Woody Allen at his most exhausted and self-parodying. A philosophy professor (a begutted Joaquin Phoenix) — newly arrived for the summer session at a quaint Rhode Island college, and bored with himself, philosophy, and life in general — finds inspiration in the notion of directly, concretely making the world a …
Echoes of Best Friends: a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team writing a script about a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team. And here as there, the result contains plenty of "insider" stuff for the movie buff: the hero's graduate thesis, for instance, is called "A Semiological Analysis of Sexual Overtones in the Early Films of …
A big time political strategist (Steve Carell), still stinging from Mrs. Clinton’s loss, spends the summer in South Carolina, helping to turn a retired veteran (Chris Cooper) into the Democratic mayor of a small conservative town. If you’re determined to pattern a Red State/Blue State variation on Frank Capra, there …
Rough stuff from the French misanthrope, Gaspar Noé. An exceedingly brutal rape sets in motion an errant vendetta by the victim's former and current boyfriends: "Fucking B-movie revenge crap," as the former and more reluctant one puts it. (Noé's vision of humanity at large: the shadowy figure who appears at …
Sudha Kangara Prasad writes and directs this tale of an aging, disgraced boxer looking for redemption through his training of a young protege. In Hindi and Tamil with English subtitles.
Karel Reisz's re-creation of the life, career, and death of Isadora Duncan was reportedly victimized by producer's cuts; but it seems obviously to be hampered, anyway, by the usual whirlwind-tour cursoriness and momentousness of movie biographies. Reisz and his star, Vanessa Redgrave, experience their best moments rather at random, with …
Retirement-home pablum about the warming relationship between an inquisitive eleven-year-old (interested in ghosts, interested in “what happens”) and the old crank, formerly The Amazing Clarence, who takes over the boy’s room. Vibrant color photography by Rob Hardy, and a vibrant performance by Michael Caine, perhaps too vibrant for the role. …
Gore and idiotic plotting from South Korean director Kim Ji-woon. A pregnant woman is butchered by a sexual psychotic, then the creep exchanges ambushes and sadistic shockers with a “special agent” who is (of course) the woman’s fiancé. Apart from Lee Mogae’s atmospheric imagery, this is simply a wallow. Humor: …
Bad man makes good music. Or, perhaps more strangely, sad man makes happy music. (Spoiler alert: we don’t hear the plaintive croon of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” until the closing credits. Instead, we see and hear a rousing rendition of “Hey Good Lookin’.”) Screenwriter and director Marc Abraham’s …
Jane Schoenbrun's followup to We're All Going to the World's Fair has been hailed as a breakthrough cinematic treatment of gender dysphoria. Maybe so, but it's a good enough piece of art to bear multiple interpretations; for your humble correspondent, it played as an almost shockingly effective evocation of How …
Temporarily blinded due to stress, a Filipino tour guide falls in love with the guy who acts as her seeing-eye human.