Phil Kaufman's worthy remake of Don Siegel's McCarthy-era sci-fi classic.
The standard science-fiction theme of dehumanization and the standard 1950s theme of conformism (the idea of "pods" taking the places of human beings seems particularly apt) are put over with a low-budget action movie's sense of strain, urgency, brutality. With Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter; directed by Don Siegel.
America is ripe for terrorist attack: "soft, spineless, decadent." Ah, but they forgot about Chuck Norris, who, although no longer with The Company, has kept in shape wrestling alligators in the Everglades. We get to see two successful terrorist strikes, against a sleepy middle-class suburb and a Latino youth center, …
Pale imitation of a 1950s soap opera, set in that actual era. The issues are solid (first love, the wrong side of the tracks, the gossip-stained reputation), and the storytelling shows good patience, and the cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, Joanna Going, Billy Crudup, Kathy Baker, Will Patton) …
High-concept comedy with and from Ricky Gervais, co-writing and co-directing with Matthew Robinson. It's set in an alternative universe where everyone by nature tells the brutal truth (even advertisers: "Pepsi, When They Don't Have Coke"), until the brutalized short portly hero, unable to make his rent, makes an evolutionary leap …
The insatiably curious and headstrong inventor/artist Leonardo da Vinci (voice of Stephen Fry) leaves Italy to join the French court where he can freely experiment, invent flying contraptions and incredible machines, and study the human body. Joined in his adventure by the audacious Princess Marguerite (Daisy Ridley), Leonardo attempts to …
The equation of political Fascism with sexual perversion is formula Italian psychologizing (cf. The Damned and The Conformist). But this seamy storyline, about a police chief who experiments with murder in order to test his immunity from the law, plays rather light and clever. And director Elio Petri's agile camerawork …
During the first nine years of his pontificate, Pope Francis visits 53 countries, focusing on the issues of poverty, migration, the environment, solidarity and war. Starring Pope Francis, directed by Gianfranco Rosi."
Doubtless not the sort of project that fans of director Clint Eastwood want from him, a Big Statement, no matter how characteristically understated. Marrying elements of the Great Man biography and the inspirational true sports story, it tells of Nelson Mandela’s first years as the first black president of South …
From the busy Disney sports department, an implausible but true story made more implausible and less true (and not made "better" in the process), the football equivalent of baseball's The Rookie, wherein a thirtyish laid-off schoolteacher, part-time bartender, and abandoned husband in South Philly, name of Vince Papale, earns a …
Werner Herzog digs up another nugget of Odd History: the story of a simple village blacksmith, Polish and Jewish, who sets out for Berlin in 1932 to assume the job of strongman in a theater called the Palace of the Occult, operated by a crank clairvoyant, and closet Jew, with …
Romana is an Austrian biologist whose passion is insects. She takes viewers on a trip to discover the home of many endemic and endangered species that live in the Gesäuse National Park.
Small bore, with big ambitions, about a dark-eyed dark-haired high-school grad (the blandly pretty Jordana Brewster) who follows the European trail of her blue-eyed blond sister (Cameron Diaz), accompanied on the soundtrack by an aggressively sensitive New Age guitar, to find out why the elder one killed herself. The present-tense …
A woman who must work with a police officer to clear her name after her lover is found dead in a locked room. Directed by Chen Zhuo, starring Greg Han Hsu, Janine Chun-Ning Chang, and Zheng Yin.