Domestic dysfunction from Korean director Sang-soo Im. The story is nothing new — sweet naïf gets ground under the moneyed wheels of her employers after crossing the semipermeable membrane of upstairs/downstairs relations in just the wrong way. But the telling is expert, with pacing so languid you almost don’t notice …
How do we know it’s weak? Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and roguish Jack Nicholson pinball through the silly story, a sophomoric relationship comedy with little zaps of adulthood. Meet-cutes pile up, some smart lines zing, and a baby is inserted to domesticate the plot. Veteran director/writer James L. …
Documentarists Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet, Common Threads, et al.) try their hands at narrative film, or docudrama, or maybe just simulated documentary, showing little storytelling sense. The central action, if one can be pinpointed, is the 1957 obscenity trial of the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s titular …
Computer-animated, seemingly computer-written, Viking tale, revolving around a twiggy little lad named Hiccup, “different” from his stout fellows, odd, aberrant, queer you might say, who rather than slay dragons, gets to know them, understands them, negotiates for peace between the species, yet still proves his mettle as a “real” Viking …
The mad passion of a wealthy Milanese matron (Tilda Swinton) for the much younger chef with whom her son has entered a restaurant partnership. Thus, there’s a food-film ingredient from the shelf of Babette’s Feast, Big Night, Like Water for Chocolate, Mostly Martha, and the like — a sensual awakening, …
No relation to the cigarette or its famous promo bellhop. Not much relation to comedy, either, as manic Jim Carrey seeks to jazz up this “based on truth” story about a liar, con man and escape artist. He flipped from church-going marriage to brazen ‘70s cruising as a gay party …
Ostensible documentary on the post-acting career of Joaquin Phoenix by his brother-in-law and fledgling director Casey Affleck. One has to qualify it as “ostensible” because honestly it’s beyond belief. The mere existence of the film adds fuel to suspicions that the change of career from actor to rapper was but …
A major snow job from fair-haired filmmaker Christopher Nolan, nominally a science-fiction thriller focussed on some sort of psychic superspy (Leonardo DiCaprio, fully earning the furrow between his brows), an expert in the gentle art of “extraction,” the stealing of conscious ideas from people when their guard is down in …
High-dudgeon documentary, concise, lucid, and loaded, on the economic nosedive of 2008: “This crisis was not an accident.” Writer and director Charles Ferguson succeeds in whipping up disgust and outrage even while he fails at fighting off strained brains and glazed eyes: “derivatives,” “leverage,” “collateralized debt obligations,” “credit default swaps,” …
It serves a sequel’s purpose; it gives the sheep somewhere to go and get clipped. No one can reasonably complain about Don Cheadle taking over the supporting part of Col. "Rhodey" Rhodes from Terrence Howard (otherwise same principal cast and director, Jon Favreau), and Scarlett Johansson ingratiatingly prostitutes herself to …
A sixteen-year-old boy, afflicted with suicidal thoughts and “stress vomit” (outdistancing Linda Blair in The Exorcist, thanks a heap), gets thrown in, during renovations, with the grown-ups on the Adult Psychiatric Floor, there to experience the full wit, wisdom, warmth, and wackiness of a mental ward. Written and directed by …
Comedy of awkwardness among emotional, possibly mental, cripples. (“I’m not ready yet for penis penetration.”) Undeniably painful, but not generally in a good way. Philip Seymour Hoffman preserves his stage role for eternity (his nervous throat-clearing, his woolen knit cap, his scraggly blond dreadlocks), important enough to him that he …
Documentary filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg cover a year in the life of the stand-up comic, and they find, beneath the surgically stretched and smoothed mask (with abundant archive footage to show how she used to look), a vulnerable, driven, hard-working, needy, even desperate human being, albeit not a …
Animator Jimmy Hayward’s live-action adaptation of a DC Comics superhero series from the Seventies comes across as an imitation spaghetti Western translated back into vernacular American, a mac-and-cheese Western, let’s call it, or a Beefaroni Western, revolving around a supernatural bounty hunter (Josh Brolin) who as a result of his …