A small-scale, big-star character study of exceedingly humble ambition. Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air, Drinking Buddies, Pitch Perfect) is Jenny, a young woman who goes to live with her brother Jeff (writer-director-star Joe Swanberg) and his wife Kelly (a charming Melanie Lynskey) after a bad breakup. She promptly goes …
The first installment of director Christopher Landon’s horror riff on Groundhog Day worked its premise to amusing enough effect: grief-damaged young woman Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) gets trapped in a time loop that sees her killed again and again on her birthday, but she manages to use said loop to …
Three interwoven plotlines with occasional points of intersection, one of them to do with the tested friendship between homosexual couples of opposite sexes, one to do with the boat-rocking new female lead singer of a garage band, and one to do with a wannabe documentary filmmaker who focuses his camcorder …
Computer-animated message movie about the pressure of conformity and (separate message) the plunder of nature, more specifically about a species of pop-song-singing penguins, into whose midst is born a "different," an aberrant, tap-dancing penguin (try, if you can, to put the pudgy trudging birds of March of the Penguins out …
Here is your chance to see a penguin pee upside down, to hear Brad Pitt and Matt Damon as brave krill eager to escape the swarm (“Goodbye, krill world”), and to hear a kid penguin sing a Puccini aria with lyrics such as, “Life’s just a big pile of crazy.” …
Adam Sandler, a would-be hockey player who can't skate, brings his slap-shot skills (and brawling manners) to the professional golf circuit. Gag construction is workmanlike, and Dennis Dugan's directorial touch provides an occasional prod. (Highlight: a fistfight with hoary game-show host Bob Barker in the midst of a Pro-Am tournament.) …
Adam Sandler, a would-be hockey player who can't skate, brings his slap-shot skills (and brawling manners) to the professional golf circuit. Gag construction is workmanlike, and Dennis Dugan's directorial touch provides an occasional prod. (Highlight: a fistfight with hoary game-show host Bob Barker in the midst of a Pro-Am tournament.) …
Character portrait of a singular person, a primary-school teacher called Poppy, almost dementedly upbeat, seeing it as her mission in life to spread sunshine and joy wherever she goes. A tipsy giggler, a babbling fount of inanities (“Here we go, gigolo”), a constant commenter (“Never been here before,” she announces …
Wintry Norwegian hills sprinkled with quaint ironies, as director Anne Sewitsky tricks up this vaguely comical tale of marital discord. An urban couple moves to the sticks, seemingly for robust choir singing. A rustic wife frets about her moose-hunting husband, secretly gay. An adopted Ethiopian kid is mute, but a …
A dirty trick. With Lynn Redgrave, in variable hairdos, eyebrows, and lipsticks, as Xaviera Hollander; directed by Nicholas Sgarro.
The number of people that have played Xaviera Hollander on screen has not surpassed the number that have played, say, Tarzan; but at the rate of her first half-decade of screen life, another decade would be all that's needed. This outing, about the cutthroat struggle for film rights to her …
The number of known names in the cast is depressing testimony to the difficulty of finding decent jobs in today's Hollywood. (Some of the knowns -- Edy Williams, Joyce Jillson -- appear exclusively in the credits and never make it onto the screen in the flesh.) All of them, most …
Story of the 1926 general strike in Scotland on behalf of some miners who probably wanted things like a living wage and worker safety protocols. Crazy, right? Back then, people didn't understand that corporations are people, too.