Dad (Matthew Goode) might have used his surprise holiday as an excuse to reconcile with Mom. Instead, his son Ross (Teddie Malleson-Allen) is greeted at the lake house by her replacement parent (Paula Patton) and his surrogate siblings Maudie (Ellie-Mae Siame) and the smashingly appointed Smash (Ashley Aufderheide). Forced to …
How does the military honor a soldier shot down on the field of battle? By firing rifles into the sky. Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be soldiers. Zohara Antebi left her son's circumcision in mid-celebration after overhearing one of the women standing cradle side remark, "What a …
A soldier’s distraught parents must simultaneously come to terms with their son’s death and the frailties of their marriage in writer-director Samuel Maoz’s anti-war drama, nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. All the sudden bursts of absurdity — an unfrequented military checkpoint where languorous camels outnumber vehicles, …
Credits normally withheld for a closing crawl open director Aleksandr Sokurov’s (Russian Ark), latest self-important hymn to the importance of art museums. Listen as the disembodied voice of the documentarian expresses disappointment over his latest production. He’s not the only one. Borrowing a page from the Michael Moore playbook, Sokurov’s …
Frank (Michael Fassbender), the visionary lead singer in an unsung alt-rock band, spends his entire life hiding beneath piñata headgear that brings to mind a Jack-in-the-Box drive-thru. His parents later confess their adult son suffers from mental illness. Really? Forrest Gump for hipsters, this huggable, Sundance-sanctioned babble joins the ever-stretching …
Once the pleasures derived from eyeballing black-and-white on a big screen wane, what remains is a digitized manure pile that adds new meaning to the term green-screen composting. This 3D pop-up primer on misogyny for 9-year-old boys finds sequel scion Robert Rodriguez — once again aided and abetted by comic …
A must for fans of upstanding citizenry. In the eyes of the NYPD, Frank Serpico was the scourge of the boys in blue serge, an undercover cop who narced on his crooked cronies. They made a movie about it called Serpico, and it’s clear from this documentary that director Sidney …
The superimposed text reads “Wednesday the 11th,” but its purpose is not to establish time, place, or even herald a film-within-a-film parody. For all the good it does, the latest Blumhouse Production might just as well greet us with: Warning: Secondhand Horror Comedy Ahead. Not that the idea of spinning …
At the time of his arrest, Chol Soo Lee had 41 rounds of live ammo and a 357 Magnum in his room and he was on probation for felony theft. He was a Korean punk living in Chinatown, but the gangs never bothered him. Lee confessed to firing a gun …
Eddie Rosenstein’s historically sweeping documentary kicks off 102 days before the Supreme Court is set to begin hearing arguments over whether America is ready to greet the day when gay couples are allowed the same rights as everybody else. For someone like Evan “The Marriage Guy” Wolfson — founder of …
A hearty “Suck on this!” prefaces a shooting in Ben Wheatley’s new film — an homage to Travis Bickle that even Helen Keller could make out. Martin Scorsese recently confessed that He no longer wastes time watching meaningless, image-free multiplex fodder, but that didn’t stop Him from taking a producer’s …
Porn for marathon runners, but even film critics whose only exercise is coughing will find that an education overload awaits in Pierre Morath’s instructional ode to sprinters. In the beginning they were joggers, viewed by some as nothing more than perverted exhibitionists streaking half-naked through our city streets. Women weren’t …
My appreciation of the films of Wes Anderson began curdling halfway through The Royal Tenenbaums. His star on the rise, Anderson began buying into his own press and from it emerged a style that, even with the best intentions, tended to engulf, rather than inform. What followed was children’s wallpaper …