Hitler killed off SA leader Ernst Röhm, not only for his ambition but for his brazen, risky gayness. The erotic love and fear simmering in a macho ideology that exalts male bonding and butch brutality gets vivid examination in Nicolo Donato’s film. A smart but alienated youth (Thure Lindhardt) is …
A great documentary portrait. Buck Brannaman, inspiration and advisor for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer, seems able to get inside horses on an intuitive, spiritual level, gentling the animals (except one that is dangerously crazy) as he teaches them and their awed owners. A survivor of paternal brutality, Buck is …
It struggled to get a PG-13 rating because of some f-words, and Lee Hirsch's documentary about vulnerable kids bullied in schools (and their sometimes woefully inadequate official guardians) has no shaping style. But if it bullies home its points a little, those points need to be made, and the victims …
A fallen lawyer hustles insurance scams for thugs who exploit auto accidents in teeming Buenos Aires. His only relief is a dedicated, weary nurse. The criminal contagion is ground into voyeuristic pulp by director Pablo Trapero, whose blatant closeups and hectic polarity of violence and tenderness are as subtle as …
A crafty, good-looking Roman Polanski film of a facile but entertainingly bitchy play by Yasmina Reza, sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? funneling into Who’s Afraid of Neil Simon? Two married couples (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) fume, spar, and rip apart their …
As scandalous lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Kevin Spacey opens with a funny wallop of vanity and profanity, like a bursting boil. But raffish riffs about D.C. corruption and satirical performances by Spacey, Barry Pepper, and Jon Lovitz only skim the moral and political toxins. It’s like Tom Wolfe material converted to …
Intrepid auteur Werner Herzog goes with a tiny crew into the Chauvet cave in France, otherwise visited only by scientists for a brief time each year. His camera and imagination feast on the sculpturally elaborate caverns, the bone-covered floors, the amazingly vivid Cro-Magnon paintings of animals. Typically, the narrating Herzog …
Like a Christopher Guest comedy less rigged for pat satire, Miguel Arteta’s film is about a naïve insurance salesman (Ed Helms) who goes to a convention in Iowa and learns from a sly roommate (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and an amiable vulgarian (John C. Reilly) how to grow up in a …
Sam (Michael Angarano) is a charming, boyish goof up. He crashes the wedding weekend of his great ex-love (Uma Thurman). She towers over him, as does her suave, posh fiancé (Lee Pace), a vain preener who seems unthreatened. Director Max Winkler (son of Henry) pulls off small comic nuances, but …
The first feature outside Iran by suavely tricky director Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry). Operatic baritone William Shimell plays an art writer whose main theme is originality vs. duplication. In Tuscany he meets antiques dealer Juliette Binoche, who gives him a spirited, ego-deflating lesson in what is real and isn’t …
It opens with a cute infant projectile-defecating into the mouth of his dad (Jason Batemen) and never gets better. Solid bourgeois lawyer Bateman and his crass bachelor chum (Ryan Reynolds) switch bodies, thanks to magic (a blackout!) while urinating into a public fountain. That allows the horndog to vulgarize Bateman's …
Horns blazing, congas calling, the sultry Havana sounds waft to hipster New York in the bop era. With singer Rita and pianist Chico at passionate center, the story is simple, but so are many great songs and most good cartoons. The three directors serve up a pleasurable, animated salute to …
A hardy film crew went deep into the jungles of Uganda and the Ivory Coast to film wild chimps. This Disney release has some old Disney flavor, with perky songs, Tim Allen's narration (“This is Freddie -- he's large and in charge”), and an overlay of humanized drama about an …
Third big quest for Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes), in a sea of special effects. The 3-D wears down as a wow rather quickly. This is storybook stuff, rich in the boyish bravado of old Errol Flynn movies, soaked in the medieval Christian nostalgia of author C.S. Lewis …