“He's a romantic atheist, she's a religious realist.” How’s that for an incentive-filled tagline? Working from a play by Johan Heldenbergh and Mieke Dobbels, the last thing Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen and writing partner Carl Joos wanted was to transform the story of a bluegrass singer (Johan Heldenbergh) and …
Documentary follows the three Reuther brothers and their involvement with the rise of the United Auto Workers.
It struggled to get a PG-13 rating because of some f-words, and Lee Hirsch's documentary about vulnerable kids bullied in schools (and their sometimes woefully inadequate official guardians) has no shaping style. But if it bullies home its points a little, those points need to be made, and the victims …
At last, a movie that exposes the seamy, beer-bloated underbelly of the supposedly decent, God-fearing Midwest. Not even an activity as wholesome as competitive butter-carving is safe from their hypocritical machinations. I am shocked, shocked, to find that there are strippers in the American heartland!
Just another pair of pretty faces, Gemma Arterton and the uni-expressional Saoirse Ronan — no match for Interview with a Vampire's Pitt and Cruise - star as mother and daughter vampires in Neil Jordan’s return to the genre that brought him the most commercial success. Jumping back and forth within …
Terrorized teens in a desolate location become unwitting participants in a faith-based reality TV show. For 40 minutes we’re treated to an encyclopedic vivisection of everything wrong with contemporary horror movies. The overly clever script by Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard eventually falls victim to its own satirization, but …
So what would happen if you staged Julius Caesar in a modern-day Roman prison? These guys found out.
A fine performance — and a good character — in search of a story. Silken-maned Robert Carlyle plays an aging former rocker, haunted by the death of his brother (his old band's frontman) and living in self-imposed exile on a farm in California. It's a tolerable, static, hidden sort of …
A pair of CEOs (Zach Galifianakis and Jason Sudeikis) see an opportunity to oust a long-seated North Carolina congressman (Will Ferrell) when he commits a major public gaffe before an upcoming election.
Will Ferrell deadpans his performance in a semi sendup of Spanish telenovelas (yes, it’s in Spanish), and his unwinking commitment to the role makes all the surrounding silliness enjoyable. It’s all there: florid themes, cheap production values, goofy technique, hack dialogue, and awesome ranchero ballads. The weakest stuff is the …
1) In order to boost sales, a young author and some friends visit a bookstore and loudly attempt to give her tome better shelf placement. 2) Two strangers exchange funny jabs after one attempts to cut in line at a Starbucks. 3) A date with a Gap model ends in …
Like the outstanding 2011 documentary Project Nim, Chasing Ice tells the story of a man's quest to do something extraordinary while at the same time telling the story of the man himself. Unlike Project Nim, the biography portion of the story is here served up not as a sly counterpoint, …
The inspirational true-life story of 15-year-old Jay Moriarty (newcomer Jonny Weston), whose dream it was to surf Mavericks, the biggest and most hazardous waves in Northern California. Gerald Butler plays Frosty Hesson, a seasoned pro whose initial reluctance to mentor the lad (“Untrained boys don’t step in the ring with …
It must have made a great pitch: send the standard bunch of young, attractive Americans on an extreme tourism adventure to Pripyat, the town next door to Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear accident in history. Tweak the real-life mutant horrors brought on by the fallout, and let the Russian …