Sam Rockwell at his most charismatic as a chipper, dancing, partially-reformed hitman with a heart of gold and a sense of the world’s metaphysical currents, getting chased around New Orleans by Tim Roth in a Southern accent while he attempts to romance the irrepressible Anna Kendrick. (He’s totally honest with …
Director Joss Whedon invites a bunch of friends into his home for a weekend of Shakespearean partying, and films the proceedings in intriguingly muted black-and-white. The friends are actors, the house is designed by his wife Kai, and the goings-on involve a lot of drinking and deception (lighthearted and otherwise) …
Writer-director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) treats 14-year-old Ellis and his friend Neckbone to a cornucopia of boyhood pleasures: walkie-talkies, taking an outboard up the river, a deserted island, a boat in a tree, old girlie mags, dirt bikes, chainsaws, fistfights, girlfriends, and looming over it all, a desperate outlaw in …
An ancient Egyptian princess escapes her tomb and sets about finding a human host for the Egyptian god of death, because a deal’s a deal. To paraphrase Dr. Hannibal Lecter, one of the monsters in the vastly superior horror hybrid (there, horror-murder mystery; here, horror-action adventure) The Silence of the …
An ancient Egyptian princess escapes her tomb and sets about finding a human host for the Egyptian god of death, because a deal’s a deal. To paraphrase Dr. Hannibal Lecter, one of the monsters in the vastly superior horror hybrid (there, horror-murder mystery; here, horror-action adventure) The Silence of the …
Whodunit? Who took the life of a famous murder mystery and left it dead on the screen? I accuse…director and star Kenneth Branagh. Though he doesn’t seem at all murderous when we first meet him as Agatha Christie’s Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, fussing over the relative size of his eggs …
Not every cool story has the potential to be a great documentary, not even when it provides its own fantastic soundtrack. Rick Hall grew up dirt-poor in Alabama - as in, the floor of his house was dirt. He suffered a series of devastating tragedies (revealed over the course of …
Subtitle: the awakening of an aesthetic sense. But of course, an aesthetic sense is not the sort of thing you can shake into waking. You've got to nudge it, coax it, maybe sing to it a little. The setup here is contrived, but still believable: an ordinary, unexceptional Canadian (Mary …
Gérard Depardieu puts his unwieldy bulk and asymmetrical face to excellent use as a village simpleton who befriends an elderly intellectual woman after the two discover a mutual interest in pigeons. Their subsequent shared adventure into the world of words is a pleasure to look at and an even greater …
More modern, more problems. Writer-director Sally El Hosaini brings a few tweaks to the familiar themes of brotherly strife and immigrants rising through drug-dealing. The immigrants are Egyptian; the religious background is Muslim ("If it's written, it's gonna happen anyway"); the city is London. Handsome, muscular Rashid (a winning James …
The sins of the fathers (and mothers) are visited upon the children in Claude Barras’s brief, stop-motion tale of little ones finding love among the ruins. The film mounts a direct assault on the heart’s tender parts — when we meet our young protagonist, he’s flying a kite that shows …
Israel Horovitz writes and directs this film version of his play about a man (Kevin Kline, clay-faced but with a voice like butter) dealing with what his recently deceased father has bestowed upon him. Materially, that means an apartment in Paris, fully equipped with the titular old lady (a seemingly …
Director and star Narcissister is the La Jolla-bred performance artist who always wears a mask and often wears little else, despite a genuine gift for creative costuming. Clothes would just get in the way of her act’s more outré elements: namely, the items she famously extracts from her vagina and …
Edgar Quintero lives in Los Angeles and writes songs about Mexican drug dealers, painting them as badass outlaws. Richi Soto is a crime scene investigator in Juarez, a city which saw over 3600 murders in 2012. (In 2006, that number was 320. Then the drug wars came to town.) Director …