Robert Redford returns to Brubaker mode as a prison reformer, only this time it's a military prison and he himself is a prisoner, a much-decorated general, former Vietnam POW, author of the biblical Burden of Command, and a man of such loyalty and integrity that he opted not to fight …
Anna Paquin, who gave a great kid’s performance in The Piano, offers a great adolescent performance as Lisa. Bright, snarky, spoiled, and neurotic about her broken family in New York, she drives her decent mom (J. Smith-Cameron) nearly crazy by becoming a drama diva. The cause is her role in …
Blue-collar weepie about a twenty-three-year-old mother with two months to live and an ambitious to-do list: make someone fall in love with her, find a new mate for her husband, record birthday messages to both of her daughters up until they're eighteen, and so on. The tousled verisimilitude is at …
The big reveal at the end of a magic trick is supposed to leave you shaking your head in wonder and asking, “How on earth?” But the big reveal that Morgan Freeman’s skeptical antagonist lays on Mark Ruffalo’s wounded trickster at the end of this sequel to 2013’s surprise hit …
Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a …
The adaptation of a nongenre novel by John Burnham Schwartz bears a first-glance resemblance to the Claude Chabrol thriller ca. 1970, This Man Must Die, in both of which a bereaved father tracks down the hit-and-run killer of his young son. But Chabrol's killer, from a genre novel by Nicholas …
Barren ground for the comic charms of Jennifer Aniston, as a hesitant fiancé investigating the possibility that her Pasadena family was the model for the Robinsons in The Graduate. That would make Shirley MacLaine Mrs. Robinson, and Kevin Costner the nuptial Lochinvar. (A self-described "dilettante Che biographer," he ignorantly pronounces …
“Disturbing” would be one word, maybe the best word, for Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Fifties-period Dennis Lehane detective novel. Nothing, let’s be clear, in the list of ingredients — the Alcatrazzy asylum for the criminally insane, the locked-room mystery of a vanished female inmate, the dreamland visitations from the …
Takes its name from a team of investigative journalists at The Boston Globe, and provides a touching ode to the old-fashioned notion that some things simply need reporting; never mind the effort, the expense, or the effect on circulation. Here, the thing in question is the awful failure of the …
Less of an addiction drama, more of a recovery story, with a few nasty moments along the way. If Thanks for Sharing occasionally feels like too much of a polished and pretty rom-com/sitcom for a movie about the grotty horror of sex addiction (masturbation! frottage! prostitutes! upskirts! hepatitis! bad Daddy …
Two short stories by Andre Dubus, one of the same name and another named Adultery, are forged into a bludgeoningly dull chamber piece centered on two faculty colleagues, with matching scrubby beards for that academic look, who each have an extramarital affair with the other's wife. Director John Curran's pattern …
John Woo's Second World War shoot-'em-up. The premise of the film, in contrast to that of any previous John Woo you will have seen (Mission: Impossible II, Face/Off, Broken Arrow, etc.), brings to bear what we could call a pressure of reality, to push against the director's cartoony tendencies, and …
A rarefied chamber piece for a small-town single mom, her pensive little boy, her nomadic no-account brother (their parents, as we're shown in a childhood prologue, were killed in an auto accident, and there's no indication of who filled that role afterwards), her soft-mannered hard-assed new boss at the bank, …