Director and co-writer Sebastián Leilo’s story of a black sheep’s return to the pen (though not the fold) hits three notes of a religious chord: faith rejected, faith endured, and faith tested. The first sounds clean and clear, embodied with captivating grace and power by Rachel Weisz as a rabbi’s …
While waiting to see if the French army deems him fit to return to active duty in Afghanistan, PTSD-riddled soldier Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) accepts a routine side gig guarding the wife (Diane Kruger) and son of a shady Lebanese businessman. With more psychotropic drugs in his system than you can …
Heist comedy with an inadequate fund of ideas to establish it (and re-establish it) as a comedy. The dour Fred Gwynne looks more than ready for a change of approach. With Corbin Bernsen, Ruben Blades, Lou Diamond Phillips, and William Russ; written and directed by Jim Kouf.
Four brothers take wave-riding to new heights in Rob Bruce's surfing documentary.
Family album of barely moving snapshots of a working-class Liverpool household modelled on the director's own, in the period from the Blitz to the middle Fifties. But perhaps not so much an album exactly, since that implies a sense of order and chronology; more an old hatbox of photos fetched …
This film plays as part of the San Diego Latino Film Festival's Cine Gay Showcase. According to the festival brochure, "After refusing a series of prestigious awards from all over the world, Mr. Mantovani, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, accepts an invitation to visit his hometown in …
Con man named Thomas Jefferson ("Jeff") Johnson gets himself elected to the seat vacated by a deceased congressman named Jefferson Davis ("Jeff") Johnson. A pert and pretty consumer-rights advocate leads him into romance and conscience. Eddie Murphy is permitted to do plenty of "funny" voices (a couple of them -- …
Neo-apartheid in South Africa: a million ghettoized extraterrestrials from a stalled spacecraft over Johannesburg. The documentary affectations, discontinued at convenience, make it seem initially a joke rather than a reality. And not a funny joke, either. The aliens — pejorative as well as descriptive term, “prawns” — are well visualized, …
Paris in the near future. Berlin-style walls have been put up around the ghettos to contain the spread of crime, and a WMD has fallen into the hands of a ganglord. The Hong Kong-style action and MTV-style camerawork fail to communicate the seriousness of the situation. With Cyril Raffaelli and …
Under house arrest for summer vacation (punchy opening scenes to explain how he got there), a troubled high-schooler begins to observe his surroundings through a pair of binoculars, and convinces himself that his neighbor is a serial killer and that the new girl next door is a hottie. Teenage suburban …
Flashy but extremely untidy comedy-thriller. A state of confusion is, perhaps, to be expected in a movie that juggles opera and white slavery, that juxtaposes the most wildly disparate settings, that buries its people beneath junkpiles of unrevealing quirks and knickknacks. And it is only fair to acknowledge the deliberateness …
A young woman trains as a warrior in the first installment of a series set in a dystopian future, eventually finding herself in conflict with the sinister Powers that Be. Divergent fairly begs to be measured against the Hunger Games series, right down to the sibilant similitude of the heroines' …
Inert entry in the YA dystopia franchise about a post-apocalyptic Chicago where people are divided by chief character trait — candor, erudition, courage, etc. (And where some people “diverge” by embodying all of them.) By this point, the city’s order has collapsed: the bad old boss is dead, but the …