A synthetic man (Johnny Depp) has been left unfinished by his creator: twelve-inch blades in place of fingers, and hence a bit of a punk-rocker's look, with an untended tangle of black hair and some fashionable self-mutilation over the face. This — the imperfection of creation and the danger thereof …
In a castle high on a hill lives Edward; a boy created by an eccentric inventor. When his creator dies he is left alone and unfinished with only scissors for hands until a kindly townswoman invites him to live with her suburban family. Can Edward find his place in the …
Conventional Hollywood "biopic" on an unconventional subject of study: the ignored, ridiculed, and campily canonized director of Plan 9 from Outer Space. The disrepute, or nonrepute, of the central figure liberates the film to engage in the kind of myth-making in which the "biopic" once engaged with impunity, but which …
Veeru Potla directs this triangular romance. In Telugu.
As an imminent construction project looms over their beloved baseball field, two New England recreational teams play ball for the last time. As day turns to night and innings bleed together, the players chat, laugh, and squabble as they face the uncertainty of a new era. Named for a rare …
Somewhat tardy and parochial social satire (formerly called Spotswood) on labor unrest in mid-Sixties Australia. An "efficiency consultant" (Anthony Hopkins, seriously, not comically, tortured as usual) is hired to evaluate a one-big-family manufacturer of "casual footwear," chiefly moccasins. What develops is an amiable variation on Other People's Money, with a …
Emma Thompson picks up her Victorian-era pen to take on the based-on-a-true story of John Ruskin (Greg Wise), a certain sort of aesthete — you know, the kind that might fall in love with an innocent girl, only to find himself horrified by her eventual womanhood and its dirty, dirty …
An underground subway system was all architect Gustave Eiffel (Romain Duris) proposed for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. Stepping into the light, he designed a metal tower 300 meters high, to be built where everyone can see it. What could have been a towering bore offers up a CG …
Agreeably old-fashioned survival adventure, "inspired by a true story" as well as by a Japanese film inspired by the same story, about a team of Antarctic sled dogs who, after saving the life of a UCLA scientist in quest of "the first meteorite from the planet Mercury," are chained up …
The old luggage mix-up at the airport: yes -- truth in labelling -- the bag of the Mob hatchet man does indeed contain graphic proof of a successful "hit" (eight of them), and it is soon in the possession of a med student on Mexican holiday with his future in-laws. …
Spend the last week of grade school with Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher), a straight-out nongregarious teen who uses earbuds to muffle the monotony brought forth by her doting dad (Josh Hamilton), fidgets her way through starting a daily PMA video blog, and joins her classmates under their desks for an …
Wised-up, camped-up creature feature about overgrown arachnids overrunning Prosperity, Arizona. Incestuous horror-film allusions abound: a parrot who squawks, "I see dead people!"; a clip from Them! in a TV Monster Movie Marathon; a shopping-mall fortress similar to the one in Dawn of the Dead; and on and on. Although it …
John Sayles dredges up the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and offers a swallowable explanation for it: the penny-pinching, plantation-master practices of team owner Charles Comiskey, inappropriately nicknamed "Commie." From this explanation, as laid out in the book by Eliot Asinof, it is easy to see what must have appealed …