The parade of crime-scene corpses at the outset combines gore and cheesecake in a way reminiscent of the illustrations in True Detective, but active violence — the deed itself as opposed to the bloody result — is kept off screen for a surprising length of time: long enough so that …
Keanu Reeves is like a streamlined Gregory Peck from a quiet planet where everyone has slow thoughts, and his performance of Lopakhin in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard has the pathos of a soulful coma. Back in Buffalo to rob a bank next to the theater, Reeves is swept by love …
The 28-year-old British Wunderkind Kenneth Branagh has dared to attempt to replicate Olivier's feat — his triple feat — of adapting, directing, and starring in a screen treatment of Part III of Shakespeare's "Prince Hal" trilogy, and has additionally dared to give it a completely new slant without doing undue …
Olivier, doing his bit for the war effort (ca. 1944-45), marshals this Shakespeare history into a patriotic pep rally, with all due pomp and swagger. The backstage-at-the-Globe introduction is clever (and more than that: devotional, spiritual). And if the production never quite loses sight of the stage and becomes a …
Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are) continues his intrepid exploration of your inner man-child, this time with a barely futuristic story about Theodore, a lonely guy (played by an opaque but vulnerable Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his smart new operating system. "If you love your tech …
The premise of a "blocked" crime novelist visiting actual courtrooms for story ideas and becoming involved in one of the cases personally is an acceptable place for a comedy-thriller to start -- or even, with minor alterations, for a "straight" thriller to start. Where it quickly stops being acceptable is …
The '63 Volkswagen Bug with a mind of its -- er, his -- own (also a libido of his own: antenna coming to full alert at the sight of a late-model cab-yellow Beetle) is reclaimed from Crazy Dave's Scrap and Salvage and spruced up for the NASCAR circuit. Insipid kiddie …
The ready-or-not-here-we-come Disney animation team of the Nineties, having previously trivialized a classic novel in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, are not about to balk at trivializing an entire classical mythology. And under their ruling sensibility of the camped-up contemporary stage musical, the very notion of a virile hero is …
Starring Dwayne Johnson. 'nuff said.
This plays as part of the 2017 San Diego International Film Festival. The program notes describe it as, "Herd explores how horses can guide us to heal the chaos within our lives. During a weeklong off-grid nature retreat, deep in the heart of British Columbia’s horse country, eight people participate …
A Romanian construction worker living in Brussels is about to return home to visit his mother, and maybe stay longer. Using the leftovers from his fridge, he cooks up a big pot of soup and begins handing it out as farewell gifts to friends and family. But while waiting for …
Clint Eastwood’s first venture into the supernatural, structured in three distinct, interwoven, and, we may presume, converging storylines, dealing directly with the subject of death and beyond. The screenplay by Peter Morgan, known for such docudramas as The Queen and Frost/Nixon, touches upon, gives voice to, a variety of common …