Urban Outfitters plays at The Rialto, while down the street at the Orpheum, an audience is packed to the rafters, watching The Ape of God, starring Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), an incendiarily disruptive stand-up comic/performance artist who makes Nick Cannon look like Andy Kaufman. (The biggest laugh from his set …
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, …
Self-betterment swill, to do with a cutthroat London bond trader (Russell Crowe, disconcertingly fey) who inherits from his uncle a rundown wine-growing estate in Provence, the happy stamping ground of his boyhood holidays, and who, returning there to sell the place, falls again under its spell -- and under that …
Marion Cotillard stars as a Polish immigrant in turn-of-the-(20th)-century New York who encounters hardships upon her arrival in the land of the free. With Jeremy Renner and Joaquin Phoenix.
A major snow job from fair-haired filmmaker Christopher Nolan, nominally a science-fiction thriller focussed on some sort of psychic superspy (Leonardo DiCaprio, fully earning the furrow between his brows), an expert in the gentle art of “extraction,” the stealing of conscious ideas from people when their guard is down in …
Director (and co-writer here) Arnaud Desplechin has made three films featuring Paul Dédalus. In those films, Paul has a diplomat brother named Ivan. Ismael’s Ghosts opens with a scene from a film-in-progress about Ivan Dédalus made by one Ismaël Vuillard, played with wild-eyed abandon by Mathieu Amalric, the same actor …
New rule of cinema: when a character pilots a vehicle down a deserted, dead-silent street for what seems like an inordinate amount of time, chances are a truck is about to come along and simultaneously shatter the complacency and a few bones. Such is the fate of Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin, …
Two schoolchildren, bound together by a spirit of anarchy and a never-ending game of "dares," can't escape the binds as they go their separate ways into adulthood: an unwinning combination of the cute and the cruel. The most "daring" escapade is perhaps the pillow fight that has the nerve to …
One of Woody Allen’s mostly smoothly enjoyable entertainments. Like Stanley Donen’s Funny Face and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, it is a devotional candle of the American love of La Belle Paris. The blond wick who lights up for joy is Owen Wilson as Gil, a “Hollywood hack,” aspiring novelist, and …
Former choreographer Rob Marshall’s third directorial effort, a restaging of the Broadway musical based on Fellini’s 8½. In essence the filmmaker has taken an intensely personal film (so named as it was Fellini’s eighth and a half opus, counting three collaborations as halves) and depersonalized it, trivialized it, into nostalgic …
John Dillinger revamped for a new century, more particularly Michael Mann-handled: high-def video, flattened perspective, eye-crossing closeups, jittery hand-held camera, frenetic cutting, amped-up sound, and the legendary Lady in Red is now (truth be told, among much romanticizing) the lady in orange skirt and white blouse. Pretty Boy Johnny Depp, …
Two broken people — massive, insensate Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) and wounded, miserable Stephanie (Marion Cotillard, scrubbed of both makeup and glamor) — warily, even unconsciously approach the prospect of supplying one another's deficiencies. Not out of charity, but out of ordinary, human need and the ordinary, human response to that …
If money makes the world go 'round, the lack of it keeps things interesting and vital. Wonderbrothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (The Kid With a Bike) return with a tale of heroic struggle against an ordinary disaster. A thoroughly deglammed Marion Cotillard plays Sandra, a woman who returns from a …