Witchcraft comedy, fittingly bewitching, from the John Van Druten stage play, exploring extensively the metaphor of love as a magical power, a spell, an enchantment, a transfigurement. Meaningful use of the Bohemian ambience of Greenwich Village (regardless how artificially reproduced on the backlot); smartly cast, from the top-billed James Stewart …
"Based on a true story" tale of a half-black English heiress (an unfailingly appealing Gugu Mbatha-Raw) navigating a world in which her mother (here safely dead) could have been treated as property. It's also based on a true painting (of the heiress and her cousin), and it does its visual …
A boy befriends a massive dog while the Holocaust looms.
One can easily get lost in the tricky business of signposting the episodes as "real" or "fantasy" in Buñuel's account of a frigid bourgeois housewife's moonlighting at a swank Parisian brothel. (Sunlighting, actually: she's not Belle de Nuit.) The subtitlist for the original U.S. distributor came to his own dubious …
Spanish romantic romp (and part-time political romp) about a Republican Army deserter, circa 1931, who hides out in a household of four nubile daughters -- lesbian, widow, fiancée, virgin -- and who cozies up to each in turn before finding the one right for him. The first cozying-up is the …
A pair of novice car and end-of-the-world enthusiasts bone up for Armageddon by spending their days and nights in search of army-surplus stores and auto graveyards that stock parts to build do-it-yourself flamethrowing devices. Other than the fact it took producer/director/co-editor/star Evan Glodell eight years to complete his audacious $17K …
Small, humanistic British crime thriller (for all its computers and gadgets), punched up, and almost out, with a baroque visual style of deep perspectives, low ceilings, angled cameras, inky shadows. The heist itself works up some suspense, when not reminding you, with its remote-control ambulatory ashtray, of the Australian farce, …
Trivia experts will instantly peg Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s as the title splashed across the Radio City Music Hall marquee while Michael Corleone and his future bride, Kay, do their Christmas shopping in The Godfather. McCarey’s Bells really has more in common with Coppola’s second installment, inasmuch …
The very ample one, to be precise, and very troubled one, of Brian Dennehy, who has come to Rome to organize a tribute to his 18th-century idol, Etienne Louis Boullée, a "visionary architect" who actually built "virtually nothing." Peter Greenaway, of The Draughtsman's Contract etc., manages to compress the most …
The use of elective sterilization as a cost-effective method of contraception inside women’s prisons sounds like something out of a sequel to Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom. But inside the belly of documentarian Erika Cohn’s Beast lurks a monstrosity more appalling than horror fiction. The concept of purifying the human …