One of John Ford's prestige pictures. The tense, doom-drenched tale of a remorseful traitor in the Irish Rebellion is played by Ford with a sort of crying-in-his-beer sentimentality: soul-stirring folk songs, lugubrious fogs and shadows, stereotyped cap-and-turtleneck costumes, limitless Catholic piety and forgiveness. Victor McLaglen, Joe Sawyer, Preston Foster.
Quentin Tarantino takes no more than the risible title from Enzo G.Castellari's Dirty Dozen knockoff of 1978, and respells, misspells, that. (Did he ponder Basturds as possibly funnier?) Much of the movie, a revisionist revisitation of the French theater of operations in the Second World War, is unapologetically, unsanctimoniously silly. …
Director Zalman King (Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid, and the like) shifts his gaze from the form of the female figure to the form of the surf. His "vision" is mystical, mythical, grandiose, although lacking the epic style of Milius's Big Wednesday, substituting the doodling style of a Baywatch montage. …
A new spin on the old boss's-daughter romance. And not just new, but contemporary, up-to-date, timely, topical. The romancer is now the boss himself -- a fast-track junior executive fresh out of business school and still wet behind the ears -- and the daughter's father is now the romancer's underling, …
Documentarian and unmistakable cinephile Stig Björkman — one of his side jobs is translating Woody Allen for Swedish audiences — gets handed the golden key that unlocks the Bergman vault. Told almost exclusively in her own words — from diary pages the actress first began filling at age 14, to …
Matt Spicer directs and co-writes an internet-based version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Aubrey Plaza as the desperate outsider looking to hijack a life and make friends in the process, Elizabeth Olsen as the Instagram goddess who invites adoration but not intimacy, Wyatt Russell as the goddess’s dumbly sincere …
Otto Preminger's Second World War soap opera, opening in Pearl Harbor on the night before the Day of Infamy, cuts a wide swath and hoes a long row (it was shown originally with an intermission), and it gives a good idea, in down-to-earth human terms, of what it must have …
Paul Thomas Anderson takes on novelist Thomas Pynchon's take on the California detective story, and brings Joaquin Phoenix along for the trip.
Dominique Sanda as a Gilded Age gold-digger whose serpentine scheme to get her hands on the fortune of a miserly retired baker (Anthony Quinn) takes her first through the bedrooms of the old buzzard's two disinherited sons. Aside from maximizing Sanda's opportunities to slip out of her clothes, the logic …
Downtrodden Austrian peasants are left the farm when their malevolent lord and master is murdered. The simple life ends; a complicated one begins. Rustic dullness carries over. Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky.
Curtis Hanson's handling of the Jennifer Weiner book, lightly, mildly, breezily entertaining in a second-rate, best-sellerish, chick-lit kind of way: the seriocomic story of two mismatched Jewish sisters, one an overweight, high-achieving Philadelphia lawyer whose private life consists of romance novels and a shoe fetish, and the other a rootless …