Hou Hsiao-hsien reimagines the gangster genre in the form of a Taiwanese slice of life, an anti-drama, an anti-melodrama, that eases, glides, sneaks into its moments of animosity and violence. Or better say slices of life, plural, to emphasize the unconnected, random, desultory quality. What passes for a narrative has …
Apocalypse happens within 48 hours of the titular sayonara being anonymously texted to over a million phones. Premises, premises. What begins with a lecture on revolution as a moral obligation quickly centers on a group of vested whiners stranded in a cabin while awaiting the rapture. Think the thirty-somethings from …
Other than Bruce Willis reprising the role of John McClane, nothing in the film bears even the remotest connection to any of its four predecessors. McClane pulls up stakes and catches the first red eye to Russia to help his son (Jai Courtney) have fun "killing f@#&ers.;" Never much to …
Three years after Brave, Pixar gets around to making a film that’s actually about bravery, aka the right response to fear. The setup: dinosaurs never went extinct; instead, they turned into people. That is, they became farmers who keep chickens and store up crops, and also cowboys who guard their …
The initial situation is plenty serious. A friendship is struck up between two men of different social levels but otherwise in the same, or a similar, boat: each recently separated from his wife and small son. The one in the higher income bracket finds an outlet for his own sloshingly …
A strong contender as Martin Scorsese's most negligible, most dispensable, most redundant movie. Here we go again: the subjective tracking shot through a nightclub, the stack of goldie-oldies to be gone through on the soundtrack, the torturously repetitive dialogue ("fuckin' " this and "fuckin' " that). Yes, there's a new …
Inspiring rags to riches documentary of the life of John Paul Dejoria.
A nostalgist's film noir, one more black-and-white postwar thriller, over a half-century tardy in its arrival, for the buff who has run through Crossfire, Cornered, Notorious, The Stranger, Berlin Express, and Captain Carey, U.S.A., among numerous others, and who still has a hunger. Reassuring archaisms, such as the 4:3 aspect …
Condescending gaze at low-rent Texans, principally the employees of a discount department store named Retail Rodeo. (A Southern accent continues to be condescension's favorite weapon.) A useful proving ground, nonetheless, for the unspoiled talent of Jennifer Aniston, underplaying the discontented wife of a pothead housepainter and the secret lover of …
The 1982 Mexican debt crisis, as seen through the eyes of the women behind the men in manufacturing, that is, the ones with the most to lose. They’re the type of pampered souls who demand their octopus be hammer tender and ask the waiter to bring fresh water because the …
His screen presence is pretty puny, his voice is uncultivated, and yet Chuck Norris, the martial-arts maestro, has an authentic machismo that could go to good use in a movie less slapdash and short on action than this one. A fair indication of its seriousness is that when murder and …
Bad camerawork, no worse than the documentary norm these days, rough, shaky, often out of position, but the film is nevertheless an engrossing and entertaining investigation of the "problem" of African-American hair, the size of which problem may hitherto have eluded you. Our on-screen investigator is a bemused, amused, nonjudgmental, …
Renn Wheeland (Nick Jonas) returns home to Cleveland for his mother’s funeral. Once there, he forges new relationships while healing old ones (featuring co-stars Brittany Snow, David Arquette, Alexandra Shipp, Matt Walsh and Elisabeth Shue), before confronting his problems and trying to face his grief.
Renn Wheeland (Nick Jonas) returns home to Cleveland for his mother’s funeral. Once there, he forges new relationships while healing old ones (featuring co-stars Brittany Snow, David Arquette, Alexandra Shipp, Matt Walsh and Elisabeth Shue), before confronting his problems and trying to face his grief.
A bad-hearted barkeep (Brian Cox) takes under his wing a homeless failed suicide (Paul Dano), to pass along his knowledge of the business and his hostility to his fellow man. A collection of unamusing and unconvincing crotchets in a bloodless sallow image. Written and directed by Dagur Kári.