Finally, a movie about a vampire-human love affair that isn’t afraid to tackle the tough question of what happens when the resulting vampire-human hybrid fetus begins to threaten the life and health of the human (read: fragile) mother. No “happily ever after” here, folks — this is a story about …
Oh, alas. The fevered emotion of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 — the one where teen bride Bella (Kristen Stewart) and her ageless vampire suitor Edward (Robert Pattinson) get married, get down, and get into trouble when the hybrid fetus that results from their love begins to …
If money makes the world go 'round, the lack of it keeps things interesting and vital. Wonderbrothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (The Kid With a Bike) return with a tale of heroic struggle against an ordinary disaster. A thoroughly deglammed Marion Cotillard plays Sandra, a woman who returns from a …
It's not a subtle move to open your story with a tour guide (Oscar Isaac) leading a group around some sun-drenched ruins and telling site-specific stories from the Greek myths. (In this case, the story of how Theseus lost his dear old dad Aegus after killing the Minotaur.) But it's …
Uncle Boonmee is dying. His relatives show up to take care of him. So do his dead wife and transmogrified son. If no one acts particularly surprised, it’s because they all share a sense of continuity — between life and death and life after death, between the human and animal …
San Diego-based moviefolk Kevin Tostado (director/producer), Craig Bentley (producer), and Jordan Guzzardo (director of photography) team up to do for Monopoly what Wordplay did for crossword puzzles. The 2009 Monopoly World Championship in Las Vegas provides the dramatic engine, but there are plenty of diverting asides along the way, from …
As an ad for the annual electronic dance music festival The Electric Daisy Carnival, Under the Electric Sky is pretty good. The gigantic animatronic owl whose nest serves as the event's main stage is flat-out fun to watch, and there's lots of music and dancing. The founders at Insomniac Events …
Glacial in pace, skeletal in plot, and generally nasty, Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin is a repetitive nightmare of drear and dread punctuated by moments of queasy-making horror. Scarlett Johansson plays a blank but fetching piece of alien bait, trawling Scotland for solitary dudes that no one will miss, then …
Glacial in pace, skeletal in plot, and generally nasty, Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin is a repetitive nightmare of drear and dread punctuated by moments of queasy-making horror. Scarlett Johansson plays a blank but fetching piece of alien bait, trawling Scotland for solitary dudes that no one will miss, then …
Kate Beckinsale slithers into Selene’s vinyl catsuit once again for another round of Vampires vs. Werewolves...er, Lycans. Happily, much of the grandiose mythology has given way to scientific scheming and old-fashioned monster-movie fun. Specifically, the old-fashioned monster movies of Hammer Films, complete with glowering Brits (Charles Dance, channeling both Peter …
Director Steven Soderbergh returns to the cinema of anxiety he explored in 2013’s Side Effects. Here, he wraps a lump of toxic masculinity in a thick layer of mental distress and deep fries it in rancid insurance malfeasance, then matches the whole thing to a relentlessly discomfiting visual aesthetic: garish …
Director and co-writer Amat Escalante presents a piece of genuinely sympathetic horror, expertly conceived and acted. A scientist and his wife have something unearthly in their barn — the physical manifestation of “our primitive side” — and as the film opens, it’s using one of its many tentacles to pleasure …
Director Neil Burger’s remake of the French hit The Intouchables tells the story of Phillip, an unhappy (but fabulously wealthy) quadriplegic (Bryan Cranston) who decides to tempt fate by hiring the least competent life auxiliary he can find: Dell, a broke ex-con (Kevin Hart) who thought he was applying to …
A pretty and romantic horror film. A woman is force fed a worm that renders her completely suggestible. If her captor tells her that water is the most delicious thing on earth, then it is. If he tells her she needs money to ransom her kidnapped mother, then she does. …
Writer/director/producer Jordan Peele is a smart, ambitious, skilled filmmaker. All three qualities are on display in his second effort — the story of a vacationing family whose members find themselves set upon by scissor-wielding doppelgängers — but that doesn’t quite make it a successful film. The final reveal feels too …