For all the posh trappings of Ye Olde Haunted House and a Guillermo del Toro script, the horror is hokum. Guy Pearce is too busy fixing up the mansion to notice that his daughter (Bailee Madison), traumatized by his divorce, is losing her mind. She is also terrorized by tiny, …
Russian actress Kseniya Rappoport has a lovely, vulnerable intensity as Sonia, a chambermaid in Turin, Italy, who falls for a sensitive ex-cop (Filippo Timi, who was Mussolini in Vincere). Her soulfulness can’t save a moody jam-up of various genres utilizing robbery, two suicides, two loves, a dating club, brain injury, …
Leasing an old New England home, haunted by past murders and present terror, cause hard times for newcomers Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. jim Sheridan also directed Naomi Watts, Marton Csokas, and Jane Alexander in the PG-13 thriller.
A tricky, unsettling, often riveting film, shot in a coldly glowing L.A. by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Ryan Gosling, an update on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, has magnetic mystery as the lean, terse “hero” who drives hard, can fox-out criminals, and may be a sociopath. His shy interest …
Nicolas Cage, ripping down highways to avenge his daughter and recover his grandchild from a satanic-cult preacher (Billy Burke), joins with a kick-ass waitress (Amber Heard) and is pursued by Hell’s suave, deadly emissary (William Fichtner). The violence, nudity, crashes, trash talk, and hocus-pocus could make you yearn for the …
Donald Sutherland sags into his Roman toga when his soldier nephew (Channing Tatum) goes almost solo from Britannia into dark, primeval, 2nd-century Scotland to retrieve (great Caesar’s ghost!) the gold eagle of his dead father’s decimated legion. Though a limited actor, Tatum has the brawny force of meat on a …
Michael Webber’s documentary about people fixated on owning wild, often dangerous animals (lots of TV news clips and talking heads). The heart of it is the connection between Tim Harrison, an Ohio cop who cares equally about people and “pets,” and Terry Brumfield, a man emotionally fixated on his caged …
Chinese family (melo)drama, played out against the backdrop of the financial world circa 1899. There are epic aspirations at work here; it’s hard not to see traces of the Karamazovs in the interaction of Old Master and his four sons: the mute Buddhist, the violent hothead, the simpleton, and the …
Honorable simplification. In Icíar Bollaín’s film, Gael García Bernal is the idealistic director and Luis Tosar the tough producer of a film being made in the Bolivian Andes. Modern villagers play the Carib Indians subjugated by Columbus, and as politics invade the production, themes arrive on tracks of editorial cinema: …
A strict and solitary woman meets a teenager with a love of life. In their differences they discover infinite possibilities and insurmountable gaps.
The daily goings-on of an upper middle class family are presented for your watercooler enjoyment. Liev Schreiber and Helen Hunt, facing marital ennui, must deal with the latter’s ailing father. Brian Dennehy is credible in the part, cursing out his doldrums with an end-of-the-line kind of resignation. Photographed in a …
Dan Rush directs his padded adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story, Why Don’t You Dance? Will Ferrell, as the central character, is a bit of an obstacle. He plays an upper-middle-class alcoholic whose wife leaves him on the same day that he loses his job. He returns home to find …
Amiable Phil Rosenthal, having created the hit show Everybody Loves Raymond, went to Moscow to help craft a spinoff copy, Everybody Loves Kostya. Smart but sometimes clueless (taken to a Russian military museum, he can’t relate), he felt frustrated by a culture gap in humor, intrusive bosses, miscasting, etc. This …
Ocean’s 11-style caper pic with more mayhem and darker skin. (Paul Walker’s whiteness here gleams like marble; his performance is similarly statuesque.) You get plenty of pretty machines and pretty ladies to go with your muscles, explosions, and bro-banter, but for a film stuffed with two of the hardest hardbodies …