It struggled to get a PG-13 rating because of some f-words, and Lee Hirsch's documentary about vulnerable kids bullied in schools (and their sometimes woefully inadequate official guardians) has no shaping style. But if it bullies home its points a little, those points need to be made, and the victims …
Comedy without laughs. "Satire" might be the optimistically preferred word of the director, co-writer, and star, Warren Beatty, and he might want to add, for commercial as well as critical purposes, the immediate qualifier of "Capra-esque." (The presence of the name Frank Capra III in both the opening and the …
It's Herbie meets Transformers meets Monster Trucks when an interspecies friendship is struck between a California teenager and an otherworldly VW Bug. From Hasbro it came, but take heart: the talented Hailee Steinfeld stars and Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings!!!) is in the director's chair, .
It's Herbie meets Transformers meets Monster Trucks when an interspecies friendship is struck between a California teenager and an otherworldly VW Bug. From Hasbro it came, but take heart: the talented Hailee Steinfeld stars and Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings!!!) is in the director's chair, .
It's Herbie meets Transformers meets Monster Trucks when an interspecies friendship is struck between a California teenager and an otherworldly VW Bug. From Hasbro it came, but take heart: the talented Hailee Steinfeld stars and Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings!!!) is in the director's chair, .
But was there ever really a Bunny Lake? Otto Preminger's urbane kidnap thriller rises to an over-the-moon climax, but the rest of the journey is enjoyable enough -- under the guidance of an unusually human and charming Laurence Olivier as a Scotland Yard inspector. Carol Lynley and Keir Dullea make …
Luis Buñuel’s third film, Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread), was the director’s only documentary. For his first feature, visual effects designer Salvador Simó puts into cartoon motion an adaptation of Fermin Solis’ graphic novel based on the months Buñuel spent making the 27-minute short. For 80 minutes I sat contemplating …
A satire, one supposes, on the average American suburb, with the targets drawn so broad as to be all but unmissable -- and so broad, too, as to be all but unrecognizable. A double-twist ending cancels out the last-minute moralizing after first cancelling out the endless-minutes storyline. Tom Hanks, Bruce …
Mike Burden (Garrett Hedlund), proprietor of the Redneck Museum, is Klan and stupid to boot. Were it not for girlfriend Judy (Andrea Riseborough), the film’s backbone, and her faith in the redemptive power that can reach even monsters, this would be just another say-no-to-hate potboiler. A fact-based race drama with …
Documentarist Les Blank, who earlier recorded Werner Herzog in the act of eating his shoe (never mind why), here follows the German director's misadventures in the Peruvian jungle on the set of Fitzcarraldo. Perhaps most useful as a sort of subtext or appendix to the finished Herzog film, this is …
Comedy thriller, although really not much of either, about a part-time cat burglar and rest-of-the-time bookseller who falls under suspicion of murder. The character is tailored so snugly to the personality of Whoopi Goldberg that it stops being a character anymore -- or actually never starts. Bobcat Goldthwait is not …