At 50, Kristin Scott Thomas’s elegant face seems freshly vitalized as Suzanne, a stifled bourgeois wife liberated by sex with a Spanish worker (Sergi Lopez). Her spouse (Yvan Attal) responds with the spite of a Molière cuckold, minus the wit. The engaging, lusty lovers make foolish, desperate mistakes, and director-writer …
Frederic Lilien, an aimless Belgian, found his mission by seeing and then keeping photographic vigil on Pale Male, a great hawk that nests on prime real estate facing New York’s Central Park. Lilien’s documentary is padded with music and sage thoughts about life, but the bird is glorious and the …
Computer-animated antifascist children's story of, and for, the birds. A puffed-up heroic epic punctured by self-conscious self-mockery and incomprehensible combat. With the voices of Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, Helen Mirren, Abbie Cornish, and Geoffrey Rush; directed by Zack Snyder.
The fate of the world plays out at a roadside diner in Paradise Falls at the edge of the Mojave Desert: the Archangel Michael and the Archangel Gabriel battle over the imminent illegitimate baby of a dirty-blond hash-slinger. Bombastic horror film with idiotic dialogue: “Either your child lives or mankind …
American revamping and retitling of the overpraised Swedish horror show, Let the Right One In, a tender, tentative, prepubescent love story between a bullied schoolboy and the next-door vampire (“twelve, more or less”), snail-paced, whisper-soft, like the original. Matt Reeves, dropping the pardonably sloppy digital camcorder of Cloverfield, directing this …
The poise and grace of Vanessa Redgrave, her reunion on screen with Franco Nero (her Lancelot in Camelot, the father of one of her children), and a mouthwatering tour of Tuscany are insufficient counterweights to the slop bucket of false sentiments about romantic love. With Amanda Seyfried, Christopher Egan, and …
Todd Solondz has described this as a “quasi-sequel” to Happiness, a helpful description inasmuch as a dozen years have passed since the quasi-predecessor, and inasmuch as the moviegoer’s memory receives no help whatsoever from the recasting of the principal roles with different players: Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson, and …
It’s hard to say which is a finer encapsulation of the proceedings: Robert De Niro sitting for a caricature artist at a children’s birthday party or Dustin Hoffman detonating a whoopee cushion and saying, “We have to laugh at the stuff that makes us human.” Put another way, whether you …
The youngest son in an Italian family struggles with whether or not to come out of. Italian comedy film directed by Ferzan Özpetek, who also co-wrote the script with Ivan Cotroneo. Starring Riccardo Scamarcio, Alessandro Preziosi, Nicole Grimaudo, Lunetta Savino, Ennio Fantastichini and Ilaria Occhini.
Preening action film about a five-man commando team with a delicate moral sense and robust appetite for fun. Idris Elba acts as though he were playing a real character instead of a video-game simulacrum. With Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoë Saldaña, Chris Evans, and Jason Patric; directed by Sylvain White.
A loser. Cheap humor, cheap sentiment, cheap filmmaking, around a $370 million jackpot, hit by a ghetto youth who doesn’t know enough to sign his ticket before the news gets out. With Bow Wow, Brandon T. Jackson, Naturi Naughton, Loretta Devine, and Ice Cube; directed by Erik White.
Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal play two attractive people who enjoy having sex. But it turns out that while both are nice to look at, neither is particularly appealing. She’s sick and getting sicker, coping with the pain by diagnosing everyone else. He’s an aspiration-addled jerk who’s never said “I …
At 50, Kristin Scott Thomas’s impeccable bone structure and diction (French, English) ratify her cool, rapacious “charm” as a business power schemer, in a Parisian complex of offices that recall the glassy city of Jacques Tati’s Playtime. Too soon, she’s gone (imagine Meryl Streep exiting The Devil Wears Prada early). …
Fact-based tale, despite the name changes from Oscar Bonavena, Sally Burgess, Joe Conforte, and the Mustang Ranch, of a lethal love triangle comprising an Argentinian heavyweight contender and the married partners in a legal brothel outside of Reno. It seems a subject made to order for the screen, though you …