A chef (Ewan McGregor) and an epidemiologist (Eva Green) fall in love while the world around them gives way to a sensory-depriving epidemic. Be it zombies or infectious plagues, an assault on the immune system has long been a staple of horror and melodrama. Not since Todd Haynes’s Safe has …
Some interesting experimentation with split-screen images, images-within-images, and images of differing dimensions -- but that sort of interest dries up fast. Writer-director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, et al.) gives us a sort of love story and a sort of revenge story, though "story" …
A follow-that-dream fairy tale set in a world of robots, anthropomorphized and sentimentalized to such extent that an assembly-required baby-bot will grow organically into a tot-bot and a teen-bot and ultimately a budding inventor-bot. It offers, as they say, something for everyone: fart jokes and big-butt jokes, pop-culture allusions, corporate …
The charm stretches but doesn’t break in Lasse Hallström’s odd, gentle comedy about a visionary sheikh (Amr Waked) who devises a dam, river, and salmon in dry, hot Yemen. Caught up in his crazy but moving scheme are two Brit dreamers (Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor). It has some of the …
Three youthy and self-congratulatory Glaswegians, two men, one woman, to a cocktail-shaker beat in the background, subject prospective flatmates to a torturous inquisition (a variation on the standard "audition" montage), leaving viewers wondering why anyone would want to move in with them. (Not to mention into the eye-fatiguing confines of …
The long-awaited (by some) prequel to the Star Wars trilogy, and such a letdown as to make you feel almost sorry for George Lucas, poor little rich boy. Even moviegoers who have never attended a foreign film in their lives are apt to be aware that Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden …
The saga grinds on, in state-of-the-art digital video: crisp and detailed yet somewhat overcast, monotoned, seemingly covered in a sort of pinkish-complected skin, like an unboiled wiener. The particulars -- the diminished role of the reviled Jar-Jar Binks; the teen romance between Queen Padmé (now known as Senator Amidala) and …
George Lucas closes the circle: the last of the three prequels, evenly spaced out at three-year intervals. (The filmmaker's latter-day visual style comes back to us in a twinkling: the flatness of the humans and the overfertilized fluorescence of their computer-generated surroundings, something like sticks of wood in a stop-motion …
The long-awaited (by some) prequel to the Star Wars trilogy, and such a letdown as to make you feel almost sorry for George Lucas, poor little rich boy. Even moviegoers who have never attended a foreign film in their lives are apt to be aware that Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden …
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 …
Danny Boyle's group portrait of young Edinburgh deadbeats bound together by their addiction to heroin — a junk bond, as it were. For all its visual flash and dash — all its distorting lenses, freeze frames, fast-motion, and so forth; all its head-first dives into the rabbit hole (or in …
British-accented Disney computer cartoon, concerned with the role of carrier pigeons in World War II, a factual basis abnormal for computer cartoons. It assumes a degree of grounding in the history, and the cinema, of the Battle of Britain and the French Resistance. In other words, parents and grandparents may …
Todd Haynes's self-indulgent and overreaching excavation of the "glam" scene of the early Seventies. It starts out in mid-19th Century with the arrival on earth of Oscar Wilde, deposited on a Dublin doorstep by flying saucer. After a forward leap of a hundred years, it settles down (somewhat) to a …
Writer-director Tobias Lindholm’s latest is a microcosmic and finely wrought war story in which everyone has their reasons. Danish company commander Claus M. Pederson (Pilou Asbæk, looking like a cross between Michael Shannon and Ewan McGregor and nailing the role’s measured intensity) starts leading his unit’s patrols through Helmand province …
Zola-esque wallow in animal lust and criminal injustice, set in the place and period of the kitchen-sink movement, the late Fifties on a Scottish coal barge. (The amoral ladykilling hero is called Joe, like the one in Room at the Top, but without the upward mobility.) The actual source is …