A new laugh-withholder from Rawson Marshall Thurber, the brain behind Dodgeball. For those still reading, forced to become drug traffickers, a pot dealer (Jason Sudeikis), homeless waif (Emma Roberts), clueless Tintin lookalike (Will Poulter), and stripper (Jennifer Aniston), masquerade as an all-American family looking to smuggle a Winnebago filled with …
The “West Memphis Three” -- Jessie Misskelley, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin -- were teenagers in 1993 when they were wrongfully convicted of the murders of three 8-year old boys. Directed by investigative journalist Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil), West of Memphis picks up where Joe Berlinger and Bruce …
Why? Steven Spielberg can make any movie he wants. Why trace a legend if all that’s to come of it is a blemished face-lift? Some of the more problematic moments from Robert Wise’s 1962 original — Anglo-stars darkened by Max Factor, Marni Nixon’s ghost-singing, Vaselined lenses — have been smoothed …
Mr. “Candid Camera” himself, Allen Funt, was the architect of reality television. With the show absent from the airwaves for going on three years, Funt turned his hidden camera in the direction of the big screen for what he called, “A series of sex-related comic incidents.” My first X-rated movie: …
A gym teacher at a Catholic Girls School becomes the main suspect in a series of brutal murders. Giallo, a lurid, uniquely sadistic strain of Italian horror film, emerged in the early 70's sandwiched snugly between Norman Bates and Michael Meyers. This elite group of slasher films is known for …
Warning: contents could cause loathing. Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan star as a pair of aimlessly adorable twentysomethings on the rebound and eager to demonstrate the futility of platonic male-female relationships. How did a talented guy like Michael Dowse go from directing the flipped out and intensely moving It’s All …
The co-founders of the San Diego Surf Film Festival, Pierce & Petra Kavanaugh, once again join forces with writer/editor Geoffrey Smart on what ostensibly amounts to a surfumentary in the guise of an educational doc. Kavanaugh and company invite a dozen hydrophilics to freely riff on the title. The participants …
A film about dementia that’s more than an Oscar-trolling showcase for its attached actors. First-time writer/director Elizabeth Chomko infuses her characters with varying degrees of impulsive unceremoniousness and unanticipated comedic curlicues that make it hard not to love watching this extraordinary cast get a handle on grief. (Not since Carl …
A multi-character (pregnant) chick flick with five converging storylines about expectant couples. Don’t expect much in the way of wit or originality from this Lifetime Channel stray, but the appealing cast and cinematographer Xavier Pérez Grobet’s balanced ‘Scope frames help defray much of the pain induced by a labored script. …
A hush falls over the rackety classroom the moment an overdue teacher bursts through the door. When pressed to outline the day’s curriculum, an unprepared student jabbers out a couple of run-on sentences that end in apple-polishing. Sounds like a typical day in the homeroom. But this isn’t your average …
Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010) brought to light footage that, for 50 years, was believed to have been an authentic historical record of Jewish life at the hands of the Nazis. A long-lost reel of outtakes was later unearthed, revealing retakes and cameramen staging shots. While much of what …
What did comic Alan King say after the Queen of England greeted him with, “Hello, Mr. King”? “Hello, Mrs. Queen!” That’s one of the hundreds of laughs to be had in this testament to what Mort Sahl calls the “Jews’ ability to always find the joke.” The sagging-head documentary gathers …
The title alone found me reaching for the Imodium, but what’s a critic to do after links to two preferable titles took a turn for the farblunget? At first glance, all one could think was a parabolic cross between The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (aka A Child’s Garden of …
A fluffy little “What if?” of a movie that greets the viewer with a snarky, disjointedly tone-setting false equivalence disclaimer: “What follows is a work of fiction. So is the United States political situation.” I’ll play along. What if Hillary had not shrugged off 45 as a rival unworthy of …
With daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) almost grown and husband Elgie (Billy Crudup) making a name for himself in the artistic world, it’s time for lapsed architectural whiz kid Bernadette (Cate Blanchett) to shut down the sacrificing (along with the 24 hour pharmacy inside her medicine cabinet) and put her artistic …