Senagalese men attempt to cross the ocean to Spain in an oversized rowboat. It's dangerous, but staying at home seems hopeless.
The problem: geek culture has ascended to the point where it's difficult to portray, say, college guys who do a capella renditions of pop songs as lovable losers who have to triumph over their own peculiarity to win the respect of their peers. Even if they're not the Big Men …
The problem: geek culture has ascended to the point where it's difficult to portray, say, college guys who do a capella renditions of pop songs as lovable losers who have to triumph over their own peculiarity to win the respect of their peers. Even if they're not the Big Men …
It's hard to put hunger onscreen. Starvation, sure, that's easy: the visible ribcage, the distended belly, the face stretched tight over the skull. But a hungry person can look very much like a full person - can even look like someone who eats too much. Directors Kristi Jacobson and Lori …
At last. A French sex comedy about a couple of married dudes who can't stop running around on their wives, but who can take a moment now and then to wax philosophical about the situation.
Play keep-away! Jessica Biel's reward for her brief, vanilla-flavored performance as Vera Miles in Hitchcock is a lousy dye-job and a starring role opposite a wrong man in this feculent rom-com. Gerard Butler stars as Biel's ex, a once-mighty sports figure whose recent run of bad luck finds him coaching …
A churning, driven French film about a child-protection unit of the Paris police and how the harsh impact of their work (re: prostitution, violence, abandonment, pedophilia) lacerates their lives even as it bonds them. The director Maïwenn cast herself as a photographer who falls for the unit’s sensitive hothead (vivid …
From Abby to The Possession, studios with an "anything for a buck" attitude have spent over 40 years dutifully repackaging The Exorcist. Director Ole Bornedal's (Nightwatch) based-on-factual-events entry in the pea-soup cavalcade of horror tells the tale of a young girl (the simply dreadful Natasha Calis) who purchases a Dybbuk-in-the-box …
It's a fun premise: take a practitioner of a universally loathed profession — New York City bike messengers, a group that treats traffic laws and those who follow them as little more than video game obstacles — and make him a hero, a guy whose Special Delivery can literally deliver …
Somebody took a perfectly good black comedy and grafted a fairy tale onto it. The results aren’t pretty. What could have been a delicious dissection of one poor bastard’s attempt to become cool by whoring out his upscale home for party-fueled destruction winds up as an affirmation of true love …
A long-planned, crushingly filmed prequel to Alien, with director Ridley Scott again insulting his high achievement in Blade Runner. Many borrowed themes get rummaged together with absurd effects, dismal violence, and self-administered surgery by a scientist (Noomi Rapace) that seems both for and against abortion (in this ugly, loopy vision, …
A natural gas salesman (Matt Damon, not director Gus Van Sant) uses the economy as a bully stick to convince a small town into accepting his company's offer for drilling rights to their properties. He is opposed by a charismatic stranger (John Krasinski) who takes advantage of an open-mic night …
Good acting has seldom been more excellent than in this, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut. Dusty lives up to his nickname with a whiskered senior moment of a movie. (It’s best that Hoffman started late in the game; audiences won’t have to put up with too many more vanity projects like …
If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby had married Daisy — if the middle-class Midwestern boy’s dreams of achieving happiness through wealth had all come true — you might have wound up with something very close to the story told in this fascinating and intimate documentary about what does and does not …