Better titled Cockiness, even if it meant that the convoluted scam at the center of it had to be called, with altogether appropriate machismo, a cock game: the poker-faced Edward Burns, in a cropped haircut that makes him into a poor man's Ben Affleck, dances rings around Dustin Hoffman's underworld …
Francois Truffaut's film noir exercise, like such earlier exercises of his as The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid, stresses more the content than the style. Yes, this one is in black-and-white, but, in spite of the amount of rain that comes down, is not especially atmospheric. Meanwhile, the plot …
The enormous suspense potential of the Alberto Moravia novel, about an Italian Fascist whose yearning for normality and acceptance has brought him the assignment of murdering his former professor, remains buried beneath the hot-shot gimmickries and smart-aleckries indulged in by Bertolucci — the shuffled time sequence, the overly choreographed snow-white …
Old-fashioned (as old at least as Rider Haggard) African safari adventure, from a Michael Crichton novel: restless natives, defecting porters, a hippopotamus attack, a Lost City, an angry volcano. A few newer-fashioned touches, too: a talking gorilla (her sign language computer-translated into an audible voice), a leech attached to a …
In the decades since Linda Blair first hocked up a pea-soup facial, Hollywood xerographers have found in demonic possession a perennial cash absorber. Director James Wan (Saw, Insidious) stylishly resists the easy temptation of schlock-shocks and CGI as a means of supplanting storytelling. For its its first hour, this fact-based …
What a difference acting makes. At the outset of this sequel to 2013’s surprise horror hit about a Catholic couple who do scout work for the Church to determine where supernatural intervention is required, wife Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) has a vision of a demon who has it in for …
It’s beginning to feel a lot like television. Rather than spend 30 minutes each week watching Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) solve real-life mysteries on a fictional cable show (Curse Breakers?), New Line drops semi-annual theatrical installments from the seemingly limitless Conjuring universe. It’s 1981, and …
It’s beginning to feel a lot like television. Rather than spend 30 minutes each week watching Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) solve real-life mysteries on a fictional cable show (Curse Breakers?), New Line drops semi-annual theatrical installments from the seemingly limitless Conjuring universe. It’s 1981, and …
There is ample photographic evidence that the '70s were not, in fact, the best-looking, coolest decade ever. But you wouldn't know it from watching The Connection, a "loosely based on reality" story about the infamous drug-smuggling operation known as The French Connection, set in — of all places — France. …
If you wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, what do you do for an encore? (Well, after a spin-off TV series, anyway.) How about this? A sex-change operation on Some Like It Hot: two airport lounge singers (sisters of the one in Anything but Love) witness a …
Conor McGregor assumes the Cary Grant role in this remake of the Hitchcock classic. Yeah... right.
Director Xavier Durringer imagines the political ascent of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Denis Podalydès looks the part of the underdog, a slouchy duck of a man who likes to protrude his bottom lip. He sustains interest as Sarkozy, but it is Florence Pernel as his wife and top advisor who …
After the suspicious death of her brother, a priest, Grace goes to the Mount Saviour Convent in Scotland to find out what really happened. Once there, she uncovers murder, sacrilege, and a disturbing truth about her own past. Directed by Christopher Smith, starring Jena Malone, Danny Huston, and Ian Pirie.
A cautionary tale concerning wife-swapping: your fellow swapper could turn out to be a sociopath who wants to frame you for murder and to steal your wife for keeps. The dilemma for the filmmakers -- scriptwriter Matthew Chapman and director Alan J. Pakula -- is how to make the premise …