A women's film, specifically a black women's film, more specifically a film of four black women. Although adapted from a novel by Terry McMillan, it plays as a sort of dramatization of a panel discussion on Oprah, giving voice to feelings of dissatisfaction with menfolk, as well as voice to …
A waitress and expert pie maker named Jenna (Sara Bareilles) is stuck in a small town and a loveless marriage. When a baking contest in a nearby county offers her a chance at escape, Jenna fights to reclaim a long-forgotten part of herself. Through the support of her fellow waitresses …
Quintessential blind-lady-in-distress thriller, from the theater piece by Frederick Knott, playwright also of Dial M for Murder. It's undeniably talky and stagy, but the device whereby the heroine learns that her new ally is really her new enemy is an ingenious bit of stagecraft, and it gains on screen from …
A Manhattan Lawyer (Bryan Cranston) has an Alice moment when his evening commute ends with a raccoon coaxing him up into the family’s storage loft over the garage, where he spends the next few years looking on in delight as his wife and two daughters agonize over his whereabouts. Even …
An experimental feature shot in live action (by Richard Linklater) and then painted over via computer (by, or under, Bob Sabiston): neither fish nor fowl, though certainly fishy and possibly foul. The undulating, sloshing animation on top of the already unsteady camerawork is very hard on the eyes. And any …
Someone's a lottery winner in Tulaigh Mhór, a/k/a Tully More, population fifty-two. The problem is, he died of excitement with his signed ticket in his hand: no reason the winnings, a shade under seven million, shouldn't be split fifty-one ways among his neighbors, if one of them can successfully pass …
A serious bore. Keith Gordon's adaptation of a Scott Spencer novel chronicles the Nixon-era relationship of a working-within-the-system political animal (Billy Crudup) and his subversive boat-rocking lover (Jennifer Connelly), and their continuing, or resuming, relationship during his first Congressional campaign eight years after her death in a right-wing Chilean car-bombing. …
Dan Villegas directs this romantic meta-comedy about a writer of romantic comedies who isn't sure that love is real. In Filipino and English.
James Marsh’s Man on Wire — the superb Academy Award-winning documentary account of the death-defying stroll that high-wire artist Philippe Petit took between the Twin Towers back in 1974 — is given a fantasy thrill-ride makeover by Hollywood motion capture champion Robert Zemeckis (Flight). Saddled with a French accent, Michigan …
Edward Bond's screenplay — two school children, accustomed to crisp uniforms and transistor radios and such things, find themselves marooned in the Australian outback — possibly is more complex in its ideas about a cultural misalliance than is readily apparent. No matter. Nicolas Roeg's bright, clear, airy images create a …
Liam Neeson’s latest actioner is born in cliches — a pre-credit flashback explains how a career cop becomes an unlicensed P.I. (and sober) after a shootout results in the accidental death of a child — and fatigued by even harder-to-swallow secondary characters. Credibility crumples the moment our hero begins to …
A kid with trouble for a father and a father whose son wants nothing to do with him fill the gaps in each other’s lives in this tough but tender road picture. “Always know where the cue ball will wind up after the shot,” says pool hustler Cal (Jeffrey Dean …
British director Alex Cox gives us just enough glimpses of the hero amidst a blood-spurting Peckinpah-esque shootout in Mexico, or urging his horse across a cactus-studded Southwest landscape, to establish him in a mythic Western milieu and to make it clear that it's exactly that strain in the national character …
In essence a spoof of Walk the Line, to do with a sort of cut-rate Johnny Cash (a Johnny Wampum maybe), although the protagonist's music branches out further than the real Cash's into the groves of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, punk rock (ahead of its time), trend-setters and -followers in …