It takes a bit for writer-director Nicole Beckwith to clue audiences in on the importance of the job interview that opens the picture. It’s also an audition of sorts, with Anna (Patti Harrison) trying out for the role of surrogate mother to successful app designer Matt’s (Ed Helms) single/surrogate dad …
Before TV animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera struck a Bedrock bonanza and turned cave people into animation's answer to The Honeymooners, they helmed a series of shorts at M-G-M that paired together the most durable team of cat and mouse to ever hit an animation stand. As a little …
Remorse is all one gets from Tom Clancy fans piqued over Paramount’s decision to modernize the author’s 1993 adventure thriller. They complain that the updating bowdlerized the source material. It didn’t seem to bother the Clancy estate much; the check cleared and his name is in the title. Three months …
A standing joke/disclaimer: I probably would have liked Shakespeare more had his plays been written by someone else. If the film’s the thing, my appreciation of his work doesn’t extend beyond the films of Welles and Kurosawa. To hold Joel Coen to those unattainable standards would be unfair. So it’s …
Cantonese language film featuring twelve scenes of a tumultuous marriage, from its happy beginning to its harsh end. Directed by Oi-Wah Lam, starring Edward Ma and Stephy Tang.
There is so much fact-fudging going on in The United States vs. Billie Holiday that for all the good it did screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, she could just as easily have fabricated a character out of whole cloth based on the life …
What happens when Falun Gong, a life-energy practice that advocates meditation, spirituality, and coordinated movement as a means of self-betterment, amasses more followers than the Chinese Communist Party? The punishments range from academic expulsion to having one’s shirt cleaned and pressed while you’re still in it. Or worse. Director Leon …
Vanquish finds director George Gallo careening in the opposite direction of a comeback. Ruby Rose stars as Victoria, a single mother whose past as a Russian drug smuggler comes back to haunt her when former mentor Damon (Morgan Freeman) kidnaps her sick daughter in exchange for one last job. Once …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The live-action cast performs under anthropomorphic handles like Duck, Lion Man, Parrott, German Shepherd, and The Zookeeper, but this isn't your mother's fairy tale. George MacKay stars as the wolf trapped in a boy's body who undergoes the conversion therapy needed to snap him out of it. Lily-Rose Depp plays …
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; …