A little fib snowballs into an avalanche of lies over the course of a three-day family getaway. For the first 30 minutes, writer-director Asghar Farhadi acts the role of magician, using sleight-of-hand to sufficiently divert audience attention away from the cataclysmic events about to take place. It’s when Elly (Taraneh …
Or, “The Further Whitewashing of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” this time with an all-black cast. The promise of talented Will Gluck’s (Fired Up, Easy A) name attached as producer never materialized. Leaning on the okay 1986 film version About Last Night… (give or take an ellipses) rather than …
Throughout history, documentarians have scaled the heights of non-narrative cinema, dedicated to the belief that there was no fact too insignificant nor challenge too great for the curious spectator. Vertov! Flaherty! Jennings! Marker! Wiseman! Akerman! Herzog!. When the time came for these trailblazers to put their insight and veracity to …
The scuzzy but lovable owner of a ramshackle amusement park (Johnny Knoxville), hoping to compete with a newly built corporate theme park, decides to make the threat of physical danger his venue’s biggest attraction. The verdict is in: Knoxville’s first attempt at folding Jackass-style tomfoolery into a narrative structure finds …
Only in a world with democracy and corruption to spare are gangsters treated like movie stars. Director Joshua Oppenheimer set out to explore the “nature of impunity” by offering celebrated Indonesian death squad leaders a cinematic platform on which to reenact their participation in the genocide of 1965 — in …
The Navy granted “filmmakers” Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh permission to play with their toys, and the result is a gung-ho recruitment film that’s as incompetently acted and slapped together as it is propaganda. If the two former stuntmen could direct as well as they fight, the film would kill. …
A power surge on an International Space Antenna nearly knocks career astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt, in his earnest, Robert Redford mode) out of commission. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that Ad Astra, Latin for “to the stars,” is Apocalypse Now in space — there’s a lot of Capt. Willard …
They had me at Uncle Fester’s nipples. And kudos to Nick Kroll for restoring Jackie Coogan’s insensitive lisp to the character! Much closer in spirit to Charles Addams’ ghoulishly byzantine etchings (Lurch was indeed an escapee from a home for the criminally insane) and the '60s sitcom it spawned than …
America fell in love with Uncle Fester’s nipples. Why else would a topless Fester be there to greet audiences at the outset, the first big guffaw in a rapidly narrowing field of laughs? The press release promised “many new kooky characters” before asking “What could possibly go wrong?” New kooky …
A reasonably engrossing documentary portrait of behavioral researcher Victor DeNoble, the first person to blow the whistle on the American tobacco industry’s efforts to manufacture a “maximally addictive” cigarette. Kudos to director Charles Evans Jr. for shying away from scare-tactic closeups of diseased lungs, but his reliance on rudimentary animation …
A snooty admissions officer puts her career on the line when trying to get the son she secretly gave up for adoption accepted into Princeton. This is 117 minutes of prefabricated shit for people who are constipated. The performances are uniformly lazy; not for one second do Tina Fey and …
A bottomed-out narcissist (Nick Kroll) is forced to temporarily move in with his semi-estranged sister (Rose Byrne) and brother-in-law (Bobby Canavale) and play nanny to his infant nephew. With a director at the starting gate (Ross Katz), flanked by a pair of rudimentary screenwriters (Jeff “Blades of Glory” Cox and …
Philip Roth, no less, lauded mentor Saul Bellow as the first Jewish author to gain acceptance in a Christian world. He was championed by readers and peers alike as the literary voice who defined his generation. What became of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author? Long before the woke brigade loomed on …
Inspired by true events? For all the truth the opening title card contains, it might just as well have read, “Insipid by All Accounts.” Wasn’t it John Ford who said, “When the legend becomes fact, print any excuse imaginable to reunite Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne in the hope of …
God knows I’ve tried on several occasions to grasp the genius of this vaunted chestnut, the wormy apple of John Huston fan’s eyes. Even a 35mm dye-transfer Technicolor® print wasn’t enough to recruit me. The last thing this reporter wants to do is book passage up river with a grimy …