It takes a bit for writer-director Nicole Beckwith to clue audiences in on the importance of the job interview that opens the picture. It’s also an audition of sorts, with Anna (Patti Harrison) trying out for the role of surrogate mother to successful app designer Matt’s (Ed Helms) single/surrogate dad …
Cue trailer announcer: “They stole his insulin kit! They shot his son and violated his daughter! This time, the revenge comes subtitled!” Chile’s official submission in this year’s Oscar derby is a variation on a Death Wish theme, with enough passive camerawork and artlessly composed excess headroom to give it …
Before TV animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera struck a Bedrock bonanza and turned cave people into animation's answer to The Honeymooners, they helmed a series of shorts at M-G-M that paired together the most durable team of cat and mouse to ever hit an animation stand. As a little …
Bullies are becoming as prevalent on art house screens as superheroes are in multiplexes. A felt pen scribbling a jagged suicide farewell across a cocktail napkin sets the perfect note of tension for this homoerotic thriller. Tom (writer-director Xavier Dolan) journeys to the cow farm owned by his late (and …
Remorse is all one gets from Tom Clancy fans piqued over Paramount’s decision to modernize the author’s 1993 adventure thriller. They complain that the updating bowdlerized the source material. It didn’t seem to bother the Clancy estate much; the check cleared and his name is in the title. Three months …
With six years sobriety in tow, Abel Ferrara awards himself with an autobiographical AA coin of a movie. His sixth collaboration with Willem Dafoe, this is a typical family affair for the controversial filmmaker. Filmed in the director’s apartment in Rome, Dafoe stars opposite Ferrara’s wife (Cristina Chiriac) and three-year-old …
Ben Hogan once quipped, “The only thing a golfer needs is more daylight.” Director Jason Connery knows precisely how to apportion the right amounts of sunshine and gloom to mute the Scottish skies with a singularly overcast variant on twilight time. Old Tommy (a never-better Peter Mullan) was a modest …
The tomorrow man (John Lithgow) lives a solitary existence in the house of yesterday, all furnishings unmodified save for a flat screen TV and a secluded, state-of-the-art man-cave-cum-fallout-shelter, built and stocked by our paranoid “prepper.” His today woman (Blythe Danner) is a pedigreed hoarder, operating in floor-to-ceiling clutter, uninclined to …
Screenwriter Stuart Beattie, of Pirates of the Caribbean fame, tries his hand at directing by plundering John Milius’s Red Dawn. Eight teens return from vacation to find their fictional hometown of Wirrawee invaded by anonymous Asian soldiers. Kids become combatants, and the outcome is as predictable as it is long …
When asked to apologize for a rude comment, Toni Erdmann’s immediate response should be, “Which one?” Erdmann is the alter ego of Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek). Together he embarks on a trip to Bucharest looking to patch things up with an estranged, and no doubt embarrassed-to-tears daughter, Ines (Sandra Hüller). …
Writer and director Dominga Sotomayor Castollo’s near plotless autobiographical dream piece lays bare her memories of underdevelopment and the blush of first love during the downfall of dictator Augusto Pinochet. It’s 1990, and 16-year-old Sofia (Demian Hernández) joins her father, who — along with several other refuge-seeking families — is …
As a director, Chris Rock makes a fine stand-up comic. Like a good Gilbert Gottfried ectype, eyes wide open and minus the tics, Rock squawks dialog with the same intensity he brings to a Madagascar dubbing session, only his latest creation is being pitched as gutsy and ambitious. To date, …
The “uncompromising style” referred to in director Joseph Kosinski’s (Oblivion) biography involves more closeups than a flight simulator cockpit and an ability to do what you're told by keeping one’s yap shut when the media mentions scientology. Don’t let the mumbo jumbo regarding a mission to prevent the opening of …
One can’t wait for the election to end. If the best man wins, it will bring down the curtain on countless hours spent in the service of tRump-bashing docs so that we may once again rejoice in the simpler virtues of narrative storytelling. Having said that, Alex Gibney’s (Enron: The …
Director Keith Maitland combines eyewitness testimony,16mm file footage, and hack animation to document the afternoon of August 1, 1966, when University of Texas Tower sniper Charles Whitman shot and killed 16 people. One can almost justify the use of animation in cases where no photographic record of an actual event …