An Elmer Gantry updated for the age of the portable computer and the rock tour. En route to Topeka, a truck in a revivalist caravan breaks down outside Rustwater, Kansas (a little heavy-handed maybe, but it could have been worse; could have been Jerkwater), the "Corn Relish Capitol of America," …
Patricia Clarkson (Cairo Time) stars as a recently ditched book critic bumping up against the fact that she never learned to drive. (She had a husband for that.) Ben Kingsley (Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb) co-stars as a recently arrived Sikh driving instructor/taxi driver who never learned …
PTSD veteran takes a troubled boy under his wing. Complications ensue. Probably not a good idea to have nearly all the praise-quotes in your trailer come from a single source.
Intermittently cute comedy on the wild and woolly early days of pro football, cute in some of the archaic banter, but not cute in the unrelieved drab brown color scheme or the indifferent and infrequent on-field action. It shows a lighter side of director George Clooney (Confessions of a Dangerous …
Homeless by choice — due in large part to the emotionally crippling time Dad spent serving his country — a veteran with PTSD (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) live peaceably for years in the woods of Portland. The girl’s curiosity about life in the forbidden zone …
At 50, Kristin Scott Thomas’s elegant face seems freshly vitalized as Suzanne, a stifled bourgeois wife liberated by sex with a Spanish worker (Sergi Lopez). Her spouse (Yvan Attal) responds with the spite of a Molière cuckold, minus the wit. The engaging, lusty lovers make foolish, desperate mistakes, and director-writer …
Losers' love story about an all-day drinker and a lady of the night. (What passes for sweet talk: "You're like some kind of antidote that mixes with the liquor and keeps me in balance.") There is nothing convincing about the essential storyline, not the level of convenient coincidence (the pair, …
The title tells too much. Or rather the rest of it tells too little else. An abused housewife and an earthy waitress (no, not Thelma and Louise but Marianne and Darly) head out on a picaresque odyssey to Alaska, cheered along by some tinkly (and thump-thumpy) New Age jazz, but …
Sledgehammer antiwar film from the claustrophobic confines of an Israeli tank at the start of the Lebanon War, 1982. The noise and vibration of the machine in motion are horrific, the sweat and piss (copious excretions of the four occupants) can just about be smelled, and the gunsight provides, through …
Yet another of Jean-Pierre Melville's hommages to the American gangster genre. There is, as always, an ever-present element of playacting about it -- these European actors in their I-Am-a-Hoodlum uniforms -- but the "play" maintains a childlike seriousness and unselfconsciousness and freedom from irony. And if the modern-day moviegoer should …
From James Ivory (by way of a Diane Johnson novel), a light, witty, civilized divertissement about Americans abroad, living the high life and the heady life in present-day Paris. A lot has changed since Henry James and Edith Wharton were writing about this sort of thing: sooner to bed and …
Into the Parisian underworld, with Americophile Jean-Pierre Melville as our guide: the ambience (the solitary streetlamp, the smoky bar, the anonymous staircase) is impeccable, which is to say it has little connection to the contemporary real world; the mood is that of a cool-jazz blues number, doleful but aloof; and …