Michael Shannon gets the thankless task of trying to humanize Wall Street's capitalist swine Gordon Gekko, right down to the speech about how hard work never really helped anybody get ahead and the passing of the moral buck on to the whole rotten, rigged, remorseless system. (Thankless because it's Gekko's …
Have you ever wondered how it feels to be on your own? With no direction home? Like a complete unknown? Like a rolling stone? Well, you won’t get much satisfaction here, because even though titular mystery woman Alice (Rachel Weisz, stifled) is blessed with the (frankly implausible) ability to slip …
Dr. Strange, General Zod, Spider-Man, and Beast join forces to play real-life superheroes Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch), George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), Samuel Insull, (Tom Holland), and Nikola Tesla (Nicolas Hoult) in a race to introduce electricity to the civilized world. Vigilantly designed and lit, if not photographed; director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s …
Historical flight of fancy suggesting that if only Nixon could go to China, then perhaps only Elvis could go to Nixon: a rock ’n’ roller beloved by America who loved America right back, right down to her squaresville commander-in-chief. In 1970, the King surveyed his dominion and was dismayed: riots, …
Brash title for a movie not about Muhammad Ali and not remotely great, only goodish. First-time writer and director Shana Feste has devised a sticky situation — the parents of a highway fatality open their home to the boy’s pregnant girlfriend — and she uses it to anatomize the different …
Michael Shannon is incapable of delivering anything but brilliance, and all too often, the success or failure of one of his pictures hinges on a filmmaker’s ability to meet him halfway. Ariel Vromen (Rx, Danika) isn’t quite there yet, as evidenced in The Iceman, a true-crime mob movie based on …
Gerard Butler plays the life-based Sam Childers, an ex-con hellraiser who catches some gospel piety from his wife (Michelle Monaghan). He hauls the family to Sudan, where children are being brutalized (or doing the brutalization), and in the name of God he puts his violent skills to work as a …
Director Zack Snyder sucker-punches Richard Lester’s Superman II, to date Hollywood’s final say on how to film a comic book. Credit the man of steal and screenwriters David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan with adding a couple of new wrinkles to the designedly faded red cape of Krypton’s favorite son. …
Lapsed cultist Geppetto (Michael Shannon), and vacationing state trooper Jiminy (Joel Edgerton) kidnap Pinocchio (in this case an immaculately conceived nine-year-old starchild played by Jaeden Lieberher) and race to reunite the lad with the Blue Fairy (Kirsten Dunst) and his mother ship. Is it really a good idea to leave …
Michael Shannon grunts and groans his way through a lethargic private-eye case as a gin-soaked gumshoe tailing, for reasons unknown, a middle-aged bald man and a Mexican boy from Chicago to Los Angeles. Comfortless low-budget indie written and directed by Noah Buschel. With Amy Ryan, Frank Wood, Linda Emond, Margaret …
True crime, bizarre crime, a San Diego matricide committed with a prop sword from a regional production of a Greek tragedy. The perpetrator — the sole survivor of a white-water-rapids expedition in Peru — is an amalgam of oddities (pet flamingos, visions of God, a pseudonym of Farouk, etc.), and …
A smartly built, chemically-enhanced Christmas story about growing up that you can't watch with the grown-ups — at least, not the ones who will get bothered by dick pics. The Night Before, which follows three friends (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and Anthony Mackie) as they wind down a tradition of …
It's a fun premise: take a practitioner of a universally loathed profession — New York City bike messengers, a group that treats traffic laws and those who follow them as little more than video game obstacles — and make him a hero, a guy whose Special Delivery can literally deliver …
Director Sam Mendes returns to the suburban stamping ground of his filmmaking debut, American Beauty, but at the very opening of that territory in the 1950s, at the inception, that is to say, of all the clichés of cookie-cutter conformity, Little Boxes, the Lonely Crowd, lives of quiet desperation, and …
Gather ‘round, allegory fans, and behold this fish-out-of-water tale of man’s inhumanity to what he deems inhuman from director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro. The action is recalled as a sort of adult fairy tale, and concerns a woman (Sally Hawkins, mesmerizing) without a voice and the mysterious creature who …