A global plague quickly dispatches Gwyneth Paltrow, but Marion Cotillard and Kate Winslet carry on the fight as noble doctors. Lawrence Fishburne is the solemn voice of humane science, like Dennis Haysbert intoning for Allstate Insurance. Steven Soderbergh directed with brisk, methodical care for the big vista and small details, …
The opening text lets you know that prior to 1996, no one had died during a commercial expedition to the world's highest peak. So now you know what's coming. The first part of Baltasar Kormakur's version of the events recounted in John Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air serves to introduce …
The opening text lets you know that prior to 1996, no one had died during a commercial expedition to the world's highest peak. So now you know what's coming. The first part of Baltasar Kormakur's version of the events recounted in John Krakauer's bestseller Into Thin Air serves to introduce …
Corinne (Vera Farmiga) desires total submission to Jesus Christ. She also wants loving support, adult discussion, and a vent for her talent as a thoughtful speaker. As director, Farmiga never caricatures fundamentalism and never pegs the main males as dim fools, just patriarchal and defensive. Corinne seeing bestial spirits feels …
Four score and 150 minutes ago, Steven Spielberg shifted into his John Ford mode with this giant, myth-bolstering Golden Book of a movie. As the Civil War rages on, we open with a moment lifted from Saving Private Ryan: a shorter, but equally anonymous massacre. Inasmuch as it fails to …
A triumph of casting: the magnificently gaunt and haggard John Hawkes as talented, horse-addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany, and the touchingly vulnerable and longing Elle Fanning as his daughter Amy Jo. (Glenn Close also gets in some fine licks as Joe’s long-suffering, tough-but-tender Mama.) A triumph also of visual mood: …
Martha strives to recover from a grungy cult group. Director Sean Durkin intercuts timeframes and creates a twilight sadness. The cult leader (John Hawkes) sings like Charles Manson trying to be Leonard Cohen, and as part of Martha’s “cleansing” he provides rape. As morose, inarticulate Martha, Elizabeth Olsen (sister of …
Quirky comedy, without question, but quirkiness these days is no scarcer than shark's teeth, and it becomes necessary to distinguish between the pointlessly quirky and the pointedly. The issue still teeters in the balance when, for instance, a scraggly, trashy-looking white male, kicked out of the house by his black …
Did you hear the one about the 38-year-old virgin in the iron lung who hired a sex surrogate to take the cherry off the sundae? The trailer unspooled like a checklist of everything culpable in American cinema: a cute, fact-based, feel-good “disease of the week” romcom equipped with an endless …
Lili Taylor, much in her element, plays one of Anne Tyler's lonely, loopy protagonists, an amusement-park bunny in North Carolina, living at home with her shortwave-hobbyist father ("There's too much Spanish in the world") and nurturing a fixation on a garage-band rocker called Drumstrings Casey. (On impulse, she carves his …
Poky, low-key, somewhat parsimonious rural thriller with a simple set-up: if absent Dad, arrested for “cooking crank,” the new moonshine of the Ozarks, fails to show for his court date, the family stands to lose the house he signed over for bond, and so it falls to his eldest daughter, …