Still very much a live-action cartoon, but one with considerably more charm than its predecessor, thanks in no small part to the game commitment of everyone involved to making a film that feels remarkably like it was conceived and created by (as opposed to merely for) 12-year-old boys. It’s chiefly …
You go to the fair, you get your cotton candy, you know what you’re in for: nearly unadulterated sweetness that melts into nothing almost as soon as you take it in. Elle Fanning plays a lonely Polish girl growing up on the Isle of Wight who enters the titular singing …
Writer-director Ali Soozandeh wastes no time in mounting his lovingly rotoscoped attack on sexual hypocrisy in Islamic Iran: the film opens with a man paying a desperate woman for a drive-time blowjob while her son sits in the backseat. The sordid scenario gets interrupted only when the driver spots another …
Sci-fi franchise reset that grafts a new storyline onto the 1984 original tale of a murderous cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) sent back through time to kill Sarah Connor, eventual mother of the revolution against our future machine overlords. The result looks like, oh I dunno, a 67-year-old skinjacket sagging off the …
Vera Brittain's memoir of a woman's experience during World War I seems perfect for a modern-day historical drama. Well, perhaps "suitable" would be a better word. Or maybe "correct" — entirely appropriate, but without too much gutwrenching or heartbreaking. Headstrong young Englishwoman (an interesting if not quite compelling Alicia Vikander) …
Less of an addiction drama, more of a recovery story, with a few nasty moments along the way. If Thanks for Sharing occasionally feels like too much of a polished and pretty rom-com/sitcom for a movie about the grotty horror of sex addiction (masturbation! frottage! prostitutes! upskirts! hepatitis! bad Daddy …
Lone Scherfig’s adaptation of Lissa Evans’ better-titled novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, set in London during the early days of World War II, is as polite, charming, and English as its star Gemma Arterton, who sails through the chaos and calamity with the good sense, pluck, and grace …
There is a moment near the middle of writer-director Josh Margolin’s geezer crowd-pleaser that perfectly melds its sometimes desperately disparate tones, namely: a touching but not too sweet meditation of aging, its attendant losses, and the right response to both and a funny but not too far-fetched riff on Mission: …
Co-writers and co-directors Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage make a movie about religious believers that has the decency to take its subjects seriously even as it casts a critical eye toward faith-based communities in general and snake handling in particular. (But boy howdy, do the serpents ever serve a …
Writer-director David Rühm’s Therapy for a Vampire is wonderfully good-natured and agreeable and even funny for a film about an unhappy marriage between a pair of murderous and immortal bloodsuckers. It’s Vienna in 1932, and Count Geza von Közsnöm pays a visit to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud — though not to …
Is it ironic or fitting that director Peter Jackson’s brilliant use of technology should help make such an arresting treatment of a war in which technology — tanks, machine guns, mustard gas, etc. — wrought heretofore undreamt-of horror upon humanity? Either way, it’s astonishing that a film which must resort …
Is it ironic or fitting that director Peter Jackson’s brilliant use of technology should help make such an arresting treatment of a war in which technology — tanks, machine guns, mustard gas, etc. — wrought heretofore undreamt-of horror upon humanity? Either way, it’s astonishing that a film which must resort …
A prequel to the 1982 remake of the 1951 original. Pretty lady scientist (is there any other kind these days?) heads down to Antarctica to examine an unusual specimen discovered in the ice. Things go awry. The frozen wasteland is put to good, foreboding use, but director Matthijs van Heijningen …
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about watching philosophy professor Nathalie Chazeaux’s (Isabelle Huppert) life crumble is the utter lack of drama accorded to various disasters by both the film and its characters. (This is, one recalls, what’s meant by “taking things philosophically.”) Things fall apart, and as she notes in …
Exactly what you might expect in a movie based on a relationship manual written by comedian and game-show host Steve Harvey. Harvey — who actually shows up onscreen to dispense his grandmotherly wisdom — tells the ladies that while “times have changed, your playbook hasn’t.” Nor, it seems, has the …