Dr. Jess Ting clearly lived up to his name when, looking down to admire his reconstructive wizardry, he joked, “I make a mean penis.” In 2015, New York began requiring insurance companies to cover gender-affirming surgery. It was Dr. Ting who was assigned the task of making the external face …
An oscillating orphan grows into a highly successful, Vegas-style motivational speaker who, after a 5 month stint in the pen for insider trading, reinvents herself as a chocolate brownie baroness. With her red wig in place, Melissa McCarthy wants like crazy to assume the Lucille Ball mantle, but all America’s …
Apart from Frank Tashlin’s The First Time (it’s narrated by a fetus), talking baby movies are not my bag. Adding to the aggravation, this joins Spirit Untamed as the second film from Dreamworks Animation in as many months to base a sequel on a small screen counterfeit and not the …
Apart from Frank Tashlin’s The First Time (it’s narrated by a fetus), talking baby movies are not my bag. Adding to the aggravation, this joins Spirit Untamed as the second film from Dreamworks Animation in as many months to base a sequel on a small screen counterfeit and not the …
Vera Farmiga is not a name readily associated with drollery — her bounded approach to comedic delivery generally results in talking faster — and her performance here is not about to change any minds. Writer/director Shana Feste’s (Country Strong, Endless Love) feel-good, “love-me-daddy” road picture proffers a pair of males …
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! For the price of one thin ticket, witness an intimate documentary account of the tragic rise and fall of Violet and Daisy Hilton, the world’s most celebrated conjoined twins. Long before reality television beamed anomalies and curiosities of medicine into living rooms on a …
A spiritless, secondhand ripoff of first rate social satire. It’s Mad Max meets Death Proof to form the basis of another bloody dumb apocalypse comedy. With Corporate Wars having reduced the planet to near-unlivable conditions, a band of grubby futuristic human hunters are hired to beat the bushes and anything …
Nothing frosts my ass more than a cartoon feature that doesn’t put to use the limitless imaginative possibilities of creating an animated universe made up entirely of pen and ink (and now, pixels). Not much happens in this story of a young runaway brought to act as an apprentice in …
Without benefit of intertitles or one spoken word – the spare dialogue is unintelligible – Brazilian animator Alê Abreu’s gentle fantasy, seen entirely through the coin slot eyes of a 5-year-old stick figure, speaks volumes. At first, all that’s needed to advance the simple tale of a son’s journey from …
As if one feature per lifetime on the dodo-headed topic of conversion therapy weren’t enough, make room for 2018’s second big screen crusade to make bank off of public-spirited homophobe Mike Pence’s pet project. The first thing the viewer notices is an overall aversion on the part of the characters …
A transgendered virgin-with-girls (Michelle Hendley) falls for a girl virgin (Alexandra Turshen) engaged to a homophobic marine (Michael Galante). A good portion of writer-director Eric Schaeffer’s time is spent hammering out well-worn dialogue exchanges aimed at shedding light upon transsexuality to cave-dwelling Red Staters who probably wouldn’t go near a …
Why all the whining? Put another way, why does Brad (Ben Stiller) spend more time counting other people’s successes than he does taking stock in his own good fortune? Beset by the feeling that his college chums (Michael Sheen, Jermaine Clement, Luke Wilson) are all passing him by, his anxieties …
A down-on-her-luck ditz (Juno Temple) filches a teapot from a rural antique shop, only to discover that the 2000-year-old boiler -- branded with a Star of David and once owned by Hitler -- is cursed. The more pain inflicted on its owner, the longer the stream of hundred dollar bills …
With another wild-haired royal at the helm (and only one-tenth of Tangled’s wit, charm, and stereoscopic invention), Pixar’s latest amounts to little more than Rapunzel redux. What begins as a standard Disney fairy princess outing takes a turn for the better halfway through, when a magic spell converts one of …