Screen debut of rapper Eminem, a pop-star acting vehicle not unlike some of the more serious (everything being relative) of the early Elvis vehicles: Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Wild in the Country. (The Eminem character is even addressed on occasion as "Elvis.") On the score of "realism," one …
It starts out in the precinct of Joseph Wambaugh's Police Story — L.A. cop shoots and kills petty drug dealer, goes on an extended bender, loses his family, emerges months later at A.A. meetings — but it soon veers off toward more routine TV cop shows. Director Hal Ashby has …
A family-man gumshoe follows the trail of an apparent snuff film (a genre originally dismissed as an "urban myth") into the S&M; underworld, with a Hollywood porn-shop clerk as his guide. Hyperbolic detective story, combining the routine barbarity and depravity of a Matthew Scudder case (Lawrence Block, novelist) with a …
François Ozon offers up, for specialized tastes, a cinephiliac musical-comedy whodunit, set at a snowbound country house in the late Fifties or early Sixties, with an all-female cast (exclusive of the faceless male corpse). The deliberate staginess and theatricality -- it was adapted from a forgotten play by Robert Thomas …
A film of famous post-production troubles, so watered down in the editing (or somewhere) that you can no longer tell what the hard stuff originally was. Scotch? Bourbon? Rye? Whatever it was, it tastes now like nothing kickier than oversugared and overiced tea: something to do with two style-conscious voluptuaries …
Michael Shannon gets the thankless task of trying to humanize Wall Street's capitalist swine Gordon Gekko, right down to the speech about how hard work never really helped anybody get ahead and the passing of the moral buck on to the whole rotten, rigged, remorseless system. (Thankless because it's Gekko's …
Alexandre Aja directs the story of a neurologist seeking to make contact with a comatose nine-year-old boy in order to discover the true nature of the fall that made him that way.
An anxiety-ridden man who embarks on a surreal Kafkaesque odyssey back home after his mother suddenly dies, confronting his greatest fears along the way. From his darkest fears comes the greatest adventure. Directed by Ari Aster and starring Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix.
A bright young man at a fancy tech company (Domhnall Gleeson) gets picked to visit the company’s founder (Oscar Isaac) in his country home, er, homey concrete fortress. There, he is introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), a sweet and pretty robot who might just be the world’s first Artificial Intelligence. …
The Graham family starts to unravel following the death of their reclusive grandmother.
Howard Ratner’s (Adam Sandler) day is consumed with robbing Peter to pawn to Paul. His life is a constant juggling act, his desperate ploy a complex series of bets involving a multitude of moving parts. If he can distract his clients long enough to keep afloat everything, the rewards could …
After a group of would-be criminals kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, all they have to do to collect a $50 million ransom is watch the girl overnight. In an isolated mansion, the captors start to dwindle, one by one, and they discover, to their mounting …
Or, “The Further Whitewashing of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” this time with an all-black cast. The promise of talented Will Gluck’s (Fired Up, Easy A) name attached as producer never materialized. Leaning on the okay 1986 film version About Last Night… (give or take an ellipses) rather than …
Based on the David Mamet play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, adapted by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, and directed by first-timer Edward Zwick. The movie, wherever it gets it from, and however deeply buried beneath slickness, cuteness, soupiness, pop songs, montages, and assorted froufrou, has something a little special about …