Melanie Laurent (The Adopted) serves up a sexy slice of French sisterhood gone sour, starring Josephine Japy and Lou de Laage. Subtitled.
Breathe In contains no surprises, but still gets points for its sustained mood (thwarted) and careful story mechanics. Plus, of course, the parted-lip glamour of Bright Young English Thing Felicity Jones (seen recently as the object of adulterous desire in The Invisible Woman). She plays English exchange student Sophie, the …
What Jim McBride has done with the Jean-Luc Godard original, whether by conscious choice or by native temperament, is to translate it back into the film noir idiom from which Godard first snatched it. It is a pretty straight Americanization, in other words, of what was a Frenchification of something …
Jean-Luc Godard's jazzy, highbrow homage to Monogram gangster movies, which of course it only remotely resembles; in fact it is nearer to being the Citizen Kane of the Sixties, if you measure it by reputation and influence and don't let its improvisational style obscure the comparison. It features Jean-Paul Belmondo …
A remake and update of the 1945 farce, complete with commensurate inflation: where the earlier hero had to unburden himself of a million dollars in two months, if he was to collect the bigger inheritance, the current figures are thirty million in a month. The central plot problem -- how …
It's being described as "a very connected San Diego film." After Brian Banks was wrongfully sent to prison, Justin Brooks, criminal defense attorney and director of the California Innocence Project, successfully fought to exonerate his client. Brooks, a tenured professor at San Diego’s California Western School of Law, is portrayed …
Affected debut film from Rian Johnson, writer and director, a test-tube species of teen noir, a hard-boiled high-school hybrid, featuring a junior detective, a fille fatale, a small-time Mr. Big, and a brawny henchboy. Opaquely plotted, arcanely scripted, darkly photographed, and reverberantly recorded, incomprehensible on several levels. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, …
Glossy women’s film, playing facilely on our sympathies: a Bangladeshi Muslim shipped off to London, at an early age, for an arranged marriage to an oppressive older fatso, eventually courted as she deserves by a hunky young political activist. Nine-Eleven comes along to broaden the horizons further. With Tannishtha Chatterjee, …
The late Paul Walker stars in an aggressively stupid parkour demonstration that at least has the lowbrow moxie to actually chain a pretty girl to a rocket with a bomb attached to it. Or maybe she's chained next to it; it's not entirely clear, and it doesn't entirely matter. All …
Not so much a remake of The Bride of Frankenstein as a continuation of it, starting out in the scientist's laboratory in the midst of a thunderstorm, and asking the question: what if they hadn't all perished that night? (And what if the scientist's latest creation had looked like Jennifer …
In 1930s Chicago, groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious brings a murdered young woman back to life to be a companion for Frankenstein's monster. What happens next is beyond what either of them could ever have imagined. Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, this thriller features Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale in a reimagining …
A Jane Austen-pattern fairy tale cut out of the gaudy fabric of a Bollywood musical. After pointlessly altering the first word of the familiar title, filmmaker Gurinder Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach, Bend It Like Beckham) aggressively pushes the third word into the realm of race relations, as an Ugly …