Ice Cube, a Bay Area teacher, returns to his roots in South Africa, only to land in a rubbish pile of carjackers, racist thugs, dope peddlers. Elizabeth Hurley, the Estée Lauder girl, turns up as a crackhead stripper: "I like dahncing." Neither has much of a grasp of the job …
A full recital of misgivings about the casting would run the risk of descending to John Simon-esque rudeness. Let it suffice that John Malkovich is not altogether persuasive in the part of an infamous and irresistible roué that Michelle Pfeiffer is only slightly more persuasive as the demure embodiment of …
New to Netflix: a television-tempered thriller in which the winds of mystery act as a vacuum to reasoning. Katie (Camila Mendes), a caregiver four months on the job, arrives at work to find her 88-year-old charge (Elliott Gould) dead in the attic. Before the meat wagon arrives, Katie and her …
Catholic-school hellions in the 1970s. Peter Care's handling of alienated youth falls somewhere between Larry Clark and John Hughes, though it's not a fixed position: there's an uncertainty of tone and intent. Todd McFarlane's animated sequences, bringing the kids' superhero fantasies to fruition, tend toward flattery, but the performances of …
Perhaps there is something to be said for passionate amateurs. Writer-director-producer-composer John Rad's labor of love about a woman who starts hunting dangerous men comes to a few more big screens than it did during its original 2005 release.
Freud may be out of fashion, but he shouldn’t be boring. Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender) and their patient who became a brainy disciple and colleague, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), trade analytic ideas and furtive, sado-masochistic feelings. Knightley bravely uses her beauty, even jutting out her jaw a …
A Blackboard Jungle, a To Sir, with Love, for the Nineties. Which means something nearer a music video than a bona fide movie, driven by a persistent rackety background beat, and speeded through five-minute class periods forever interrupted by the clangorous bell at peaks of tension and unsettlement. The innate …
A highly competitive movie, at least insofar as its subject matter. That it deals with the World Chess Championship ensures it a degree of the dramatic tension inherent in any sports event, and that the competitors are an aging, ailing Soviet Jew and a temperamental, somewhat paranoid Soviet defector ensures …
Character sketch, in fussy fine-point, of the town nutball, a repressed, ridiculed, Coke-bottle-lens-wearing, Fig-Newton-loving spinster. A psychological "label" is expressly withheld, but with Debra Winger doing her up large, she's more a performance than a person, a trick-bag of tics and quirks, an oddity for public exhibition. With Gabriel Byrne, …
Annual family gathering (parlor games, touch football, talent show), complicated by romantic rivalry: two brothers, a widower with three girls and a reformed womanizer, both smitten by a worldly Frenchwoman. A showcase for Steve Carell's self-consciousness, somewhat more sympathetic than Dane Cook's luggishness. Juliette Binoche looks as if she could …
The story of Gerda, a struggling portrait painter (Alicia Vikander) who loses a husband but gains a compelling subject — there’s nothing like a broken heart for inspiration! Of course, the losing and gaining are all of a piece, born from her man Einar’s (Eddie Redmayne) conclusion that while nature …
Al Pacino makes the worst of the biggest disaster his name’s been attached to since sickening audiences with the contemptibly cuddlesome Author! Author! Pacino is all struts and scarves as the drugged and disillusioned rock star boilerplate who has an It’s a Wonderful Life moment after receiving a long-lost letter …
This privileged peek inside the Paris Opera Ballet — more than a peek, a thorough probe — ought to be catnip to anyone interested in classical and modern dance, or for that matter in artistic creation in any form, the process of bringing execution in line with conception. Veteran documentarian …
Formula disaster film, with only the tiniest ingredient of human interest and (like Independence Day, like Daylight) an overriding dash of canine interest. Because the agent of disaster is a volcano ("She's just clearing her throat. She hasn't even started to sing yet"), there is considerable delay before the big …