Open-faced Kristen Wiig stars as Alice, a borderline-personality woman who believes everything Oprah tells her about being a special person who deserves to win. And who, when she wins $87 million dollars in the lottery, decides to host a TV show about...herself. What starts out looking like a quirky attack …
The well-digger is French star Daniel Auteuil (who, besides starring, also adapted the Marcel Pagnol novel and directed), and he has, in fact, five daughters. But the focus here is Patricia (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), an angelic eldest sister who rivals the surrounding South of France for natural beauty. But when the …
Why does beautiful boy Jonah hide under his bed at night to do his writing and drawing? Let’s see now. He’s a sensitive soul growing up in exile — macho Dad is of Puerto Rican extraction and vulnerable Mom is a white girl from Brooklyn, but the bunch of them …
A fairy tale of divorce, one that imagines an blissful way out of the trauma brought on by Mom and Dad putting a bullet in the love that gave rise to your existence. Julianne Moore is a comically narcissistic aging rocker; Steve Coogan is her gotta-ramble mate, and Onata Aprile …
What would happen if you stripped vampirism of all its moral horror and existential drama and just made it a thing, a way you happened to go from day to day? And then what if you allowed a documentary crew to come in and film your quotidian, blood-sucking, eternal existence? …
What may wind up being the final film from Studio Ghibli comes across as more whimper than bang, an excruciatingly simple story about an asthmatic foster child who wishes for a more normal life. Anna — long of neck, short of hair, pointy of chin — is a sour, sickly …
What may wind up being the final film from Studio Ghibli comes across as more whimper than bang, an excruciatingly simple story about an asthmatic foster child who wishes for a more normal life. Anna — long of neck, short of hair, pointy of chin — is a sour, sickly …
The contemporary hook for this fable is the setting: a Lebanese village where the Christians and Muslims have crafted a fragile peace built on isolation from the conflicts raging “elsewhere.” But of course, “elsewhere” finds its way in, and we discover that the fable is about something more fundamental than …
Noah Baumbach is still swinging away at generational divides (The Squid and the Whale) and the plight of the artist (Frances Ha), but here, he trades in his rapier for a foam rubber cudgel. Open on Naomi Watts forgetting the plot of The Three Little Pigs and crying "What the …
If this cautionary tale keeps just one kid from selling his soul in the name of artistic greatness, then it will have done its job. What's that? It's not a cautionary tale? It's a searing exploration of the sacrifices demanded by art, as exemplified by a driven jazz student (Miles …
It seems likely that at some point, most folks probably entertain a fond fantasy of pulling up stakes and heading off into a new life full of adventure, excitement, and maybe even danger. Bored TV newswoman Kim Baker (Tina Fey, successfully and rapidly alternating between aggressively smart and emotionally vulnerable) …
The thing about a white bird in a blizzard? It disappears. Just like pretty young Kat Connor’s (Shailene Woodley) mom Eve (Eva Green), who simply vanishes one school-day afternoon. But it turns out that Eve had been evanescing for years: a beauty queen rendered gradually invisible by marriage (to mustachioed …
For his third outing as a director, Ralph Fiennes gives the title, star billing, and great majority of screen time to Oleg Ivenko in his turn as famed Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who also famously defected from the Soviet Union in 1963. But he keeps the keys to the …
First-time writer-director Elizabeth Wood’s White Girl sets out to be a Great Gatsby for the 21st century — and perhaps in the process, to depict the orgastic future that Fitzgerald mentioned at the story’s end. College sophomore Leah (Morgan Saylor, gung-ho) arrives in NYC shortly before the start of classes, …