Remarkable: a sequel that actually scales down from its predecessor. The high concept — workers of the world, kill your boss! — dispensed with, our working class heroes Nick, Kurt, and Dale (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day, clearly enjoying themselves and each other) can relax and get down …
Tara Subkoff (All Over Me,The Cell) moves behind the camera to write and direct this based-on-true-events cult horror entry for IFC Midnight. After one of the zippiest title sequences in recent memory, six well-heeled twelve-year-old girls settle in for a sleepover in a mansion where “the vortex of the four …
Mad scientist stuff, having to do with a wheelchair-bound, black-gloved Pavlovian who habitually cracks his knuckles and performs frontal lobotomies on whoever checks into his sanatorium for a weekend of rest and relaxation. Knowledgeably eclectic and quirkily humorous, but in the long run stunted and disappointing, particularly the late-arriving monster …
The first, and finest, of Christopher Lee's numerous appearances as the Transylvanian bloodsucker for the Hammer film studio. (Let us not speak of his appearance in the unspeakable Count Dracula for Jesus Franco in Spain.) This is the movie, too, that deserves recognition for taking the single greatest stride in …
Corny costume adventure involving Austrian spies in pursuit of Italian expatriates in post-Napoleonic France, presently in the grips of a cholera epidemic. (All you need to know of the history: the Italians are the good guys, the Austrians the bad.) The casting of a vain vapid male-model type, Olivier Martinez, …
This one had been high atop my must-see list, ever since Scorsese dubbed it his favorite film of the ‘90s. (Though made in 1985, it took some time for it to wash up on American shores.) And for years, it was available only in botched pan-and-scan video transfers. According to …
Richard Mullane directs this documentary short about horse whisperer Jean François Pignon that screens prior to Herd at the 2017 San Diego International Film Festival.
Robert Redford's almost three-hour rendering of the Nicholas Evans best-seller, a gussied-up grade-A version of the staple triumph-over-adversity made-for-TV movie, with Nature Company greeting-card photography and a high-class cast (Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Dianne Wiest, Chris Cooper, in addition to Redford). The adversity arrives in a hurry: a more …
Dr. Seuss adulterated: plumped-up graphics (faithful in bare outline); wised-up attitude (vocal impressions of Kissinger and JFK, a martial-arts anime parody); dragged-out storytelling. The elephant’s crossing of a rickety rope bridge is a good sequence (meanwhile, down in minuscule Whoville, a jostled dentist misses the mark with the novocaine needle, …
A mighty contest between the cool, interior sci-fi stylings of writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, In Time) and the overheated adolescent emotionality of Twilight creator Stephenie Meyer, who wrote the source material. Meyer wins in the end, but for the first two acts, the tension proves fruitful. Alien parasites known as …
South Korean creature feature, a tad overlong and a bit wavery in tone, yet very well made on the whole, and especially well made in its computer-animated creature, a two-legged, amphibious, carnivorous, whale-scale fish, with a toothy Venus-flytrap mouth. (Blame it on the Americans, Scott Wilson specifically, dumping toxic chemicals …
Times two. A small-town sheriff, and burnt-out big-town SWAT negotiator, faces a hostage crisis at a fortified hillside mansion, but the head of the house has connections to big-time criminals, who then take the sheriff's family hostage, too, to compel his co-operation. Brassy, bombastic suspense film, with a host of …
Sophomoric gore, "presented" by Quentin Tarantino but directed by Eli Roth. Youthful backpackers interrupt their tour of Amsterdam (a cannabis cafe, a disco, the red-light district, no time for Anne Frank House) in order to pursue the promise of beautiful and easy girls in Slovakia, where indeed a couple of …
A callous American doctor stationed at a military facility in Seoul orders an underling to dispose of formaldehyde by pouring it down the sink, never once stopping to consider the havoc it might wreak once the toxic chemicals reach the water system. It’s on this basis of fact that Bong …
It’s being sold as a “very relevant thriller...about a segment of our population who want to embrace the American Dream, but their hope is shattered by unfortunate circumstances.” First-time director Michael Dwyer pushes hard to elicit sympathy, but the unfortunate truth is our young undocumented martyr’s idea of embracing the …