Michael Shannon is incapable of delivering anything but brilliance, and all too often, the success or failure of one of his pictures hinges on a filmmaker’s ability to meet him halfway. Ariel Vromen (Rx, Danika) isn’t quite there yet, as evidenced in The Iceman, a true-crime mob movie based on …
With less than thirty hours to save the twenty-six excavators trapped in a diamond mine cave-in, it’s up to Mike (Liam Neeson) and five other truckers to undertake a suicide mission by transporting, across the coldest region of Canada, three trucks containing the wellhead needed to save the day. Chances …
Ang Lee's adaptation of a 1994 novel by Rick Moody, set in John Cheever country at Thanksgiving, with the ice outdoors outweighing even that in the cocktail glasses. The view of the people -- alienation as a spectator sport -- is no less aloof than in the filmmaker's Jane Austen …
This could be likened to The Purple Rose of Cairo, but why should anyone want to do that? Dislikened to it, if there were such a verb, would be certain to get more takers. The premise is one of those that inevitably seems more complicated in the retelling than in …
At the start, there's a swift and sustained twenty minutes or so, painstakingly pieced together with wary point-of-view shots and edgy circuitous dialogue, as the finger of guilt turns toward a Catholic priest, who has learned the real killer's identity in the confession box. This places the priest in what's …
I haven’t seen enough of British director Ken Loach’s movies, but the few that have come my way (My Name is Joe, Sweet Sixteen) struck me as good examples of finely crafted social realism. Alas, this time around, Loach and his habitual screenwriter Paul Laverty are working in moral black …
I sensed trouble the moment the picture opened: with a police officer — banging down the door of a violent felon accused of beating up a hooker — turning to the victim and cracking wise about a pair of Chanel loafers. Perhaps twenty-five years ago, this “my gay dads” comedy …
Somewhat heavy reading of Oscar Wilde's stage comedy of manners and morals. Julianne Moore, as Mrs. Cheveley, has the role that makes everything go, and she is fully present and alert in it, and her departure before the final act is a grave loss. Rupert Everett seems strangely uncommitted, and …
What if the King of Rock 'n Roll had an identical twin who was raised by a hardline preacher?
Middle-aged Magdalena (Mercedes Hernandez) has lost contact with her son after he took off with a friend from their town of Guanajuato to cross the border into the U.S., hopeful to find work. Desperate to find out what happened to him, she embarks on an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous journey …
Hokey thriller about a Ten Little Indians-type annihilation of the guests at a remote Nevada motel in a pelting rain. The hokeyness has a rationale, but the rationale is hokey, too. With John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Ray Liotta, Clea DuVall, Rebecca DeMornay, Alfred Molina, and Pruitt Taylor Vince; directed by …
Don’t blame the Apatow connection for this one. Director Seth Gordon (Four Christmases, Horrible Bosses) steals a few chapters from the John Hughes playbook as he tries in vain to transform Melissa McCarthy into this generation's John Candy. Playing an alcoholic sociopath in a Bozo fright wig, she uses the …