An almost unexportable English comedy, one which takes its pleasure in the common schoolboy practice of fantasizing about the pigpen conditions of life in the oldendays. Even for viewers who've received a proper English education in Arthurian legends, it is probably not awfully intelligible. In the slough of messy atmospherics …
A young Syrian refugee (Malek Rahbani) on the streets of Memphis, Tennessee faces the hard truth in chasing the American dream, while living in poverty, witnessing social injustice and his neighbor’s (Lorraine Bracco) opioid addiction. From writer/director Waheed AlQawasmi, filmed on location in Memphis, Tennessee. The international cast includes Lebanese …
Notwithstanding the dropping of three words of the title, the re-do of The Day of the Jackal has not approached its task with a mind to downsizing. Over and above the obligatory bigger gun and bigger action sequences, the principal accretion is in the recruitment of an incarcerated IRA "freedom …
A film about the perils of success. Watch Al Pacino do his damnedest to shed his legacy (and goof on his beloved Shakespeare while he’s at it). Watch Adam Sandler take the lash to himself for getting rich via crass hackwork. Watch them both pretend that what they really want …
When a review commences with, “As gratifying as it is to see the gang back together…,” you know there’s trouble in paradise. Johnny Knoxville’s gone white (in some scenes) and Steve-O is practically sporting a pompadour. Why lead with those observations? They offer something different to look at in a …
The emphasis of Bad Grandpa is not so much on the daredevil stunts that made household names of Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass brand. Nor is there, apart from decorating the wall of a small town eatery with a duodenal Dali, much of the traditional dependence on doody humor. Instead, …
Time-travel contrivance, at least as convoluted as it is clever: a Gulf War vet, subjected to crackpot experiments in a mental hospital, bodily visits the future, accidentally bumps into a big girl whom he had once bumped into as a little girl, learns of his earlier death, endeavors to avert …
Comedy of awkwardness among emotional, possibly mental, cripples. (“I’m not ready yet for penis penetration.”) Undeniably painful, but not generally in a good way. Philip Seymour Hoffman preserves his stage role for eternity (his nervous throat-clearing, his woolen knit cap, his scraggly blond dreadlocks), important enough to him that he …
Were it not for the giant blood stain on the lower-half of her fabled pink dress – a moment director Pablo Larraín takes his sweet time revealing in a startling pullback – and constant juxtaposition next to her husband’s casket, Jackie Kennedy could have just as easily been mistaken for …
At first, and for the better part of its two and a half hours, this is apt to seem an oddly unadventurous undertaking for Quentin Tarantino, a gabby adaptation of a novel by his revered Elmore Leonard (source of notoriously mediocre movies), draggy, only fitfully funny, lifelessly staged, largely static. …