Interrupted long takes serve as bookends to our story. What appears to be a police interrogation room is in actuality a television studio. It’s been ten years since Nancy’s (Roxana Campos) daughter’s passing, and as many desperate souls are conditioned to do, she turns to TV as a remedy to …
A nasty, self-destructive masseuse (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) learns that a client (Catherine Keener) is the former wife of her new squeeze (James Gandolfini) and quickly uses whatever information she can glean to sabotage their relationship. Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing, Please Give) moves far off-center with this contrived chick-flick. Running gags …
Refuse to aim your snoot skyward when style and subject intertwine, and this nastily surreal descent into standup madness will deliver on its title. With his stringy, Dippity-Do-ed Zero Mostel combover and predilection for mucous-huffing mid-set, Neil Hamburger — a character comedian Gregg Turkington has spent the past 20 years …
By day, Bob McCall (Denzel Washington, out for a walk), works for a home improvement retailer, but under cloak of darkness, the average Joe segues from Home Depot to lone despot, one Russian mobster at a time. Washington begins by saving the life of a young hooker (a badly miscast …
It’s the Battle of the Franchise Superstars when X-Men’s Nicholas Hoult and Twilight’s Kristen Stewart — both stretching to play physically perfect specimens — take turns commandeering soft-edged closeups in this dystopian dud. Director Drake Doremus (Like Crazy) has no idea how to establish an everyday universe, let alone create …
When it comes to believing in human-caused climate change, you either agree with the scientific consensus that global warming is a fact or you voted for Trump. All the well-intentioned documentaries in the Erde aren’t likely to change any minds, particularly one as dogmatic as this. Austrian documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter …
Sylvester Stallone back in stir, this time as a professional jailbreaker hired by penal institutions to go undercover and test the impregnability of maximum security prisons. The implausibility of the opening escape is made clear in a flashback. Sly is assigned a different institution to crack, and the moment fellow …
Michael Almereyda’s docu-biography never once attempts to fool the gullible into thinking the footage assembled is anything but fictive. In the mind of the film’s subject, Hampton Fancher, his life and his work are inseparable to the point one might just as easily speak on behalf of the other. Fancher …
Mastectomies as subject matter are, not surprisingly, a hard sell. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the first time Hollywood breached the subject was the small screen 1978 biopic, First, You Cry starring Mary Tyler Moore as news correspondent Betty Rollin. Some 22 years earlier, Kinuyo Tanaka’s The Eternal Breasts …
Boredom begins when a group of six top flight international astronauts undertake a mission to find life on Jupiter's fourth largest moon. From television footage to fixed surveillance cameras onboard the ship, the entire film tediously unfolds through the eyes of television cameras.(There’s a “Europa One” ident in the right …
Or: Lars (Will Ferrell) and the real actress (Rachel McAdams). We open in 1974 with an Icelandic nod to The Jazz Singer: only over Erick Erickssong’s (Pierce Brosnan) dead body will his son Lars be allowed to appear on the world’s largest televised singing competition. From that seed grows a …
A power outage during a wedding celebration lasts just long enough for one of the guests (Carla Campra) to be abducted (and later held for ransom) while Paco (Javier Bardem) fetches a generator. Given the paucity of visual information and/or character backstory that’s doled out during the 20 minutes that …
A request arrived to review this documentary about the current polio crisis in Pakistan. First thought: what a lousy time for Lickona to take vacation. The disease was almost under control until the Taliban voiced opposition and, in 2012, placed a ban on vaccinations, effectively turning a campaign to fend …
A hardheaded detective, determined to crack an ages-old crime involving two young women who served time for infanticide, becomes emotionally involved with the case. The mystery-movie-of-the-week premise is buoyed by the evenly detailed performances from the four female leads (Diane Lane, Elizabeth Banks, Dakota Fanning, and newcomer Danielle Macdonald, playing …
A film that lives up to its title. Forgive the prudish tone, but for once, I’d have gladly sacrificed the f-bombs and duelling dildos that warranted an R rating so that parents would have felt more comfortable taking the family to a madcap mother-daughter (Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu) bonding …