For a film about identical-twin gynecologists who share a woman, David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers was awfully psychological. Conversely, for a film about identical-twin psychologists who share a woman, François Ozon’s latest is awfully gynecological. The film practically opens on a shot of a speculum-spread opening, and most of the drama …
Jean-Claude van Damme tries out his third Hong Kong director, Tsui Hark, after John Woo (Hard Target) and Ringo Lam (Maximum Risk). He gets tirelessly hard work out of the man (and one outstanding shot, a closeup of van Damme's jiggling eyes as he is running at full tilt), but …
From the prize-winning stage play by John Patrick Shanley, an ambiguous drama of possible priestly pedophilia at a Catholic school in the Bronx. The playwright, perhaps best known to moviegoers as the writer of Moonstruck and writer-director of Joe versus the Volcano, handles the direction of his own work on …
The homicide transpired in a Brooklyn housing project in 2014: NYPD cop Peter Liang was two years on the job when he happened across Akai Gurley, an unarmed 28-year-old black man, on a dim flight of steps. The 911 call ends with the neighbor on the other end gasping, “The …
Based loosely on Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, this is Paul Mazursky's second attempt at a transatlantic transplant (the first was Willie and Phil, from Truffaut's Jules and Jim) -- and better luck this time. In fact, better luck than the original. The anarchic vagabond and the bourgeois home he …
Losers' Club comedy by Jim Jarmusch, with a befitting small-change budget, about an unemployed deejay and an apathetic pimp who are placed in the same prison cell in Louisiana, soon to be joined by an Italian immigrant with a do-it-yourself English phrase book ("Not enough room here to swing a …
Two-and-a-half-hour countdown to the end of the Third Reich. Bruno Ganz, digging into his meatiest role in years, looks and sounds fine as the Führer and filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel's strict adherence to documented history, and to the precise design and décor of the infamous bunker, give the film some educational …
Alfre Woodard, with her sparkling fencing match of emotions, is good to see in a role of almost any size, and better to see in a bigger one. For a change, she has the lead, a substance-abusing Chicago single mom who glues herself and her family back together in the …
Edward Norton enacts a soft-spoken, slick-shootin', sore-thumb cowboy in the San Fernando Valley (nowhere sorer than in synagogue), who enters an inadvisable relationship with a too-young girl, the succulently photographed Evan Rachel Wood. His self-styled Westerner persona ("You can be anybody you want to be. You just have to decide …
Sort of a kinky thriller, which is to say definitely kinky but only sort of a thriller, re-enacting the ostensibly “true events” of a self-mutilating married woman finding on the Internet a compatible sadist willing for a fee to put her out of her misery. Director Johan Renck, rather than …
Director and co-writer Alexander Payne gets Matt Damon to go full Everyman as Paul Safranek, a middle-aged, lower-middle-class white guy who’s rightly worried about the future: the world’s, sure, but mostly his own, which looks pretty bleak, at least by American Dream standards. When he starts hearing about the economic …
This plays as part of the 2017 San Diego International Film Festival. The program notes describe it as, "Down The Fence profiles horse trainers on their journey to compete for one of the most challenging equestrian championships in the world, documenting how cowboy culture has evolved and is thriving because …