Makoto Shinkai wrote, directed, edited, and handled the cinematography for this ambitious romantic drama that gathers up body-swapping, time-shifts, cosmic disasters, divine intervention, country v. city, tradition v. modernity, broken families, coming of age, and the seemingly endless handleability of breasts and weaves them into one brightly colored, highly emotive …
At first, Your Sister's Sister plays like a comedy of very modern manners, everything so up to date that antique notions of "good" and "bad" can be replaced safely by "gratifying" and "weird." Jack (a bearish Mark Duplass) is a sweet, modern guy, but he's sad, because his brother died …
Sergio Martino’s giallo take on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” is similar to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, but much twistier and trashier and about an hour shorter. (The Shining still wins for sheer quantities of blood, but Vice has more lovingly depicted violence.) As in Kubrick’s classic, you’ve got …
Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) has made something of a crowd pleaser, a gorgeous consideration of the artistic impulse that yields up its fruits without too much of a struggle. (A little patience may be required while the weaver spins out his threads, but they all wind up woven, …
"You can't choose your family," goes the old saying. You Will Be My Son shows what may happen when you try. It's not a surprising story, but it is a satisfying one, saved from devolvement into grotesquerie by its layered performances, perfect setting in the world of fine wine (where …
Documentarian Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine) takes on the Stuxnet story — and more importantly, its implications for the future of international relations, foreign policy, rules of combat, what have you. You know, global-scale life-and-death stuff. It’s more fun following the narrative if you don’t know …
Thrillingly Biblical, in both the Old and New Testament sense. In a radioactive, post-war world, Ann Burden (symbolism) lives a lonely life, tending the valley that is her home and also maybe the last unpoisoned place on Earth. Hope for humanity (or at least company) arrives in the form of …
Remarkable for taking a lurid and ludicrous storyline — a federal prosecutor and aspiring politician plunges (reluctantly) into the world of high-priced escorts, even as the FBI goes after the very service he frequents — stocking it with a solid cast — Patrick Wilson as a twitchy, tortured Paul Newman, …
A zookeeper (Kevin James) tries to win back the girl who dumped him (for being a zookeeper) by taking dating advice from the animals under his care. It’s hard not to imagine what could have been made from such an insane premise, especially given the anodyne goings-on of what actually …
Dramatization of the efforts by real-life Warsaw zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski to smuggle and shelter Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. It’s easy to see the story’s appeal: a loving couple (Johan Heldenbergh and a radiantly glamorous Jessica Chastain), struggling to preserve their life’s work but still risking …
The oldening of Ben Stiller, who directs, stars, and co-writes here, continues apace. It’s not just the sort-of sad, mostly doomed attempt to recapture (silly) lightning in a (men’s fragrance) bottle 15 years after his first story about the titular superdim supermodel. (Though the few times he manages it are …
Movies about making movies need to be smart and fun if they’re going to avoid getting sucked into the black hole of their own navels. Director Pedro Morelli’s storytelling ouroboros does manage to keep things fun (and sexually frank), partly by presenting the making-a-movie part of the movie as a …
Disney’s animated arm wrestles with race relations. Here, that means predators and prey: formerly enemies (the film requires you to resist any temptation to use the modifier “natural”), they have now evolved to the point of living as peaceful neighbors in an urban metropolis. Of course, out in the sticks, …