From Mike Leigh, another polished, flinty, brilliant fragment in the monumental mosaic of the Human Comedy. The fundamental and solid idea of the thing is to compare and contrast (back and forth, with no set plan) the personalities of two love-hungry girlfriends at two separate stages of their lives: their …
The town liar and the town tease (representing the two halves of writer John Hughes's artistic temperament) spend the night locked inside a Target discount store: they "open up" to one another, roller-skate through the aisles, confront burglars. The setting gives Hughes something besides his audience to feel superior to. …
Two sisters, one poor, one rich, fight for custody of their dead sister's son. The lush and rather decorative visual style, with a lot of foreground activity from flowers, leaves, smoke, garden trellises, stone balusters, and so forth, and a lot of shallow focus to mash either foreground or background …
From Brian De Palma, the same old thing. Excepting Sean Penn. Or anyhow Sean Penn's hairdo: a thinning-on-top Art Garfunkel-y blond frizz, for the role of a crooked, coked-up lawyer. The leading chameleon of the American screen can be counted on always to show you a new look. Otherwise, it's …
In a world losing itself to screens, teenage mystic Carlo Acutis saw beyond our social media-addicted society and offered an answer—if we’re willing to listen. Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality explores the life of the first millennial saint while following teens on a phone-free pilgrimage to his tomb, immersing them …
Musician Carlos Santana and his family are featured, alongside archival footage including home video recordings Santana himself made, concert footage, and behind- the-scenes moments. Two-time Emmy-winning director Rudy Valdez creates a documentary about a man whose sound casts a magical spell on his fans around the world.
Musician Carlos Santana and his family are featured, alongside archival footage including home video recordings Santana himself made, concert footage, and behind- the-scenes moments. Two-time Emmy-winning director Rudy Valdez creates a documentary about a man whose sound casts a magical spell on his fans around the world.
A young woman named Carmen is cast for the lead role in a dance production of the same name, and proceeds to prove her rightness for the role off stage as well as on. That old life-imitating-art gambit, or more accurately, that old art-imitating-life-imitating-art gambit, which has been a creaky …
A crafty, good-looking Roman Polanski film of a facile but entertainingly bitchy play by Yasmina Reza, sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? funneling into Who’s Afraid of Neil Simon? Two married couples (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) fume, spar, and rip apart their …
Those dopey enough to buy into the “based on a true story” disclaimer that opens the film are doomed to enjoy this minimal ‘70’s throwback about a crazed Vietnam vet (Pat Healy) and the hostage of a botched bank robbery (Ashley Bell) he puts through the paces of an Ed …
A series of set pieces dedicated to proving the unworkability of sexual relationships. So premeditated and predictable are the moves of actors and camera that the supposed human fickleness comes across more as a kind of conspiracy. The script is by Jules Feiffer, which is not hard to tell, and …
Satisfactory neither as documentary, which was the least that could have been expected of director Robert Kaylor (Derby), nor as a melodrama of the midway. What potential there was to delineate the mystique and the ambience and the inner workings of carnival life is pretty thoroughly siphoned off, soaked up, …