Like a soap bubble, writer-director Sally Potter’s arch sendup of the English intelligentsia (plus the odd coked-up banker) is brief, diverting, and laden with impending doom from its very first moments. (We open on a distraught and undone Kristin Scott Thomas, filmed in delicious black and white, opening her front …
Director Morten Tyldum makes the most of many of his assets in this interplanetary romantic drama: the vast exterior emptiness of space, the vast interior emptiness of the colonist ship Avalon as it is experienced by a single passenger awoken 90 years early, the gently affirming android bartender in the …
2011 saw the United States release of Love Crime, a French corporate-erotic thriller starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier as a couple of hot lesbians, er, as a couple of professional women who get entangled in less than professional ways. Now, just two years later, Brian De Palma is …
Having lionized American Navy SEALS in Lone Survivor and American working men in Deepwater Horizon, director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg turn the spotlight on American police officers, taking the Boston Marathon bombing and the massive manhunt that followed as their occasion. It’s a gutsy move, what with that …
It’s tough to make a compelling character out of someone suffering from mental illness; ultimately, all you can do is look on with pity and horror. (And also sympathy, thanks to some hammer-subtle backstory.) It’s even tougher to make a national hero out of one. But when it’s 1972 and …
Writer-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz team up to bring you what is quite possibly the feel-good movie of the year, for good and ill. The good part has a lot to do with the deep sweetness and natural ease between leads Shia LaBouef and Zack Gottsagen, two unlucky souls …
Director Steve Martino and the makers at Blue Sky, aware of the potential for aesthetic barbarism in transferring a beloved comic strip (and hand-drawn animated television property) to CGI, have exercised great care and sensitivity in bringing Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the gang to the big screen. Many of the …
Dad died on the Titanic (though his mistress survived). Mom hailed from a family of daft birds. And sis dropped her kids off a hotel roof to keep from losing custody. What’s a poor(ish) heiress to do? In this case: head to Europe, delve deep into the amoral avant-garde that …
Filmmaker (and former lawyer) Austin Vickers pleads his case on your behalf, hoping to get you sprung from whatever prison you’ve built for yourself. A jail term following a drunk-driving accident serves as an Everyman play for modern times and also illustrates the themes laid out by a parade of …
Author Stephen Chbosky adapted and directed this version of his bestselling young adult novel about Charlie (Logan Lerman), an emotionally damaged high school freshman who is lucky enough to fall in with a couple of senior step-siblings: the fabulously gay Patrick (a barely restrained Ezra Miller) and the adorable Sam …
We didn't bother reviewing Jumanji, so here's Marks' review of P.R.: An affectionate note of Tex Avery mayhem opens the story — in an instant, a bucolic chorus of Disney-esque birds in flight is rendered utterly oofty-magoofty — and for the next 90 minutes, I looked on in amazement as …
Way back in 2015, Disney subsidiary Pixar released The Good Dinosaur, a boy-and-his-dog story that flipped things by making the big green lizard into the lost little boy and giving the dog’s part to a feral human child. Here, Disney flips Pixar back into conventional mode, returning the feral human …
All the elements are there for a genuinely horrifying (as opposed to simply startling) movie: heck, two or three horrifying movies. You’ve got your woman traumatized by her youth spent caring for a hideously crippled sister who hated her. You’ve got your little girl struggling to understand why the cat …
Actor Daniel Day-Lewis has played any number of difficult, even unpleasant men over the course of his remarkable career. And he is famously exacting and disciplined in his approach to his art. So perhaps it’s fitting that his (self-proclaimed) final role is that of Reynolds Woodcock, a difficult, even unpleasant …