Facile but enjoyable. George Clooney directed and stars as a presidential candidate, a glib liberal dream — apart from his Clintonian attraction to a naïve intern (Evan Rachel Wood), who seems to be running on the Live Bait ticket. As a silky machine of ambition, he excites other tough guys: …
Billed as a movie lover’s dream for a reason: the eye hasn’t seen this much color on screen since Vincente Minnelli passed. The songs and musical numbers are lively, the cast attractive, all attempts to transform city streets into expressionistically lit studio backlots successful, and the ending decidedly downbeat. And …
Director Craig Gillespie, of the mainstream Mr. Woodcock, indulges the monkeyshines of Ryan Gosling in the part of an antisocial Minnesota Lutheran who seeks happiness in a chaste relationship with an anatomically correct life-size sex doll. Everyone in town loves him too much, for some unapparent reason, to burst his …
Young love relived in the old folks' home: James Garner, every day, reads to a memory-impaired Gena Rowlands the story of a different-worlds romance ("It was an improbable romance. He was a country boy, she was from the city"), the story -- you guessed it -- of their own romance …
Barbet Schroeder, coming off his engagé political thriller Our Lady of the Assassins, reverts to his Hollywood-hack mode, with an updated Loeb-Leopold case about a precocious, Nietzschean, absinthe-sipping high-school misfit who masterminds a "perfect crime" in collaboration with a cocky BMOC. For hack work, however, it is a handsome job, …
The opening is pure [Shane] Black: we soar over the ruined ‘70s Hollywood sign to catch a boy sneaking his dad’s porno mag and ogling the centerfold, just before a car driven by said centerfold crashes through his house and plunges into the ravine below. The boy investigates, finds her …
Young love relived in the old folks' home: James Garner, every day, reads to a memory-impaired Gena Rowlands the story of a different-worlds romance ("It was an improbable romance. He was a country boy, she was from the city"), the story -- you guessed it -- of their own romance …
Young love relived in the old folks' home: James Garner, every day, reads to a memory-impaired Gena Rowlands the story of a different-worlds romance ("It was an improbable romance. He was a country boy, she was from the city"), the story -- you guessed it -- of their own romance …
Did you find the violence in Drive just a trifle too restrained and tasteful? Then Nicholas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling would like a second chance at your sensibilities. Gosling plays a drug-smuggler whose super-nasty mom (Kristin Scott-Thomas) wants him to hunt down the person who killed his brother. In …
A rare exception to the old line about the book being better than a movie, The Place Beyond the Pines is a small-scale epic that might have been better as a novel. In a novel, we might not have minded the sudden loss of major characters, the 15-years-later epilogue that …
A tortured art student with writhing eyebrows plans to kill himself in three days on his twenty-first birthday, and a psychotherapist in pants as short as early-Beatles hastens to prevent it. A pattern of duplications and repetitions establishes an air of oddness, and the narrative line spirals off increasingly into …