The final installment of director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is long and loud and chock-full of his great love for plotting and abstraction. Sometimes, it works, but often, it doesn't, and the honest interaction of characters is ground under the wheels of storytelling necessity. The film might feel like an …
Nothing-is-as-it-seems love triangle, composed of a Brit, a Brazilian, and a Spaniard, in London. Writer-director Matthew Parkhill, in his feature debut, conceals the complete illogicality until the "sucker-punch" twist. In the meantime, he reveals the charms of Gael García Bernal and Natalia Verbeke. With James D'Arcy, Tom Hardy, Charlie Cox.
Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski: hunched and shuffling, folded in on himself both physically and otherwise. When we meet him, he's tending bar at his cousin Marv's (a ponderous, sullen James Gandolfini) old place, a neighborhood joint now run by Chechen gangsters who sometimes use it to receive unbankable cash …
A happy match of style and subject: Christopher Nolan’s genius for treating movies like chess matches — the careful, methodical combination and orchestration of events and characters to produce an inescapable conclusion — is brilliantly employed in this account of the British (and French) attempt to retreat across the English …
Southern-fried Godfather: diminutive kid brother (Shia LaBeouf, who seems to be trying a little too hard) wants in on the family moonshine business, but his godlike (read: unkillable) elders (a more impressive Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke) will hear none of it. We even get a botched assassination attempt and …
How do you make a boring film about gangster twins in ‘60s London, one of whom is a violent, paranoid schizophrenic homosexual, and both of whom are played by Tom Hardy? Easy: neglect the violent, paranoid schizophrenic homosexual and play up the other one’s girlfriend. While you’re at it, give …
There have been musicals about mass murderers (Rent, Sweeney Todd), but none as monotonously tasteless as this talk-singing account of the 2006 killings of five prostitutes in the titular working-class neighborhood. The film is adapted from a stage play, and it shows in every frame. Still, it’s commendable for its …
Quick: when you're trying to forge a new civilization from the ashes of the apocalypse, what's the most important element for making sure it endures? That's right: babies. And in a world where the test tubes have all been smashed, if you want babies, you need women: their wombs, their …
Quick: when you're trying to forge a new civilization from the ashes of the apocalypse, what's the most important element for making sure it endures? That's right: babies. And in a world where the test tubes have all been smashed, if you want babies, you need women: their wombs, their …
Early on in director and co-writer Alejandro González Iñárritu’s small-scale epic, frontiersman Hugh Glass (played with almost frightening commitment by Leonardo DiCaprio) learns the hard way that if you get too near a mother bear’s cubs, she will have at you. And even if — through some astonishing combination of …
Tenth entry in the series, if, that is, you can regard the adventures of two distinct starship crews as somehow connected and continuous. The one episode of overlap, Star Trek Generations (thanks to a spot of time travel), makes it harder to argue for separation. But an argument could be …
If we can have His and Hers bath towels, why not a His and Hers movie? (Okay, mostly His.) A pair of charming super agents — sensitive Brit Tom Hardy and swaggering golden boy Chris Pine — compete for the heart of a consumer-products tester (a game Reese Witherspoon). The …
An intricate condensation of John le Carré’s novel, previously a BBC sprawler starring Alec Guinness. As the very dry, very British spy master Smiley, Gary Oldman is nearly at Sir Alec’s level. Tomas Alfredson’s film is all micro-plot observation, with expert details that link, fester, and spin webs. Sad, brainy, …