Hubert Selby's violent novel of Brooklyn low life in the early 1950s (gang violence, sexual violence, labor violence, domestic violence -- da woiks!), brought to the screen decades too late, and by a foreign director (Uli Edel) to heighten the alienness, and grotesqueness, and squalidness, and luridness, and garishness, and …
Pseudodocumentary horror in the Blair Witch tradition, far below the high-water mark of Cloverfield and even the not as high one of Paranormal Activity, the premise of which has a fast-talking, Bible-thumping charlatan (Patrick Fabian) intending to “expose exorcism for the scam it really is” but encountering, with a film …
Things were going so well for Nell (Ashley Bell) in the group home where she was deposited after all the mishigas that went down in the first Last Exorcism. But the demon Abalam refuses to allow Nell to move on. For 75 minutes, Ed Gass-Donnelly's film chugs along with the …
It starts on a note of what appears to be reverent satire — vomiting pea soup, a cry of “the power of God compels me” — and quickly delivers what is quite simply one of the most inept horror films since we lost Ed Wood. What drew me to this …
With Brad and Angelina on the outs, Sean Penn steps in and picks up what could have been one of her rejects. With Penn at the helm you know to expect good acting at its most serious from Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem. Was this released by River Road Entertainment? …
How to gussy up your completely conventional story of boy-meets-girl, boy-marries-girl, boy-gets-famous, boy-moves-on? Well, you could start by chopping up the timeline so that we start with the heartbroken ending, cut to the ecstatic beginning, slam to a curdled late-period fight, and work from there. Oh, and you could also …
Director and co-writer Richard Linklater (Everybody Wants Some!) takes up the story of Larry (Steve Carell), a recently widowed Vietnam veteran who journeys to collect the body of his son after the boy dies serving as a Marine in Iraq. For support, Larry turns to a couple of fellow vets: …
An actress, pressured by her producers to star in yet another romcom, turns her personal heartbreak into box office gold.
Jia Youwei (played by Jia Bing) is the undisputed spokesperson for the "Money Saving Gate" and the proud son of heaven who is far ahead in the stingy race. He spent half his life searching and didn't dare to spend money with his life. He didn't expect to spend money …
Amidst World War I's chaos, a grieving father turns hero, leading villagers to safety while evading a relentless enemy driven by vengeance.
When was the last time that three, count 'em, three war movies, set during three different wars, played town in the same week? First, thee's World War I as depicted in 1917, followed by World War II and Quezon's Game, and now the true-life story of Vietnam vet, Airman William …
Harvey Keitel plays an aging Mafia don who decides the time is right to train his middle-aged, mildly retarded son (writer/director Hyung-rae Shim) as his successor. The only thing that kept me watching this period-genre parody was the schizophrenic production design — it’s impossible to pinpoint in what part of …
Director Bob Balaban's third feature film signals no sort of "growth" in his career, but instead a switch to a totally different branch, a less twisted one, a more widely reachable one, an altogether lower one. Perhaps counting himself lucky to be still working at all, the man who made …
Some small effort is made to heat up the drama (the hero has to look on helplessly while his daughter is attacked in slow motion by a pair of skin-crawlingly reptilian rapists), but for the most part this hurried Western shows no appreciation of the emotional meanings in the rubber …
The old, old -- fifty-six-year-old, to be exact -- Alec Guinness vehicle retailored to the expansive personality and physique of Queen Latifah. As a mousy cookware clerk at a department store in New Orleans, given three weeks to live and determined to blow her bank account on a dream vacation …