A divorced record exec (Mark Ruffalo), inundated with booze and bombarded by mediocrity, stumbles upon an open mic night in time to catch a fetching singer-songwriter (Keira Knightley) with a sensational “little voice” who he instantly signs. The gimmick: they’ll record an album on the fly at various locations across …
"Based on a true story" tale of a half-black English heiress (an unfailingly appealing Gugu Mbatha-Raw) navigating a world in which her mother (here safely dead) could have been treated as property. It's also based on a true painting (of the heiress and her cousin), and it does its visual …
Boy from the wrong side of the tracks (played at varying ages by Luke Bracey and James Marsden) falls for rich man’s daughter (Liana Liberato/Michelle Monaghan). An inability to divine where this timeworn premise might lead makes you the perfect audience demographic. Nicholas Sparks’ notion of destiny is two different …
It's an auspicious opening: a little girl — English, half-black, desperate to please — steps onto an obscure talent show stage and sings Nina Simone's "Blackbird": Why you wanna fly, blackbird? You ain't ever gonna fly. She comes in second, and her equally desperate mother (Minnie Driver) makes her trash …
What could Tim Burton have possibly seen in the story of a monotonous, marginally talented, yet enormously successful “artist"? Something of himself, perhaps? Another one of the director’s triumphs of production design over storytelling, as structurally spiritless as the ocular-enhanced, Children of the Damned urchins generally associated with the paintings …
An exciting and sometimes funny commercial for what will surely be a delightful action figure, available in three iterations: original plushie, Samurai battle mode, and full robot warrior. Collect them all! Two directors and seven writers (not counting the authors of the original comic book) labored to cobble together this …
In burying her mother, small town pharmacist and 40-year-old spinster Ave Maria Mulligan (Ashley Judd), unearths a scandalous family secret. The brief documentary history of the titular Virginia town that opens novelist and first-time director Adriana Trigiani’s undoubting romantic comedy suggested something more than another serving of Fried Green Magnolias. …
Michael Keaton plays Riggan, a guy who used to be a box-office superstar, in part because he played Birdman in three films. (Art improving on life?) Now Riggan (like Keaton) is starring in much artier fare. Sadly, everything is going wrong, and he is routinely haunted by his feathery, famous …
Kevin Costner plays a white grandfather who winds up raising his mixed-race granddaughter all on his lonesome. But not for long, because here comes black grandmother Octavia Spencer! The social media hashtag for this one is #LoveHasNoColor.
Three brothers – Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta), the brains, Luigi (Marco Leonardi), the brawn, and Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane), the goat-herding outcast – each with a different vision of what direction the “family business” should take. The stories are workaday, but the storytelling is anything but in Francesco Munzi’s instant gangster classic. …
Director, co-writer, and star Mathieu Amalric (Venus in Fur) serves up a short, slight, somewhat Frenchie crime story. Meaning: the runtime is 76 minutes, the interest comes mainly from the chopped-up-and-scrambled timeline, and there's a little ooh-la-la arthouse nudity at the outset to catch your interest. Everyone involved in this …
The Dia de Los Muertos is a natural subject for a creepy-lite kiddie flick (alas, Tim Burton...). Sure, there are skulls, but they're made of sugar. Yes, there are graves, but they're covered with marigolds. Even the skeletons are dressed to blend in with the (still-fleshy) crowd. And it's all …
A look inside the sphincter-clenching world of the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics. Yes, that spells SLAM.
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! For the price of one thin ticket, witness an intimate documentary account of the tragic rise and fall of Violet and Daisy Hilton, the world’s most celebrated conjoined twins. Long before reality television beamed anomalies and curiosities of medicine into living rooms on a …