany he meets antiques dealer Juliette Binoche, who gives him a spirited, ego-deflating lesson in what is real and isn’t …
It opens with a cute infant projectile-defecating into the mouth of his dad (Jason Batemen) and never gets better. Solid bourgeois lawyer Bateman and his crass bachelor chum (Ryan Reynolds) switch bodies, thanks to magic (a blackout!) while urinating into a public fountain. That allows the horndog to vulgarize Bateman's …
Iranian musician Nasser Ali Khan has haunted, buggy eyes, an unruly mustache, a broken heart, a wife he does not love, two children he does not know, and a mysteriously stalled career. But Nasser Ali is a great violinist who believes that art guides us through the darkness of existence, …
In this film by Maryam Keshavarz, an upscale Iranian family must deal with teen problems including a lesbian romance and the secular temptations of Dubai. With Nikohl Boosheri, Sarah Kazemy, Reza Sixo Safai.
A WWII vet dreams of becoming a star but instead turns to crime, in Nathan Morlando's Canadian thriller. With Scott Speedman, Kelly Reilly, William Mapother, Brian Cox.
Chuan Lu’s epic about the 1937 Japanese conquest of Nanking, China, tries to do for that what Elem Klimov’s Come and See did for the Soviet-Nazi hell in Russia. In cold, ashen black-and-white, the panic, rapes, and atrocities pile up, along with some heroic Chinese resistance. Attempts to personalize this …
There is chat about Sherlock Holmes and vapors of Hitchcock, but Aaron Katz’s quirky mystery is mostly a hip, atmospheric slummer on the underside of wet, gray Portland, Oregon. The weather conspires with the shaggy plot to work up some soft, amiable tensions that will either tickle or bore you. …
Colombiana is an Angelina Jolie action-blockbuster without the Jolie. Enter Zoe Saldana, an actress Hollywood can’t quite pigeonhole, as Cataleya, a stock exotic-female vigilante poised to take on a slew of interchangeable male aggressors. The opening sequence — a chase that allows nine-year-old Cataleya (Amandla Stenberg) to show off her …
A view of the effects of the economic crisis in a company gutted and “diversified” by a CEO turned bottom-line pig (Craig T. Nelson). Ben Affleck (rising sales exec), Chris Cooper (vulnerable workaholic), and Tommy Lee Jones (grizzled dreamer-doer) turn on the spit, yearning not just to survive but to …
Late-night deity Conan O’Brien is such a good scout that he’ll stop at nothing short of washing the feet of lepers to win you over in Rodman Flender’s sycophantic, shoot-now-figure-it-out-later documentary. Taped during a concert tour that took place between the time NBC dropped O’Brien and TBS picked him up, …
The opening passage, with a tough, near-mute little scrapper (Leo Howard as “Young Conan”) beating the snot out of every adult the script throws him, held promise. As the full-grown barbarian, all the insufferably preening Jason Momoa can muster is a hint of Ashton Kutcher on steroids. The filmmakers wisely …
What does Robert Redford have to do to make you people understand how un-American the War on Terror really is? Does he have to plop you down into post-Civil War America? Will you make him hash out every possible parallel between the trial of Mary Surratt for her role in …