It’s all about the pacing in first-time director Neto Villalobos’ leisurely unfolding of a (game)cock and bull tale about a Costa Rican broomstick in security guard’s clothing and the friendships he derives after bantering a bantam out of his landlord. Chalo (Allan Cascante) is the type of charmer who’ll sit …
Mike Leigh comes back from his change of pace and change of scene in Topsy-Turvy, back to his normal pace and his old stomping ground, a working-class milieu in modern-day London, more exactly a utilitarian housing complex and three downtrodden families therein. He gives us (among other things) over a …
Soap opera at near to its best, and certainly at Douglas Sirk's best. A middle-aged, middle-class widow falls in love with the much younger gardener. What will the children think? The neighbors? The moviegoers? R.W. Fassbinder drew heavily on this, along with bits of Imitation Of Life, for his Ali: …
Not a sequel to Knives Out, thank you God, but a bracing espionage adventure that flies in direct opposition to the strains of comic book calamities and celebrity impersonations currently curdling multiplex arteries. We open in a roomful of heavyweights — Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce, Thandiwe Newton, and Chris Pine …
The movie version of the Carl Bernstein-Bob Woodward book betokens the promotion of mild-mannered Clark Kent to the hero's role, protector of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. This post-Watergate permutation of the newspaper genre clings to plenty of starry-eyed ideas (Gordon Willis's lighting, for instance, sets up an overstated …
Big smile, bigger heart, and admired by all, Marc-André Leclerc is the kind of boychik one would be proud to call their own. Alright, so he experimented a little with drugs. Who hasn’t? When it comes to scaling faces on Alpine mountains, he is quite literally the master of all …
Costa-Gavras's valuable addition to the Holocaust canon. As an adaptation of The Deputy -- Rolf Hochhuth's pedagogical stage play of forty years earlier, and a hotly controversial one at the time in pointing an accusatory finger at the Catholic Church, among others, for complicity or at least acquiescence in the …
Why would a quartet of 20-year-old desperados (Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Jared Abrahamson, and Blake Jenner) choose to knock over a university’s special collections library? Try $12 million dollars in rare books, with only one old lady (Ann Dowd) guarding them. For every great documentary that’s been spun, there are …
Barbara Kopple re-enters the arena of her admirable Harlan County, U.S.A., that of the labor dispute. But she has not just repeated herself. The laborers this time are meatpackers instead of mine workers, but more significantly the time itself has moved on into the mid-1980s, the era of Reaganomics, and …
Pulp thriller version of the Faust-Mephistopheles myth, based on the novel Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, and directed by Wim Wenders. On one level, it's a withering critique of the male camaraderie ethic (with friends like this, who needs enemies?). On another, it's a conventional underworld adventure refreshingly infused with …
…needs lots of American worker bees to make it, a roving swarm that labors for the sake of preserving the hive and comforting the queen, and thinks of nothing else. (If that analogy seems a bit much, just take note of the preponderance of bugs through this captivating film’s generous …
When the Lord said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” He wasn’t referring to Deb Callahan (Sienna Miller). If ever a character courted chastisement, it’s she. When her daughter turns up missing, Deb embarks on a hellish, decades-long search to find her whereabouts. Like mother, like daughter: both were …
So far, Michael Haneke has specialized in focusing his clinician’s eye on tests of morality that arise during life’s deeply unsettling transgressive moments. A film about losing one’s spouse to Alzheimer's seemed to be a logical progression. Selecting French acting legends Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva to star as the …
Two months behind in the rent, deflector of note Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier) uses everything from a glass of juice to the smoke alarm that almost beaned her landlady to distract from the subject at hand. Anaïs moves at a whirlwind pace, the camera following her as it would a boxer’s …
A cocky, heedless, high-dive stunt undertaken by Claude Lelouch, the object of which is to stretch a love story across the entire 20th Century and three hours of movie time. (The version for American release retraces the two roads, going back to the beginning of the century and the beginning …