Promising young painter Dezzy (an indomitable Dora Madison) was clean and sober — until the day her agent freed her of his services. We spend half the running time watching as Dezzy celebrates the defeat by smoking, snorting, and ingesting anything she can get her hands on. That includes a …
George (Elliott Heffernan) is a 9-year-old boy in World War II London whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) sends him to safety in the English countryside. George, defiant and determined to return home to his mom and his grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller) in East London, embarks on an adventure, only to …
Fact-based historical drama as seen through the eyes of 16-year-old Arturs Vanags (Oto Brantevics), a fresh-faced Latvian teen who, along with his father, is spurred into battle after a Jerry shoots dead his mother and the family dog. (Shades of Inglourious Basterds: just moments prior to her demise — and …
With tentacles, and an accusatory finger pointed at the U.S. government. The remake, thirty years after the nugatory original, has grislier ways for the blob to kill people, but at the same time obscurer physical laws for it to obey. Where are those tentacles whenever the teenage hero and heroine …
Young Steve McQueen battles indifferent and disbelieving townspeople, in a late '50s representation of the generation gap where teenagers are the first ones to report a monster, and so naturally they're not to be believed. With little help from the adults in town, McQueen and his jalopy driving friends must …
Just passable gross-out comedy, in which three obsessive parents (Leslie Mann, John Cena, and Ike Barinholtz) — all far more repulsed by the thought of lost virginity than their respective begats — combine forces to cockblock their daughters on prom night. As it must in all Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg productions, …
Dietrich, in her fifth film for von Sternberg, strips off a gorilla suit (to reveal a platinum Afro, among other things) and sings "Hot Voodoo." That aspect of her character is more swallowable than the aspect of Self-Sacrificing Wife and Single Mom. The hallucinatory vision of America's seamy side is …
Woman who runs with the werewolves. In specific, a young American in Bucharest, where the werewolf, or loup garoux as it is known to French-speaking Romanians, is better understood, properly revered. Any true horror fan should be open to a bit of werewolf revisionism, but this bit of it is …
Hip, flip, cool, modern film noir keeps pulling up lame. He: "Could you help me please?" She: "Actually I was trying to kill myself." (Ta-tum.) He: "Could you put it off?" (Ta-tum-tum.) Or this one: "I've had my share of problems with men, and the last one made the Marquis …
Bob Rafelson's next-generation film noir re-establishes, to a noteworthy degree, the connection of the genre to reality and realism. It is not an hommage. It is not an imitation. It is not a hand-me-down. It is a legitimate continuation in a contemporary setting. And if it has lost something in …
A woman who lives in deer-hunting country in rural Wisconsin is possessed by the spirit of a Japanese samurai warrior.
Serviceable action-adventure despite frequent interruptions for sermonettes on human rights and capitalist wrongs. The ripped-from-the-headlines story (yesterday's headlines: civil war in Sierra Leone, 1999) features the stock figures of a self-interested soldier of fortune, in league with slaughterous rebels and unscrupulous jewellers, an engagé foreign correspondent, and a hapless native …
Action thriller based on Peter Craig's novel of the same name, directed by Jean-François Richet, and starring Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, Diego Luna, Michael Parks and William H. Macy.