American revamping and retitling of the overpraised Swedish horror show, Let the Right One In, a tender, tentative, prepubescent love story between a bullied schoolboy and the next-door vampire (“twelve, more or less”), snail-paced, whisper-soft, like the original. Matt Reeves, dropping the pardonably sloppy digital camcorder of Cloverfield, directing this …
Let’s not and say we did. An unsuccessful video game designer and his loser best friend get their hands on police uniforms and masquerade as cops. A dozen or so aerial shots of L.A. interspersed between amateurish, sluggishly-paced, and uncommonly unfunny skits. Where these two stone-broke schmucks raised the dough …
Bruce Weber’s documentary scrapbook on the life of jazz singer and trumpeter (and heart-throb) Chet Baker. The filmmaker (whose Broken Noses was about the boxer and Chet Baker look-alike, Andy Minsker) has a lot of material, some of it quite rare, but he hasn’t a lot of angles on it. …
Pearl Jam in concert from Chicago's Wrigley Field. The title refers to eternally upbeat Cubs legend Ernie Banks' mantra, "It's such a beautiful day today, let's play two!"
Zohra Lampert has nowhere else been granted this much time on a movie screen; and so, this ought to be an occasion for celebrating, even though she is required to impersonate a stock New York Neurotic, and even though the story material is flimsy Gothic paperback stuff. The shabby appearance …
After missing out on a long-awaited mass suicide, an obnoxious cult member (Stavros Halkias) teams up with his former leader (Wes Haney) to rebuild their group, gathering a gang of awkward outcasts determined to fulfill their transcendent destiny. Directed by Ben Kitnick.
Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul.
You shrugged at Werner Herzog’s historical drama Queen of the Desert, but maybe you’ll find yourself taking a second, more interested look at this documentary version of Gertrude Bell’s astonishing life as an Englishwoman who, among other things, helped to shape the Middle East in the wake of World War …
The second part of Clint Eastwood's Second World War diptych, the Japanese-language, Japanese-perspective counterpart to Flags of Our Fathers, an exercise in empathy whereby the filmmaker re-examines the same subject, the costly Battle of Iwo Jima, from the opposite side of the firing line. For an American production to attempt …
The poise and grace of Vanessa Redgrave, her reunion on screen with Franco Nero (her Lancelot in Camelot, the father of one of her children), and a mouthwatering tour of Tuscany are insufficient counterweights to the slop bucket of false sentiments about romantic love. With Amanda Seyfried, Christopher Egan, and …
Two Russian sailors on leave in Liverpool, sort of like Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (sort of, but not a lot). They get lucky with a couple of working-class lasses on the prowl. The hairy one named Sergei makes love all night, but the pink-faced one named …
A recently widowed mother moves her daughter from Tokyo to a small island community. There, the young girl is befriended by a trio of gas-passing goblins. The richly articulated background drawings can’t help but call attention to the static character animation and rice paper-thin plotting that plays out before them. …
Cornball comedy from China in the vein of Kung Fu Hustle, involving a bandit who (by means of falsified identity) takes the position of governor in a rural province (circa 1919). He takes on the struggle of the people against the wealthy gangster who runs the town. Writer/director/actor Wen Jiang …
There is very little to feel good about in this documentary on the disastrous attempt by the City of Philadelphia to forcibly evict members of the black liberation organization MOVE from their row house on Osage avenue in May of 1985. Except maybe this: director Jason Osder’s organizing principle for …