A date movie for those who like their passion slow-burning and risky and their storytelling laconic and moody. Bob (Casey Affleck, whose voice and manner seem to hail from the Great Depression) is an outlaw who winds up in jail for a crime he didn't commit (plus maybe some he …

Rather tardy anti-Western (at least a couple of decades out of style), with a decidedly unheroic Jesse James, brutal, bullying, backshooting, paranoid, and suicidal, and a slightly more sympathetic Bob Ford, conflicted in his feelings toward the legendary outlaw, idolizing yet inferior, intimidated, frightened, resentful, envious. There are some gripping …

Absurdist comedy as flat as its setting, a godforsaken Southwest town (pop. 87) put under quarantine when an overturned tanker spills the "secret ingredient" of Empire Cola across the road. The literal high point is the World's Largest Ice Cream Cone, the town's tourist attraction. With Brendan Sexton III, Kate …

What happened to singer/songwriter Donnie Emerson and his family when the album he and his brother recorded as teens was rediscovered after thirty years of obscurity and was suddenly hailed by music critics as a lost masterpiece? While the album’s rediscovery brings hopes of second chances, it also brings long-buried …

A conventional, imitative, unimaginative, unadventurous dark comedy concerning the multiple suspects in the suspicious death of the most despised woman in Verplanck, N.Y. Dark comedies are not what they used to be. They are much nearer the middle of the road. (Once again the cliché of the canine casualty: run …

A straight-up Boys’ Own adventure yarn, set sincerely and squarely in early ’50s New England but gussied up with plenty of 21st-century StormWave CGI. A monster winter storm causes not one but two oil tankers to split in half off the coast, and so many people are busy attending to …

Gus Van Sant's self-imposed penance for the commercial indulgences of his Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester and, in between those two, the Psycho remake: a laid-back survival tale, a stripped-down Walkabout, about two hiking buddies (Matt Damon, Casey Affleck) who take a wrong turn on the Wilderness Trail and …

An adventure in mundanity that makes excellent use of the tension between those two words. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints writer-director David Lowery reteams with that film’s stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara for the story of two lovers whom death doesn’t quite part. How Affleck passes isn’t terribly important; what …

Ostensible documentary on the post-acting career of Joaquin Phoenix by his brother-in-law and fledgling director Casey Affleck. One has to qualify it as “ostensible” because honestly it’s beyond belief. The mere existence of the film adds fuel to suspicions that the change of career from actor to rapper was but …

Second screen version (after Burt Kennedy’s grindhouse one in 1976) of Jim Thompson’s kinky crime novel, kept in the original Fifties period, with the choirboyish Casey Affleck, and his quaky, croaky, pubescent voice, in the part of the psycho deputy sheriff of a West Texas small town, outwardly much less …

Americanization, and if it doesn't go without saying, vulgarization, of the Italian film of the same name, a fear-of-adulthood seriocomedy centered around a tight-knit group of pushing-thirties. The young cast has some glaring weak spots -- Zach Braff looks as if he'd prefer to turn it into a lighter comedy, …

Some films you watch to escape from the frequently painful and/or difficult reality of life. Pacific Rim, perhaps. Some films you watch to impose a satisfactory narrative onto the seemingly random chaos of life. Casablanca, maybe. And some films you watch to enter more deeply into life — the difficulty, …

Superdeluxe remake of a Rat Pack lark of 1960: a happy-go-lucky, jolly-good-fellows, high-tech, clean-as-a-whistle casino heist, with a star-studded cast (Clooney, Pitt, Damon, Julia Roberts, Andy Garcia, Carl Reiner, Elliott Gould, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan). There are sellouts, to be sure, and then there are sellouts, …

If Clint Eastwood’s barely reformed killer was Unforgiven, Robert Redford is unrepentant in this love letter to…Robert Redford. He plays a friendly old-timer who’s just a lovable rascal at heart, a man serenely happy in his work — which happens to be bank robbing — and supremely gifted at slipping …

Director Scott Cooper's long-awaited followup to Crazy Heart may make you wish the wait had been a little longer. He got his all-star cast, but forgot to come up with a logical screenplay (he shares writing credit with Brad Ingelsby). And apparently, he also got his camera stuck on Close …