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 …
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 …
Dark Horse is Todd Solondz’s most watchable film since Welcome to the Dollhouse. Come to think of it, it’s his only watchable film since Welcome to the Dollhouse. Solondz has long positioned himself as the heir to the Woody Allen throne. One look at his first feature, Fear, Anxiety, and …
Fantasy fulfillment for those wondering what would happen if Ma & Pa Kettle hauled Mr. Ed to Del Mar and pulled up a stall adjacent to the high-hatted muckety mucks. This effortlessly charming documentary focuses on a group of 23 pub patrons who invest in a Welsh cocktail waitress’ dream …
Ten years separate The Priests and The Priests 2: Dark Nuns, an in-name-only successor that, apart from the satanic heave-ho, a pair of holy-rolling role reversals, and an eleventh hour cameo by Gang Dong-won, barely qualifies as a sequel. Director Hyeok-jae Kwon’s idea of establishing a character’s insubordinate streak involves …
It didn’t have to end this way — in such thoroughly standard smash ‘em up fashion, with minor heroes dutifully duking it out with faceless hordes for punchy-power bolt minute after punchy-power-bolt minute until the mayhem quotient has been met and the principals can finally square off for their climactic …
Bloody Sauerkraut Western about a revenge-driven loner who goes to extreme lengths to track down and brutally torture his victims. Too clever for its own sadistic good: one victim is dispatched with a spring-activated device that, when triggered, launches a board with two protruding nails in the general direction of …
Thanks to the burden of memory, this viewer felt deeply despondent at the sight of a 76-year-old rock legend on the road and bellhopping his own luggage. And seeing him gazing at the ceiling, his head nestled between couch pillows, it’s hard to imagine David Crosby as one of the …
Strictly for fans — the rest of the world clearly doesn’t get it. The cigarette smoke billows up, meshing with and helping to accentuate the shock of white hair. It is, unmistakably, David Lynch, one of the handful of filmmakers in the history of cinema who has, for better or …
Rise of the Planet of the Apes alone justified the advent of CGI. With it comes a worthy successor. No other-worldly Hollywood actioner of recent vintage come close to playing by the rules of the robust fantasy universe it puts forth like this pair of premium summer blockbusters. It's been …
For cinema, at least, the Yukon Territory’s Dawson City was quite literally the end of the line. With no further bookings on the horizon, most of the combustible nitrate prints that played the movie house in that turn-of-the-century gold rush town were given an unceremonious burial at sea. But a …
It took a few minutes to get in sync with austere Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's (Viva L’Amour, Goodbye, Dragon Inn) deliberate pace. (The title prophetically announced the amount of time one felt it took for the first couple of long takes to play out.) Neither one of our principals is …
The ScreenVision pre-show reel predicted a $150 million opening. This must have been the same team of fortune-tellers hired by the Times that gave Hillary Clinton a commanding 11 point lead, for other than one family, I had the theatre to myself. (It fell short of their prognostications with a …
The Dead is marketed as Africa’s first horror film. British filmmakers Howard and Jonathan Ford’s well-intentioned effort desperately wants to comment on race relations, but apart from the emotionally charged locale and The Defiant Ones casting, there’s not much social criticism (or originality) on display. At least the Fords follow …