A drunken, faded sports jock (Kristoffer Polaha) who is having difficulties raising his rebellious teenage daughter (McKaley Miller) on his own finds faith-restoring “magical happiness” in “Produce,” a grocery clerk played by David DeSanctis (one of the few actors with Down syndrome to star in an American feature). Mixed messages …
When was the last time you watched a celebrity documentary where not one person had anything even remotely kind to say about the subject? Prepare to be licked by documentarian Matt Tyrnauer’s soft-serve Cohn. It began at age 15, when Roy Cohn arranged his first bribe by fixing a traffic …
Soldiers come from places such as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and parents such as the Smiths and Fredianellis. One day they’re kids doing cannonballs off a pier, the next they’re commanding tank cannons in Afghanistan. For four years, and at great personal risk, director Heather Courtney and her crew followed a …
Olivia Newman makes her theatrical debut with this all for one, one feral period drama. Best-selling novelist Delia Owens is so eager to be the next Harper Lee, she might just as well have named this To Kill a Crawdad. One by one, starting with his wife, Pa Clark’s (Garret …
This time around, Michael Moore is playing it conspicuously safe, inviting America to tag along on a paid vacation in which the clearly run-down rapscallion barely breaks a sweat when pointing out just how much better the quality of life is everywhere else on the planet. The documentary superstar takes …
Birds warble in the background as career detective Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) pulls up to Gilda’s (Catrinel Marlon) house. Or do they? Broken into seven chapters — all but one named after a principal character — Corneliu Porumboiu’s icy, camp-free caper comedy prides itself on cunningly backtracking audiences through a tale …
For 80 minutes we sit, palms choking armrests, as a flashback to boyhood explains the motivation behind the youthful American sniper (Nick Krause), alone in a car, one eye blackened and rifle cocked, who opens the picture. White Rabbit makes Bully (well-intentioned indie doc, not Larry Clark’s good time) look …
From ice fields to oil fields, a camera crew trails hiking guide-director-producer David Lavallee as he follows an imaginary drop of water from the peak of Western Canada’s Mount Snow Dome down through the contaminated waters of the Anthabasca River. His goal is to point out the oil industry’s dependence …
If your kids turned out even slightly well-adjusted, chances are two pop culture icons deserve credit with an assist: Fred Rogers and Charles Schulz. The former has already been galvanized on film, and until Tom Hanks gets around to playing Charlie Brown’s papa, this will have to do. As a …
Christmas, the perfect time for Zoey Deutch to introduce the family to her first serious boyfriend, James Franco. The titular question goes unanswered. Sure, Franco is sweet, cute in a goofy way, and above all, painfully honest, but aside from those amorphous traits we’re never quite sure what it is …
A group of gangster widows, led with tigerish confidence by Viola Davis, find their husbands’ blueprint for a heist and decide to try their hands at robbery. Widows peaks when focusing on the crime at hand. Basing his story on a pair of six-part Thames Television mini-series from the 80’s, …
Joan (Glenn Close) accompanies her husband Joe (Jonathan Pryce) on a trip to Sweden to pick up his Nobel Prize for Literature. If foreshadowing isn’t your strong suit, which is clearly the case for Swedish director Björn Runge, why bother to introduce an element of mystery? It’s obvious where this …
A top military official, a silk merchant (Issey Takahashi), and his titular bride, all childhood friends, stop short of forming a romantic triangle in the latest from Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure, Tokyo Sonata). It's being pitched as an “old-school Hitchcockian thriller.” The Master has been dead over 40 years. It's …
A traffic accident ends with the car overturned and Ida’s (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) alcoholic mother dead behind the wheel. That leaves the State no choice but to award custody of the 17-year-old girl to her loan shark Aunt Bobil (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and three male cousins, all schooled in the …