In this biography that opens with her farewell tour, Joan Baez takes stock in an unsparing fashion, confronting often painful memories and opening up about her history with mental illness, her family, drugs, ageing and questions of guilt and forgiveness. For the first time on record, she speaks to her …
Documentary filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg cover a year in the life of the stand-up comic, and they find, beneath the surgically stretched and smoothed mask (with abundant archive footage to show how she used to look), a vulnerable, driven, hard-working, needy, even desperate human being, albeit not a …
Apple guru Steve Jobs was, according to Jobs, a casual liar, a cheat in matters both professional and personal, an arrogant asshole, a clever huckster, a superlative bullshitter, a rampant egotist, a canny opportunist, a disloyal business partner, a hot-tempered megalomaniac, a cowardly cur when it came to accepting responsibility …
A good time for people who think that failed attempts at greatness are more fun to recount than successful ones. In telling the story of how he almost managed to make the movie version of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune, cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky comes off as an alternately charming …
A bolo punch of a reminder that, when not under the evil influence of Jerry Bruckheimer or making films for the financial pleasure of the I.R.S., Nicolas Cage holds sway with the best of them. As Joe, Cage commandeers a backwoods crew of “Timber!” yelling professional nature-killers who poison and …
Internet-famous youngsters set out to become movie-famous via this road trip movie. Brian Klein directs.
David Spade's "white-trash idiot" looks all right in the externals: the metal-band T-shirts, the haircut "like Jane Fonda in Klute." But his creamy-nougat center seems dictated by Adam Sandler's Secrets of Success (Sandler, indeed, is one of the executive producers); and the hot blonde in blue-jean cutoffs (Brittany Daniel: she …
Stanley Tucci's third directing effort (his second solo), all starring himself, all period pieces, all dealing with one or another aspect of the Artistic Temperament, only this one based on fact. In it, Tucci plays the Southern-bred New Yorker staff writer Joe Mitchell, who profiles a true-blue bohemian with darker …
Nothing much. A white-collar cog becomes a sudden celebrity when he challenges the company bully to a rematch. Occasion for sitcom moralizing ca. 1959. With Tim Allen, Julie Bowen, Hayden Panettiere, Kelly Lynch, Patrick Warburton, and Jim Belushi directed by John Pasquin.
In the directorial debut of playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Five Corners), there are several eye-widening romantic visions: a Manhattan city block lit up like a literal Christmas tree; the spreading sunrise on a California beach; a yacht bedecked with Chinese lanterns under a crescent moon. That sort …
Disney reaches back to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series for its most recent adventure saga. The fuzzy 3-D is a nuisance, but the artwork is competent and the interaction of live actors and digital images is nearly seamless. Taylor Kitsch plays Carter, a disgruntled war hero from Virginia (circa mid-1800s) …