A long and twisty argument for the notion that somewhere along the way, talented, high-style director David Fincher stopped liking people: the characters onscreen, the souls in the theater, even the abstract mass of humanity. Pathology still interests him, though, and so we get toxic parents, toxic lovers, toxic siblings, …
It's a tricky business to treat emotionally devastating subject matter — say, the orphans of genocidal violence — without stumbling into overwhelming horror or unrealistic cheer. The Good Lie very nearly walks the line in telling the story of four refugees from war-torn Sudan: Mamere (Arnold Oceng), Jeremiah (Ger Duany), …
Director Wes Anderson's apologia pro style sua. Most of the action takes place in the pre-communist heyday of the titular (and pinkly ornate) Alpine retreat, and involves concierge extraordinaire Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his attempt to claim the priceless painting left to him by a grateful old guest/lover. The mannered, …
His father was a respected servant of Islam and Hamas was the family business, yet Mosab Hassan Yousef’s exposure to the marked inhumanity of the suicide-bombing terrorist organization led him to go undercover as a spy for the Israelis. The Green Prince is a compelling true-life adventure tale, reduced to …
Director James Gunn brings the same brand of sweetness-amid-the-horror he peddled in Super to a big-budget Marvel Universe space saga. Put another way: this is an anti-Avengers. There, a disparate group of heroes had to look past their own individual excellences in order to come together as a team. Here, …
After an incident involving a water balloon, a third-story window, and a mother pushing a baby carriage, a single mom decides it’s time to send her youngest, Tomás (Sebastián Aguirre), to live with his older brother Frede (Tenoch Huerta). Handsomely shot by Damian Garcia in full-frame black-and-white, Güeros is at …
Two things just as sure as the turning of the Earth: the one-joke format is best suited for seven-minute cartoons, and no one made films about characters they didn’t like better than Hitchcock. When mixed together in Canadian writer-director-star Pat Mills’s (Secondary High) second feature, the results are anything but …
A look inside a remote ashram in southern India — students spend anywhere from 3 months to 3 years studying the ancient wisdom of Advaita Vedanta from Swami Dayananda Saraswati — that’s a feast for the senses. Opening opposite one of the summer’s big event movies, Gurukulam is hardly the …
A small-scale, big-star character study of exceedingly humble ambition. Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air, Drinking Buddies, Pitch Perfect) is Jenny, a young woman who goes to live with her brother Jeff (writer-director-star Joe Swanberg) and his wife Kelly (a charming Melanie Lynskey) after a bad breakup. She promptly goes …
The theme is right there in the opening shot: a pilgrim’s parade of trucks and RVs, winding their way through bucolic countryside on their way to tailgate before a Penn State football game. But oh, what’s that in the lower left of frame? Why, it’s a row of trashcans and …
The tagline is "Love goes cucking frazy." You take it from there.
A skit comedian who works best in five-minute spurts produces and stars in a feature length film based on a short story. It’s The Children’s Minute when a pair of spiteful teenage girls play matchmaker for one of their fathers (Guy Pearce, as a nowhere-near recovering alcoholic) and an invisible, …