A cuckold, too chicken to take revenge first-hand, kills himself in such a manner as to frame the lover for murder. (The ungrieving widow is no help: "Leave me out of this.") Black-ish, noir-ish crime comedy calls to mind the Coen brothers, or their Fargo at any rate, if only …
Set in Canada, Paris, London, San Francisco, and spoken in English, French, and Cantonese, this Olivier Assayas film contemplates the possibility of change in a person, and gives full, serious, unsentimental attention to the difficulty and uncertainty of such change. The person in question is "a junkie to the bone," …
Part public-service message and part private love-triangle. It covers twenty-one days at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and nine days of after-care; but despite the roughly proportionate allotment of screen time, it feels nearer to nine days inside and twenty-one days out. Or better, it feels near enough to …
Set in present-day London, a group of radical activists take over an energy company's annual gala, seizing 300 hostages in order to expose the corruption of the hosts. Their just cause is hijacked by an extremist within their ranks, who is ready to murder everyone in the building to send …
Next time you poke your head out the window and think your neighborhood is a dump, consider the Lopez family, who have in their backyard Central America’s largest garbage lot. Javier and Blanca are the parents of seven children, all of whom scrounge the giant dumping ground in search of …
Terribly tedious amnesia comedy about a P.I. and murder witness (Dana Carvey, lightweight as lint) who starts each day with no memory of anything that came before: Korsakov's Syndrome, it's called. (Kind of an inversion of Groundhog Day, where the hero alone remembers the past. ) The premise seems to …
Slow-to-start and long-to-end espionage thriller (or the further adventures of Dr. Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's CIA guy from Patriot Games), detailing a covert and illicit military action against the Colombian drug cartels. There's a well-staged ambush at around the hour mark (sole survivor: Harrison Ford), and an exciting rescue near …
Constrained kidnap thriller told in parallel action but out-of-step chronology, crosscutting between the teased-out details of an Ohio businessman's abduction ("The man Hertz and Avis are afraid of"), over the course of the first day, and the impact on his family over the numberless days that follow. The why of …
For whatever reason — in Karen’s (Otmara Marrero) mind, the selection is limitless — she decides to best cure for a bad breakup is a drive from SoCal to in Florence, Oregon and the vacation home of her ex, a celebrated artist known only as D. (Sonya Walger). A stroll …
Two of them, a conscientious convenience-store one and a goof-off video-store one: best buddies, and close cousins of the populace of Slacker. Spanning one day in the lives, the micro-budgeted movie is, perhaps appropriately, scruffy in appearance (coarse-grained, high-contrast black-and-white) and scabrous in manner. Driblets and droplets of humor slip …
The official sequel can make no effort to match the scruffy integrity of its 1994 forerunner, least of all an effort to match the black-and-white photography. Not that the forerunner set any sort of mark to shoot for, but at least it accepted its limitations and worked within them. The …
Randal Graves survived a heart attack, and now he wants to make a movie with his old co-worker Dante Hicks about their lives at the Quick Stop. The sequel to the 1994 and 2006 Clerks films, and the ninth overall feature film set in the View Askewniverse, was written, produced, …
Clunk. Patented Adam Sandler blend of juvenile misconduct and remorseful moralism. In the Beyond department at a Bed Bath and Beyond, an angel (Christopher Walken, looking more like a mad scientist) gives a "universal remote" to a harried workaholic, allowing him to mute the barking dog, fast-forward through a marital …