Auggie (Jason Tremblay), a fifth-grader born with severe facial deformities, attends public school for the first time. When handling similar material in Mask, Peter Bogdanovich surrounded his lead with a support system that would have made John Ford proud. Writer-director Stephen Chbosky’s inspiration apparently came from watching hours of ABC …
We open on a potentially life-threatening children’s amusement park overseen by a porcupine, a giant blue bear, and various forms of toothy rodentia. For ten minutes, I was along for the ride, right up until the moment little June converted the family home into a disastrous theme park ride. After …
File this under “were it not for coincidence there’d be no story at all.” Two deaf children (Millicent Simmonds and Oakes Fegley), separated by five decades and both searching for the same thing, are flattened by a train of coincidence in this period(s) melodrama from director Todd Haynes (Far from …
The ten-minute tournament — an over-produced Decathlon after the fashion of TV’s American Ninja Warrior — does nothing but rehash past glory and pad a hulking two-and-a-half hour (!) running time. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) now works as a high level anthropologist at the Smithsonian. It’s here that she meets …
After answering his calling as an educational television host, Fred Rogers quickly set about establishing a personal philosophy concerning his medium: “The space between the television screen and the person viewing it was considered holy ground.” If this sounds more like something Jean-Luc Godard might say, that’s because in his …
From the doyennes of the talking head tight-shot, American Experience, comes the theatrical release of a made-for-television documentary inspired by an Oscar-winning documentary. Phew! Shouldn’t this have gone straight from PBS to the supplementary disc of a 50th anniversary blu-ray? Frankly, no. Filmmakers Barak Goodman and Jamila Ephron are less …
Those expecting a Jean-Paul Sartre biopic will be disappointed to find instead the uninspired tale of a plagiarist. While honeymooning in Paris, a struggling young writer (Bradley Cooper) discovers a hand-written manuscript hidden inside the battered attache case his wife (Zoe Saldana) finds in an antique store. Five years later, …
A marinated-in-vodka high school English teacher (Clive Owen) and an imperious art instructor (Juliette Binoche) suffering from rheumatoid arthritis (has Hollywood finally run out of quality diseases to exploit?) are almost done in by Gerald Di Pego’s (Phenomenon) gabby script — one of the worst scripts top-shelf director Fred Schepisi …
First-time director Robert Jury finds suspense amidst the humdrum, and love among the rubble of a marriage put on hold. After decades at a routine job for a Rust Belt plastics company, our titular laborer learns that his home away from home is shuttering. But that doesn’t stop him from …
Is Akikazu Fujishima (Kôji Yakusho, contributing many a fine George C. Scott–worthy eruption) a dilapidated blackguard guilty of the triple homicide police are questioning him about? Or is he an on-the-ropes former cop about to embark on an ultraviolent journey through hell to save an estranged teenage daughter (and maybe …
The only permutation trudging along within Hollywood’s latest walking-dead pageant can be traced to its purported pricetag: who pumps $250 million into a zombie movie? Well, there’s Paramount and Brad Pitt for starters, both eager to fudge together a money-minting tentpole they can hammer into multiplexes over the next three …
Julie (Renate Reinsve) is a twenty-four-hour dilettante who, in the time it takes for the prologue to wrap, skips from surgeon to psychologist to photographer. Julie and boyfriend/comic artist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) live under one roof, but in two different worlds. Everything must be done according to his terms; …
According to writer-director Guy Ritchie, armored car heists have become more common than convenience store robberies, so much so that it’s a wonder anyone would consider a career in money transport. Given the forced tenor of their chatter, there is little doubt that the two armored car drivers that greet …
We close on a disclaimer that jokingly reads, “No musicians were harmed during the making of this film.” While it’s true that no member of this elite corps of unsung studio pros known as the Wrecking Crew ever went broke performing backup on thousands of recognizable pop tunes from the …