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 …
The easy descriptors for Todd Haynes's take on Patricia Highsmith’s tale of socially unacceptable female relationships during the early ’50s are words like “sumptuous,” “ravishing,” and maybe “entrancing” (that last thanks to a command performance from Cate Blanchett as a failed wife, loving mother, and motherly lover). But the more …
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 …
Not bad, for an unnecessary remake. I’ll gladly make do with a shortening of the misogynistic revenge-rape in exchange for a more cuddly relationship between the cop (Daniel Craig) and the girl who fell face first into a tackle box (Rooney Mara). The smooth lateral pans and flat, shiny surfaces …
I’d be lyin’ were I to express indifference to Lion, the story of a young man who, twenty years after an unexpected trip on an decommissioned train car deposited him 1000 miles from home, uses Google Earth to reunite with his long-lost family. The task of wringing overpowering visuals out …
Fifteen years after Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, director Garth Davis offers a sort of spiritual and tonal counterpoint: a Jesus story that stresses what might be called the more feminine aspect of his visit to earth — told, fittingly enough, through his relationship with the woman whom …
What makes the 1946 adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham bleak tale of life far, far under the big top so unique was the curious combination of director Edmund Goulding (acclaimed for such “woman’s pictures” as Grand Hotel and Dark Victory), the backing of a Hollywood major (20th Century Fox), and …
You know there’s trouble ahead when the pixels begin outnumbering the pixies. For the first 30 minutes of Joe Wright's (Anna Karenina) prequel to the J. M. Barrie classic, we follow Peter (Levi Miller) as he progresses from orphanage doorstep to flying pirate ship. Peter’s inevitable arrival at Neverland is …
2011 saw the United States release of Love Crime, a French corporate-erotic thriller starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier as a couple of hot lesbians, er, as a couple of professional women who get entangled in less than professional ways. Now, just two years later, Brian De Palma is …
Back in 1989, indie film director Steven Soderbergh broke onto the scene with his first film: sex, lies, and videotape, a seamy, sticky drama about sex, lies, and videotape. Here in 2013, he is giving us what he says will be his last film: a seamy, sticky drama about sex, …
Stay and fight, or leave. They will not do nothing. From director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Ben Whishaw, and Frances McDormand.