Maybe Marvel’s latest is meant specially for women — in particular, women who have been told all their lives that being a woman meant they weren’t good enough, weren’t strong enough, weren’t fast enough, etc. — and so its journey of self-discovery through self-recovery was not designed, executed, and polished …
A renegade Captain and his unconventional outlaws execute daring heists in the 1930s and 1940s. Miller must decide whether to continue running or confront the challenges head-on. Written and directed by Arun Matheswaran.
If you can get past the bombastic score and the wavering, seasick camera and what is perhaps the hackiest, laziest opening-scene conversation of the year, you might find something remarkable in Captain Phillips: a quietly scathing critique of American exceptionalism, wrapped in a story of American survival. Captain Richard Phillips …
City Slickers at sea. An Illinois landlubber inherits a boat formerly of the Clark Gable estate, and takes his family on a Caribbean cruise under the tutelage of a one-eyed drunken old salt (Kurt Russell gargling rusty razor blades) of doubtful dependability. Formulaic -- and obsequiously so in the uplifting …
The journey of a military officer who has been assigned to fight aliens. Written and directed by Shakti Soundar Rajan.
The ever-present Kevin Hart lends his crinkly voice to George, a feckless (and neckless) budding comic book artist who teams up with classmate Harold (Thomas Middleditch) to hypnotize their elementary school principal (Ed Helms) into thinking he’s an infantile superhero. In-joke asides to Jerome “Curly” Horowitz and German Industrialist/Nuremberg posterchild …
Remember when kids wanted to be astronauts?
Andrew Jarecki's documentary for HBO rehashes a late-Eighties criminal case that never came to trial, in which a Jewish upper-middle-class family man and teacher in Great Neck, Long Island, already caught red-handed in possession of child pornography (postmark Amsterdam), was brought up on charges, together with the youngest of his …
The hit-and-run car, with no markings, no license plates, and no driver, belongs properly to the tradition of monster movies instead of car movies; and Elliot Silverstein, the director, dwells not on chases and crashes, but on the rapidly mushrooming sense of alarm and amazement (some of the exclamations recapture …
Who wants to know? The defunct Sixties TV show should have stayed there -- on TV, in the Sixties, defunct. David Johansen, John C. McGinley, Rosie O'Donnell, Fran Drescher; directed by Bill Fishman.
Sisterhood in the repressive society of Beirut: an Other Woman, a defiled fiancée, a closet lesbian, an aging actress, a lonesome seamstress, a demented bag lady, all in orbit around a second-class beauty shop called Si Bella (the “B” hanging upside down on the façade, the electricity prone to outages). …
A fallen lawyer hustles insurance scams for thugs who exploit auto accidents in teeming Buenos Aires. His only relief is a dedicated, weary nurse. The criminal contagion is ground into voyeuristic pulp by director Pablo Trapero, whose blatant closeups and hectic polarity of violence and tenderness are as subtle as …
Hector Babenco takes us behind prison walls in Brazil (different prison walls than in his Kiss of the Spider Woman), in well-lit photography, for an episodic two and a half hours, where an affable doctor battles AIDS, educates the inmates, distributes condoms, etc., but mostly lends a sympathetic ear. Flashbacks, …