Overpraise The Shawshank Redemption, and this is what you deserve. Frank Darabont, the writer and director of both, raises an eyebrow of interest for his apparent dedication to breathing some life into the prison genre (pretty well flatlined since Escape from Alcatraz), but the eyebrow might decline into a scowl …
His father was a respected servant of Islam and Hamas was the family business, yet Mosab Hassan Yousef’s exposure to the marked inhumanity of the suicide-bombing terrorist organization led him to go undercover as a spy for the Israelis. The Green Prince is a compelling true-life adventure tale, reduced to …
A pinched punk band — so poor they can barely afford a presence on social media — siphons their way from gig to gig before contracting an engagement at an all-day skinhead sock hop. The white supremacist paraphernalia lining the walls of the titular cubbyhole should have been an instant …
Courageously ridiculous, blushingly romantic, tastefully perverse — in short, the best sort of Truffaut movie, in company with Wild Child and Two English Girls and The Story of Adele H., if not nearly the best of his best, in fact rather wan and lethargic. A necrophiliac meditation on love, death, …
Topical war film feeds off and into the widespread cynicism, which is to say the widespread enlightenment, as to the motives behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Matt Damon, maturing into an actor of spartan economy and vigilant interiority, plays the army officer charged with running down the …
Canonized singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley (Penn Badgely) agrees to perform at a tribute to a man he despises: his equally cultish folk singer father, Tim. (Dad OD’d when he was 28, and his son’s drowning at age 30 was ruled an accident.) We follow Jeff as he spends the week before …
Many parents of teenagers might gladly be willing to trade places, or at least trade teenagers, with the parents herein. The comic euphemism for the real, recognizable fact of life -- quite a nice change from the comic vulgarism so prevalent on the screen -- is the essence of the …
Nobody is taken very much aback on meeting a pointy-eared furry little beast who speaks and sings in English, in a voice like Disney's Chip 'n' Dale. But after all, in this "typical" American small town (so beloved of executive producer Steven Spielberg), school is still in session on Christmas …
The New Botch, hadn't we better say? These ones are not meaner, but somehow, stomach-turningly uglier, once they get into a genetics lab (Splice o' Life, Designer Genes) and begin crossbreeding with vegetables and spiders and whatnot. And they've moved on from small town to Big Apple, specifically to the …
Nobody is taken very much aback on meeting a pointy-eared furry little beast who speaks and sings in English, in a voice like Disney's Chip 'n' Dale. But after all, in this "typical" American small town (so beloved of executive producer Steven Spielberg), school is still in session on Christmas …
"It" girl Sophia Lillis tries her hand at opening a horror franchise of her own. Leaving a trail of breadcrumbs between your seat and the exit door might be in order in case you decide to bail.
Increasingly bushy-haired oil-rig men, their plane downed in an Alaskan storm, face extremely hairy wolves. No contest. As desperate men are picked off, Liam Neeson becomes even more the bravely stoical loner than he was in Schindler’s List. Joe Carnahan directed with strong weather effects, okay acting, and deaths not …
Canadian Western. Which is to say, not much of a Western at all. (Rather more of a north Western, whatever that might be: pine trees, Mounties, and whatever.) And not much of a character portrait either. The subject is the outlaw Bill Miner, who, after a long interlude in prison, …
The Maysles brothers' astonishing peek into the magnificent ruin of two womens' lives.