If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby had married Daisy — if the middle-class Midwestern boy’s dreams of achieving happiness through wealth had all come true — you might have wound up with something very close to the story told in this fascinating and intimate documentary about what does and does not …
Terence Davies’s slow and sumptuous A Quiet Passion turns the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (played mostly and hauntedly by Cynthia Nixon) into an unenthusiastic but unshakable martyr for her sex. It’s not that she doesn’t want the piety and domesticity expected of women in her place and time; it’s …
A shaggy dog story about a nearly hairless cat in 1920s Algiers. He serves his master the rabbi, but he loves his mistress, the rabbi’s fleshy daughter. When he eats the family parrot and so gains the power of speech, he seizes the opportunity to begin pitching woo. The rabbi …
How The Other Half Grieves — the other half being rich, beautiful, and above and beyond the dubious comforts of group therapy for parents who have lost a child. (Well, maybe not “beautiful” — unless you find Nicole Kidman’s shift from China Doll to Sinewy Skeleton transporting.) Moments of exquisite …
Stephen Hopkins’ account of track and field legend Jesse Owens and the controversy surrounding US participation in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 is overstuffed, muddy-headed, heavy-handed, derivative, and weirdly sanitized — and yet it almost works, because who wouldn’t thrill to see a black man take on Nazi ideology on …
…aka Waiting for Metallica. A man can endure a great deal for the sake of a dream. But expat Iranian novelist Hamid (the spectacularly coiffed Mohsen Namjoo) candidly admits that he has no dreams of his own, that his current mission — to bring together Afghani rock band Kabul Dreams …
Janice Engel’s loving portrait of perhaps the most famous liberal journalist in Texas history (there must be a few others, right?) feels a bit like a pitch for a biopic. That is to say, it’s more portrait than story. It spends an awful lot of time on what feels like …
A welcome improvement over the original Wreck-It Ralph's tale of a good guy (voiced to sweetly earnest perfection by John C. Reilly) who can’t seem to shake his onscreen character’s nasty rep when he’s off duty with his fellow video-game actors. (What part of show business don’t they understand?) In …
A welcome improvement over the original’s Wreck-It Ralph's tale of a good guy (voiced to sweetly earnest perfection by John C. Reilly) who can’t seem to shake his onscreen character’s nasty rep when he’s off duty with his fellow video-game actors. (What part of show business don’t they understand?) In …
A welcome improvement over the original’s Wreck-It Ralph's tale of a good guy (voiced to sweetly earnest perfection by John C. Reilly) who can’t seem to shake his onscreen character’s nasty rep when he’s off duty with his fellow video-game actors. (What part of show business don’t they understand?) In …
A food movie that depends very heavily on personal taste. If simplicity, sincerity, and sweetness are high on your list of cinematic preferences, then director Eric Khoo’s tale of a mixed-race cook’s journey to understand his family history —and perhaps even find some harmony between the Chinese and Japanese elements …
Director Brad Peyton's latest "Let's smash a city with Dwayne Johnson" feature may be based on a video game, but it plays like a live-action cartoon, one that doubles as a fantastical journey into the imagination and sensibility of a 10-year-old boy, complete with rude hand gestures and goofy declarations …
Director Brad Peyton's latest "Let's smash a city with Dwayne Johnson" feature may be based on a video game, but it plays like a live-action cartoon, one that doubles as a fantastical journey into the imagination and sensibility of a 10-year-old boy, complete with rude hand gestures and goofy declarations …
Director Brad Peyton's latest "Let's smash a city with Dwayne Johnson" feature may be based on a video game, but it plays like a live-action cartoon, one that doubles as a fantastical journey into the imagination and sensibility of a 10-year-old boy, complete with rude hand gestures and goofy declarations …
Kim Sung-hoon directs this unweildy mashup of political drama, zombie flick, and superhero movie. You’ve got your Crown Prince, executed at the outset for plotting an uprising against his vain and middling father. (He rebels for the sake of the kingdom, don’t you know, but what precisely will be gained …