Having smeared a handful of real-world muck on the practice of giving superhero status to damaged people (orphaned Bruce Wayne, narcissist Tony Stark, etc.) with Chronicle, screenwriter Max Landis sets out to give the same treatment to the amnesiac superspy of The Bourne Identity. Here, he becomes Mike Howell, a …
The first collaboration between dancer Antonio Gades and director Carlos Saura, Blood Wedding, was a stark dress rehearsal in a dance studio; the second, Carmen, was a realistic backstage musical, or anyway as realistic as its life-imitating-art gambits would permit. This third one is something altogether different again, a fully …
Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as a couple of happy-go-lucky sailors with whom you would not be afraid to trust your sister. They take so shilly-shallyingly long to figure out who loves whom, and to land an important audition with Jose Iturbi, that you sooner or later get your fill …
Abbas Kiarostami's semi-quasi-pseudo-documentary sequel to his Where Is the Friend's House?, an all-day quest for the all-day quester of that earlier film (an equally Kafka-esque quest in its failure to satisfy our natural curiosity as to the outcome), in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake in the area. Complexities and …
Faced with a depletion of virgins in the Transylvanian countryside, a pouty, worried Count Dracula is impelled, at the urging of his spit-and-polish valet, to take leave of his home in search of virgin blood ("But I can't leave my family down in the crypt," he whines). And so he …
Poland in wartime, with few actual Nazis in evidence, but with collaborators, resisters, fence-sitters, and a beautiful fur-coated married Jew who jumps off one of the death trains (much like the ones, and in much the same countryside, featured at length in Shoah) and hides out in the cellar of …
It was supposed to be a three-week jaunt to Mars aboard a transport ship: a floating erector set outfitted with deluxe accommodations, 21 restaurants, and an attraction known as Mima, a soothing rest-for-the-weary club room that administers emotional tuneups to uneasy colonists. But a collision with an asteroid knocks the …
Very early and very primitive Marx Brothers comedy. It has a number of numb areas, particularly when Margaret Dumont or some other straw figure shrugs or grins or grimaces on one half of the screen while one of the Marxes showboats on the other half. It has, as well, some …
Urban Outfitters plays at The Rialto, while down the street at the Orpheum, an audience is packed to the rafters, watching The Ape of God, starring Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), an incendiarily disruptive stand-up comic/performance artist who makes Nick Cannon look like Andy Kaufman. (The biggest laugh from his set …
Writer and co-director Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion animated film is a very fine portrait of the despair at the heart of a comfortable middle-aged white man in America circa right about now. British-born Michael Stone (voiced with great sympathy by David Thewlis) has, by most standards, made it. He lives in …
The lyrical intersection of two planets (Earth and its unexpected twin), two genres (the soaper and sci-film film), and two people. Both the soap and science are gently measured out, as Brit Marling (who also co-scripted) recovers from a tragic accident by helping her unintended victim (William Mapother). Her devoted …
82-year-old Claude Lorius was the first scientist to alert the world to the perils of global warming. His one regret in life is that history has proved him right. A biographical, cinematic corollary of Al Gore’s canned Learning Annex lecture, Luc Jacquet’s Antarctica condenses 22 polar missions — all told, …
The trailer and butterfly-bound poster art (borrowed from The Silence of the Lambs) may convince audiences there’s horror ahead. And there is, just not the kind inspired by the empty-headed, atrocity-inducing monsters to which audiences have grown accustomed. On their best days, Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers are no match …
In the role of the director and writer as well as of the titular character, Robert Duvall gives generously to himself, and to others too. An actor's director par excellence, he exhibits a patience that verges, if not on the infinite, at least on the Cassavetes-esque, in permitting his players …
Unpretentious, un-epic Western, adapted from a novel by the hard-boiled mystery writer Robert B. Parker. It bears more than a passing resemblance to a pseudonymous variation on the Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday legend, the 1959 Warlock, without itself qualifying as a variation on that legend. We have again the two-man …