Owen Susskind’s father feared that autism had “kidnapped” his son until a viewing of The Little Mermaid caused the child to break a one-year silence. An Aladdin puppet show soon followed — Dad does a spot-on Gilbert Gottfried — in which father and son began conversing in “Disney dialogue.” But …
After a tour of killing Jerrys in the Great War, bachelor Tom (Oscar nominee Michael Fassbender) returns to Australia, where he plans on settling down as a lighthouse keeper. Isabel (Oscar winner Alicia Vikander) is the town looker, making her, in accordance with Hollywood’s rule of keeping up surface appearances, …
Director David F. Sandberg made a three-minute short horror film about a woman being terrorized by something she first spies when she turns out the light. Reigning horrormeister James Wan got a gander, met with Sandberg, and bada bing, bada boom, we have ourselves a feature.
It’s Thelma and Louise make a Great Escape over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a pair of mismatched mental patients (Valeria Bruno Tedeschi’s aristocratic windbag and Micaela Ramazzotti’s maybe-Mom-murderer) exchange their lives inside a Tuscan nuthouse for a flighty soap opera on wheels. (With panoramas as breathtaking as these, it’s a …
Crime drama wherein a group of police officers lose their undercover identities. Director: Jazz Boon. Stars: Nick Cheung, Louis Koo, Francis Ng.
I’d be lyin’ were I to express indifference to Lion, the story of a young man who, twenty years after an unexpected trip on an decommissioned train car deposited him 1000 miles from home, uses Google Earth to reunite with his long-lost family. The task of wringing overpowering visuals out …
The vested proprietor of a dress shop (a slow-burning Paulina Garcia) whose decision it is to steadfastly use family secrets as a cudgel against the son (Greg Kinnear) of her recently deceased landlord and confidant — she insists it was his father’s desire that she stay there — makes it …
Writer-director-star Ben Affleck goes for broke and goes bust with an American tale that mistakes muchness for greatness. He plays Joe Coughlin, a vet who learned in World War I that “the rules we lived by were lies, and didn’t apply to those who made them.” (This line, like so …
Werner Herzog turns his unsparing eye on the no-longer-uppercase (perhaps because of its unspecial ubiquity) internet. He starts with the good: never before have so many been able to share so much so easily. Heck, we’re crowdsourcing medical breakthroughs! Someday, we might make phone calls to a colony on Mars! …
Expands writer-director Yrgos Lanthimos's linguistic palette to include English, and widens his hermetic vision from a modest suburban household to an imperious resort, where recently dumped schlub David (Colin Farrell) joins a group of lonelyhearts with exactly one thing in common: they have 45 days to find a romantic replacement …
Somewhere along the line, it may occur to you that Babak Najafi’s sequel to 2013’s president-in-peril pic Olympus Has Fallen is a sly attack on America masquerading as a celebration of same. It’s more than the one-man-army absurdity of aging security chief Gerard Butler as he winningly fights the war …
There have been musicals about mass murderers (Rent, Sweeney Todd), but none as monotonously tasteless as this talk-singing account of the 2006 killings of five prostitutes in the titular working-class neighborhood. The film is adapted from a stage play, and it shows in every frame. Still, it’s commendable for its …
Survival often relies on scheming. With nothing but innate resourcefulness and a pair of run-ins with angelic Clash frontman Joe Strummer (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) to guide him, 15-year-old Shay (Daniel Huttlestone) is left the daunting task of salvaging his bedridden dad’s struggling enterprises: piano shop by day, taxi driver by …
The story is as simple and clean as the pastel-washed visual compositions in Rémi Chayé’s animated adventure about a Russian nobleteen who sets out to restore her family’s honor by finding the ship her grandfather took on his expedition to the North Pole. And also, she hopes, her grandfather, whose …
aka How Uncanny Was My Valley. Guo Jingming directs. In Mandarin with English subtitles.