Basically a one-act, one-location play, with not enough material to justify its scant 74-minute running time. Jeff Daniels stars in and scripted this tale of Joseph Harris, an alcoholic (what else?) playwright who hasn’t produced bupkis in over 20 years. He agrees to mount his latest production (that has yet …
The tension between public perception and private history is always at the core of Egoyan’s work. Jim (David Thewlis) is a persnickety, permanently punched-in city health inspector. Though not a religious man, when his time came, the widower left instructions with his daughter Veronica (Laysla de Oliveira) that he be …
Two things just as sure as the turning of the Earth: the one-joke format is best suited for seven-minute cartoons, and no one made films about characters they didn’t like better than Hitchcock. When mixed together in Canadian writer-director-star Pat Mills’s (Secondary High) second feature, the results are anything but …
Babs dearest. Barbra Streisand could write her own first-class ticket on any project in Tinseltown but instead chooses to ride shotgun for Seth Rogen in this terminally cute justification for matricide. Rogen — an uptight organic chemist shopping around a new environmentally safe cleaning product — decides to play Cupid …
On the eve of his big court hearing we find Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), a judgemental cop with a grudge to nurse and a load of backstory to slowly unravel, demoted to playing wet nurse as an emergency services dispatch operator. What is the purpose of taking an original idea …
Spicoli can still surf. Other than that, little of interest transpires in this action-lacked drama about an 8-year-old assassination in the Congo that comes back to bite the titular triggerman (Sean Penn). The action is sparse, the pace sluggish, and, with very few brush strokes, Penn’s vacant turn as an …
Sam (Karen Gellan) was barely a teenager when a shootout in a diner ended badly. Her mother, professional assassin Scarlet (Lena Headley), disappeared, leaving her daughter in the care of Nathan (Paul Giamatti), head of HR for a nebulous government organization known as The Firm. Fifteen years later, and Sam …
A look inside a remote ashram in southern India — students spend anywhere from 3 months to 3 years studying the ancient wisdom of Advaita Vedanta from Swami Dayananda Saraswati — that’s a feast for the senses. Opening opposite one of the summer’s big event movies, Gurukulam is hardly the …
There was a time in the mid-’90s when it seemed like every other indie release owed a debt of originality to Quentin Tarantino. Hell, he produced half of them! The studio press release for Habit, the latest streetwise and cinema foolish grimefest starring Bella Thorne, pays its dues in the …
The people who occupy a single bedroom at various key moments in Mexican history form the basis of this ambitious but gimmicky omnibus picture. According to Variety, the creative force behind this one appears to be producer Edher Campos, who asked screenwriter Maria Diego Hernandez to create eight stories for …
Screenwriter Robert Towne gifted Hal Ashby with two masterful, director-proof scenarios, The Last Detail and Shampoo. Harold and Maude and Being There are basically one-joke comedies, the latter aided to no end by Peter Sellers’ performance, the former sentimentalizing the Holocaust by placing a concentration camp tattoo on Ruth Gordon’s …
A “tree doctor,” his wife, and their infant son move to a remote cabin in Ireland where their mere trampling on the land is enough to unleash unspeakable demons. Black goo rains from the ceiling, neighbors add menace, strange figures surround the baby, and the family dog...let’s not go there. …
Forty years and numerous sequels and/or reboots have passed, and there’s not a moment in any of them to rival the slow thrust of steadicam butterflies at play in John Carpenter’s original. The well-ordered stalking and resultant butchery of a pair of morbidly obsessed fanboy and fangirl public radio podcasters …
The scariest part of the film was the Miramax logo and the bad memories it stirred. What really kills? A director of David Gordon Green’s (George Washington, Snow Angels, Manglehorn) stature hitching his star to a formulaic “thing that refuses to die” comic book celebration of splatter. (That’s Green’s voice …