Comparisons — to Disney’s first live-action princess movie remake (2015’s Cinderella) and to the 1991 animated tale of a Beauty who wants “much more than this provincial life” (and the Beast who must win her heart if he is to recover his humanity) — may not be unavoidable, but they …
Comparisons — to Disney’s first live-action princess movie remake (2015’s Cinderella) and to the 1991 animated tale of a Beauty who wants “much more than this provincial life” (and the Beast who must win her heart if he is to recover his humanity) — may not be unavoidable, but they …
An aggressively, gleefully dumb outing from director David Ayer and star Jason Statham, beginning with the admittedly funny bit that the guy we meet at the outset who works as a beekeeper used to be a Beekeeper — a super-agent acting outside the system to Protect the Hive, aka, American …
Late in the proceedings of this, the third installment of Richard Linklater's relationship gabfest, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) gets a mid-argument chance to make a list of his beloved Celine’s (July Delpy) flaws. “Well, for starters, you’re fucking crazy,” he begins — and gets no further. But sometimes, a one-item list …
So you’re a wounded Irish Yank (Colin Farrell) who’s fled a Civil War battlefield, and you’re lucky enough to get taken in by the residents of a Southern girls’ school. Your charming blarney and their lonely desperation lead you to consider three romantic possibilities: stay on and help the exquisite …
"Based on a true story" tale of a half-black English heiress (an unfailingly appealing Gugu Mbatha-Raw) navigating a world in which her mother (here safely dead) could have been treated as property. It's also based on a true painting (of the heiress and her cousin), and it does its visual …
Trick photography. First, because it's the story of a man who photographed his tricks: Bert Stern, lenser, lover, lothario. The man is undeniably gifted, and apparently, undeniable in other ways as well — even in his eighties, he casts a spell over a trio of sweetish, youngish things (two of …
Necessity is a mother of an inventor. Because they could not afford gavel-to-gavel coverage of the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions, the bright boys at ABC News opted for a different sort of spectacle: nightly debates between conservative gadfly William F. Buckley, Jr. (National Review) and liberal author Gore Vidal …
Bettie Page — born into poverty, unwanted by her mother, and molested by her father — came within one-quarter point of being her high-school Valedictorian, an honor that would have carried with it a four-year college scholarship. Instead, she wound up in a brief, bad marriage — her first of …
Director Cristian Mungiu follows up his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days with a harrowing, unsentimental, but hugely sympathetic story of a tiny religious community's attempt to care for a damaged soul who comes into their midst. Voichita and Alina are young women who clung to one another …
It's an auspicious opening: a little girl — English, half-black, desperate to please — steps onto an obscure talent show stage and sings Nina Simone's "Blackbird": Why you wanna fly, blackbird? You ain't ever gonna fly. She comes in second, and her equally desperate mother (Minnie Driver) makes her trash …
Whether or not you are a fan of fart jokes, you will almost certainly feel something during the protracted run-up and almost equally protracted execution of the one that director Steven Spielberg delivers in his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved story of a runty giant who seeks to atone for …
What could Tim Burton have possibly seen in the story of a monotonous, marginally talented, yet enormously successful “artist"? Something of himself, perhaps? Another one of the director’s triumphs of production design over storytelling, as structurally spiritless as the ocular-enhanced, Children of the Damned urchins generally associated with the paintings …
Four damaged souls in various stages of recovery — filmmaker Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) from depression and booze, rock star Marianne (Tilda Swinton) from damaged vocal cords, nymphet Penelope (Dakota Johnson) from fatherlessness, and record producer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) from, well, his life up to now — meet up at an …
A splendid commercial — as opposed to argument — for small-scale biodiversity as an effective operative principle for a family farm in Southern California. (Translation: although farming necessarily involves imposition on the natural world, the closer you get to being just one more strand in the ecological web, the better.) …