A round-cornered, black-and-white kinescope opens this resourceful return-to-the-’50’s sci-fi. A pair of small town audio enthusiasts with a newfangled reel-to-reel tape machine in tow — Everett Sloane (Jake Horowitz), a magnetic radio DJ and master of excessive amplitude modulation, and his adoring young switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) — spend …
Considering the amount of nonconforming nihilism and punk prophecy inextricably linked to the band, the last place one expected Todd Haynes’ (Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven) account to begin was with a clip from the unquestionably aboveground game show, I’ve Got a Secret. (Bandmate John Cales’ secret was his participation …
The PR slaves at Tribeca Films want potential viewers to believe their latest release, Very Good Girls, spotlights a pact between two high school virgins, Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen, to enter college unchaste. All bets are off when the girls both set sight on the same sexy ice cream …
Separated at the outset and assigned new BFFs, America’s favorite toking twosome spend the holidays reconciling. The 3-D pot smoke is sublime, but the stereoscopic effects frequently grind what little momentum there is to a halt. It’s not as funny as the first nor as politically responsible as the second, …
Where does skit-assembler Adam McKay (SNL, Anchorman) get off receiving name-above-the-title status? The Big Short wasn’t enough to warrant such an elevation, never mind the Oscar noms (and McKay’s win for adapted screenplay), and this throw-everything-against-the-screen-and-see-what-sticks attempt to mimic Oliver Stone is a giant, self-conscious plunge in the wrong direction. …
Screenwriter Max Landis transfigures the backstory of Mary Shelley’s almighty monster-maker into a set-bound action/adventure/horror/buddy comedy told from the POV of the cutest lil’ hunchback this side of Disney’s bell-ringer. Daniel Radcliffe plays the abscess-backed circus clown (possessed with a surgeon’s steady hand) plucked from under the big top by …
Somewhere inside this 138 minute genre picture — ambitiously executed in one unbroken take — lurks 70 minutes' worth of substantive storytelling. But scrape away the concept and you'll find another workaday caper flick, one that takes forever getting to its point. (Almost half the film is consumed with setting …
First love turns out to be a lifetime deal for Martina and Lucio. As teenagers, the young lovers (Ximena Romo and Sebastián Aguirre) spent their days together in a no-nonsense Mexican Catholic school, falling in and out of love. Then, after 25 years out of sight but not out of …
With age comes an overall aversion to non-stop carnage and the fountains of red Karo splatter that it brings. But damn if there isn’t a beauty and force behind writer-director Jung Byung-gil’s cartwheeling camerawork that I found irresistible. There was no need to go back for a precise body count …
A young man grieving over the loss of his mother (and suffering from plot-convenient Tourette’s syndrome), a feisty anorexic gal, and a Bach-obsessed nerd with OCD check out of rehab for a spot of R and R. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Instead of establishing a deep bond …
No, not the Hilton sisters, America’s once loved and sadly forgotten Siamese twins. Instead, Geoffrey Fletcher’s violent and ditzy Violet & Daisy gives us a pair of blue-eyed teenage hit-girls (32-year-old Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan, basically reprising her role as Hanna) who are assigned the job of whacking Michael …
Susan Sarandon knows how to pick a character; it’s her taste in scripts that we need worry about. In her work as an emergency room nurse, Helen (Sarandon) spends a good portion of her day matter-of-factly breaking bad news to families of hospitalized patients. But when it’s Helen’s turn to …
A brother and sister use a week’s vacation with their estranged grandparents as an excuse to film a documentary reminiscence for their mom. M. Night Shyamalan (After Earth) has spent much of his career trying to duplicate the baffling success of The Sixth Sense. When all is lost, found footage! …