A President who shall remain nameless in a country that, oddly enough, resembles our own asks his fellow Americans to endorse a loyalty oath. The deadline to sign is Black Friday (get it?), leaving a biracial couple and their family to fight about it over Thanksgiving dinner. Chris (writer-director-star Ike …
An anti-Taken, though definitely not a Given. Rather, Baltasar Kormákur directs, co-writes, and stars as a surgeon (you know, a person who takes the Hippocratic Oath and vows not to play at God) who sets out to disentangle his beloved daughter (from his previous, failed marriage) from her punky-thuggy-druggy boyfriend. …
Juan Manuel Bernal plays a lightly fictionalized version of disgraced Catholic priest and founder of the Legionaries of Christ Marcial Maciel, who was eventually ordered to "retire to a life of prayer and penance" after years of outrageous sexual misconduct. Here, he is the head of a seminary, where pious …
Vanessa Gould’s documentary look at the obituary department of the New York Times in action is as deceptive in tone as it is perceptive in vision. A strange air of calm rumination pervades the account, even as we watch a group of consummate professionals go through their daily, panic-inducing routine …
A pampered American couple with a serious cash-flow problem consider liquidating their best asset: a salt-shaker-sized Henry Moore bronze. But first it gets stolen from their London hotel room by a deaf chambermaid who covets it purely for aesthetics: a touch of schmaltz in a frostily "sophisticated" comedy. There is …
A funny-how-things-turn-out relationship comedy. The situation is slow to set up -- the pregnant Brooklyn social worker wants to raise her child with her gay-guy roommate rather than her live-apart boyfriend -- and the shortsighted characters are slow to think through the consequences. The natural complications are not, in the …
A throwback piece of good-looking sci-fi, starting with the gorgeous and haunting image of a shattered moon, its debris stretching out into orbit. Happily, we are spared the resultant catastrophes; the emphasis here is more on Tom Cruise's self-discovery than his badassery, and hardly at all on saving the world. …
A road comedy, “based upon The Odyssey by Homer,” about three chain-gang fugitives in Depression-era Mississippi. (The title, should you need reminding, comes from Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels: the proposed title for a “meaningful” film by a refractory Hollywood contract director, whose subsequent quest to get in touch with the …
Delusional mall cop (a close-cropped, clean-shaven Seth Rogen) with real-cop aspirations comparable to those of the title character of Paul Blart, but with a deeper and wider vein of psychosis: manic highs, sadistic lows. The maker of The Foot Fist Way, Jody Hill, enters the mainstream for the purposes of …
Hats off to any film that tries (and succeeds) at presenting challenging, off-putting characters from whose palms I’m reluctantly persuaded to eat. Character identification has never been my celluloid raison d'être, but damn if this movie didn’t get to me in a manner destined to cloud critical thinking. Jenny Slate …
The past collides with the present in this excavation of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam: a journey from World War II to recent years of pandemic and protest and a provocative, life-affirming reflection on memory, time and what's to come. Directed by Steve McQueen