It may seem unlikely that a Czech assassin holed up in a Prague church as he hides out from the Nazis with his fellow operatives would start perusing English playwright William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But then again, they’ve got time on their hands, and the play is about an assassination. …
“Amiable” is the big aim here for director Peyton Reed. Pleasant rather than pleasurable. Amusing rather than funny. Diverting rather than delightful. Having gone full Gotterdammerung with Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel gets modest and zings to the opposite extreme for the featherweight tale of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), a man …
My first thought as the credits rolled was, “I didn’t feel a thing.” But that’s not fair. I did feel stuff. Disappointed by the clichéd staging, lazy effects, and incoherent action of the brief opening sequence (set against an admittedly dramatic nebula-filled sky). Bemused by Ant-Man’s rambling, maybe-supposed-to-be-charming introduction about …
Director and co-writer Xavier Giannoli plucks a war-ravaged journalist (he’s just lost his photographer friend in an explosion, and suffered ear damage to boot) off the battlefield and sends him into terra very much incognita: the Vatican’s canonical investigation into the veracity of a French teenager’s claim to have seen …
Fun, fast-paced French film d’animation that manages to keep its ideas from getting lost amid the steampunk aesthetics, frequent chases, and occasional explosions. Indeed, while those ideas sometimes manage to trump the people, they also explain the aesthetics: someone has figured out the value of knowledge without quite comprehending the …
Last year’s King Arthur movie may have flopped, but director James Wan — whose horror beginnings (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) show up in ways both annoying (frequent use of explosion-as-jump-scare) and delightful (there’s a reason H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Dunwich Horror makes a foreground appearance early on) — seems to …
Director Nicholas Jarecki sets out to make you sympathize with a scumbag, and comes very close to succeeding. Yes, his protagonist is a rich Wall Street bastard, trying to game the system in the age of Occupy and Bernie Madoff. Yes, he's a philanderer, waxing familial at his birthday party …
Director Alex Gibney makes cinematic lemonade from lemons whose flavor was most likely enhanced through prohibited methods. Gibney had to shelve his documentary on seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong's miracle comeback in 2009, because, of course, it turned out it wasn't a miracle. Rather, it seems it was …
Denis Villeneuve’s latest is an artier — certainly moodier and less entertaining, thanks to Amy Adams’s deeply inward protagonist and a blue-gray palette designed to contrast the barren present with the fruitful past — version of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. That is, it’s an alien-landing movie in which the alien …
Ordinarily, you might be right in thinking that a documentary about a clever forger who gets his own gallery retrospective would make for the worst sort of art-world inside baseball. (His brilliant masterstroke for avoiding prosecution: he donates all of his work instead of selling it.) But superforger Mark Landis …
Who's up for an existential road trip in an old Mercedes convertible? Colin Firth turns in an understated performance as Wallace Avery, a thwarted, once-promising golfer who sets out to make a new self for himself somewhere else. (Small wonder: he lives in Florida, but it feels like someone hit …
A nasty little triumph. It’s tempting to imagine that writer-director Riley Stearns caught a screening of the supremely feel-good The Karate Kid and thought, “Yeah, I can make the opposite of that.” Jesse Eisenberg stars as Casey Davies, a man whose slight build echoes Kid star Ralph Macchio, but who …
The high concept: why not set a horror film in the world's largest mass grave — the catacombs beneath Paris, a world of cramped tunnels, unforseen pitfalls, and millions and millions of human skeletons, many of them neatly disassembled and stacked? The motivation isn't terrible, as these things go: academic …
The titular creed states that, unlike most people, Assassins know that nothing is true and everything is permitted. It’s hard to imagine true believers in such a creed turning around and saying that their own lives are worth nothing and all that matters is the protection of the Apple of …
Wes Anderson looks to the heavens. Mostly in the material sense: the story here concerns a gathering of Science Kids for a convention in the desert adjacent to the titular space rock, and it turns out they're not the only interested parties. But also, and perhaps more importantly, in the …