James Thurber's nigh-unto-perfect short story about a little man with big daydreams gets the therapy-culture treatment from director and star Ben Stiller. No more flights of magnificent fancy as a means of coping with mundanity. No, now it's time to break the shackles and make all your dreams come true. …
Ben Kingsley's obtrusive accent at the opening may signal that Self/Less is a B movie, but B movies have their very real virtues. Despite its sort of sci-fi premise — what if you could shed your worn-out body and transfer yourself into a newer, healthier model? — the film is …
Nota bene: the name of the film is Selma, not King. Sure, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (portrayed with careful dignity by David Oyelowo) serves as architect, engine, lightning rod, and general for the organization and execution of a march from Selma, Alabama to the State Capitol …
Director Ritesh Batra’s adaptation of Julian Barnes’s my-theme-is-memory novel serves as a grand showcase for star Jim Broadbent as a sour old soul who is ever so gently forced to reckon with his past, and a smaller showcase for Charlotte Rampling as the long-ago lover who has very little interest …
Three-time Academy Award nominee Bradley Cooper and three-time Academy Award nominee (and one-time winner!) Jennifer Lawrence team up yet again (after 2012's Silver Linings Playbook and 2013's American Hustle, but before 2015's Joy) to make a complete stinker of a period piece set in the very scenic Smoky Mountains of …
Think Adaptation meets Pulp Fiction — with a heart! Or at least, with a beloved dog. Martin McDonagh, the writer-director behind the cleverly chatty crime comedy In Bruges, here casts Colin Farrell in the role of Marty(!), an alcoholic screenwriter who's having trouble coming up with a cast to fill …
True Grit, R.I.P.D., The Giver, and now this schlocky bit of medieval Young Adult adventure. At this point, it's tempting to wonder if Jeff Bridges accepts roles chiefly on the basis of whether or not he'll get to sport grizzly facial hair and talk funny. Here, he plays a spook: …
When actor Ethan Hawke hit midlife, he found himself, as he puts it, "struggling with why I do what I do" and wondering about "what is authentic." (He gets that money is not the same as satisfaction or virtue, even going so far as to note that some of his …
Director Jaume Collet-Serra and cinematographer Flavio Martinez Labiano put Blake Lively (here making her bid to be the next Kill Bill-era Uma Thurman in terms of limb length, visage resolution, and pain management) through her paces (strokes?) as a woman who decides to mourn the loss of her mother by …
Less a film than an attractively illustrated chronicle of sexual pathology. Brandon (Michael Fassbender) needs sex and lots of it — with whores, with pickups, with his hand. Pretty much anything, really, as long as the encounter is impersonal. The pathology does not tolerate humanity. But humanity arrives in the …
Gather ‘round, allegory fans, and behold this fish-out-of-water tale of man’s inhumanity to what he deems inhuman from director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro. The action is recalled as a sort of adult fairy tale, and concerns a woman (Sally Hawkins, mesmerizing) without a voice and the mysterious creature who …
Hilarious: this is a film in which the bad guys plan to capitalize on the popularity of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week by selling “the hardcore shit,” i.e., video of sharks actually eating people. But the film itself is tame enough to pick up a PG-13 rating. Even more hilarious: a …
Sharper opens with close-ups on the gear assembly of a Rolex watch — perhaps a promise to the viewer that what follows will be a masterpiece of intricate moving parts, providing a precise, satisfying experience with understated elegance. But alas, the Rolex that actually appears in the film is a …
Much will be made, no doubt, over the fact that DC has finally taken some pains to escape its reputation for dark ‘n gritty superhero movies and put the “comic” back in “comic book movie” with this, the story of a teenage boy who, when he says the titular name, …