Jim Jarmusch's mainstreamiest film to date has a lot of laughs in it, despite the pretentiousness of the cinéma d'ennui pacing and deliberately dissatisfying ending. Laughs are laughs, nonetheless, and once they've fought through the pretentiousness, they cannot be wiped off the scoreboard. (Another impediment to be fought through, another …
Writer-director Greg Berlanti brings to the West Hollywood gay scene a knowing eye, a glib tongue, a support-group shoulder: "I was left for a trainer named Dash. I was left for a punctuation mark!" More informational, perhaps, than entertaining ("OGT" is code for "obviously gay trait," and so on), but …
Thriller told in "real time" (one long unbroken take) follows a druggie who wakes up to find last night's girlfriend dead in his bed. Justin McConnell directs.
Idealistic paramedic comes to L.A. and goes down the drug tubes, guided by a thrill-seeking ambulance river. A festival of disgust (upchucking in a tank of exotic ish, etc.), with plenty to go around to the filmmakers themselves (interrupting the grubby reality for a dissolve-happy, allad-accompanied love scene). With Jason …
Israeli domestic drama, centered around a morose widow and four morose children, with the wider national issues kept well out of it. Realistic, life-sized problems, relationships, emotions, crises; touching performance by Maya Maron as the guilt-ridden and grudgingly dutiful daughter. With Orly Zilberschatz-Banai, Nitai Gvirtz, Daniel Magon, and Eliana Magon; …
Sang-hyun runs a laundry shop, but is constantly saddled with debt. Dong-soo, who grew up in an orphanage, works in a baby box facility. One night in the pouring rain, they secretly carry off an infant who was left at the baby box. But on the following day, the mother …
When best friends – though polar opposites – Jonesie (Howery) and Sid (Brener) both break up with their girlfriends at the same time they decide to move in together in a misguided attempt to help each other through their respective breakups. Alongside their friends Angry Mike (Ali) and Runway Dave …
Here’s a welcome anomaly: a film about migration that isn’t structured around a border wall. Roberto (Jorge Guerra) comes from a broken home, but word has spread that the reason he’s fled his mother’s house in Peru owes more to the country’s history of violence than the unmanageable teenager’s proximity …
Clint Eastwood as the star and owner of a Wild West show who, even in the face of dwindling attendance and grumbling employees, remains unshaken in his rosy, Roy Rogers philosophy of life, and maintains a special soft spot for the younger generation of, as he terms them, "little pardners." …
Robert De Niro's directing debut -- a chance to dedicate a movie to the memory of his father, and immediately afterwards to give written thanks to songwriter Sammy Cahn. What else? To select golden oldies for a coming-of-age story set in the Sixties; to let a first-person narrator lay the …
All guts, no heart. The opening gag — a former gymnast desperately masturbating to video of her own medal-winning heroics years earlier — has the virtue of a kind of double honesty. First, it’s an accurate indicator of the film’s tone and content: a steady drumming of deadpan, joyless vulgarity …
Into a time when audiences are being bombarded with thinkfree technology or jiggled to death by indie indifference comes Brooklyn, a three Kleenex (boxes), straight-forwardly emotional little period melodrama about a timid (though not for long) young Irish immigrant (Saoirse Ronan) finding her way through 1950s New York. There are …
Crime drama treats what would be an historically bad week for the NYPD as simply the average run. Amid a series of racially charged shooting incidents, three diverse policemen (the brink-of-retirement beat cop, the stressed-out undercover cop, the off-the-rails rogue cop) pursue their individual paths on what we come to …