An espionage caper whose sequence of events is so cartoonishly absurd that we expect to find ourselves waking up in bed when it's over. We would then have no hesitation about characterizing the experience as a nightmare. Sample sequence: the ex-con cat-burglar hero (Bruce Willis, looking even more pleased with …
Though this is as different from previous Coen brothers movies as all of those are different from each other, it nonetheless picks up the interest of Barton Fink in the issues of commercialism, success, popularity -- the whole American, and particularly Hollywooden, ethos. That earlier movie confused a lot of …
Martin Scorsese goes to town (Paris) with CGI effects and 3-D and the fantasy story from Brian Selznick’s book about Parisian orphan Hugo Cabret. Asa Butterfield is Hugo, maintaining the clocks in a train depot in 1930. Lonely, brilliant, and cute, he wins the friendship of a girl (delightful Clöe …
Zola novel transformed by Renoir into some strong documentary material about trains and trainyards and some overwhipped, mushy histrionics from the leading man, Gabin. Later remade, and bettered, by Fritz Lang, under the title Human Desire.
La Dolce Vita — never actually all that sweet - gone properly sour. Open with an overhead shot of the cleanup following a swanky Italian gala. An employee mounts his bicycle and heads for home, only to be struck by a speeding SUV. There's your disaster, but on whose head …
According to Box Office Mojo, The Human Centipede made just over $250K worldwide. The sequel, The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, made just $140K. And yet they made a third one, this time stringing together an entire prison's worth of unfortunate souls. Why? How?
Double agentry in Her Majesty's Secret Service, taken from a novel by Graham Greene, which means that conscience gets put on the rack. That British knack of remaining chipper and polite even while doing the most ruthless things is engagingly portrayed by the likes of Nicol Williamson, Richard Attenborough, Robert …
For the subject of his latest documentary, Ai Weiwei takes on nothing less than the plight of the more than 65 million people worldwide forcibly displaced from their homes. Weiwei’s camera shepherds audiences through various recesses of the planet, his encouraging smile bringing comfort and optimism to the uprooted hordes …
Highly unusual and no less highly unfunny comedy of Big Themes: animal vs. human, nature vs. civilization, id vs. superego. An ape woman (Patricia Arquette), hairy-chested at the age of twelve, a Queen Kong sideshow act at twenty, a reclusive nature writer as a young adult (best-seller: Fuck Humanity), seems …
Taking place over the course of one revelatory night, three generations of the Blake family gather together to celebrate Thanksgiving at Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her partner Richard’s (Oscar® nominee Steven Yeun) cramped lower Manhattan apartment. As the evening slowly unfolds, each family member’s frustrations and insecurities are laid bare …
Robert Benton's adaptation of a Philip Roth novel feels incontrovertibly bookish: the Big Themes (American race relations, moral hypocrisy, political correctness), the vast historical canvas (Vietnam, World War II), the contextual co-ordinates from current affairs (Viagra, Clinton-Lewinsky), the academic setting (mythical Athena College in rural Massachusetts), the self-analytical literary allusions …