Scum in orbit. Visually monotonous, turgidly violent, inanely scripted, it concerns a 2079 revolt of convicts in space-ship prison, the President’s abducted daughter (Maggie Grace) — who still looks great after taking a syringe in her eyeball — and a special agent (Guy Pearce) who keeps flipping zingers as his …
A crime farce about separate but not necessarily opposing groups of felons on a chain-reaction collision course in London's East End. And a prime piece of evidence of the music-video-ization of movies. Everything in it is just for show, most of all the convoluted, contrived, and confusing plotline. Even with …
A crime farce about separate but not necessarily opposing groups of felons on a chain-reaction collision course in London's East End. And a prime piece of evidence of the music-video-ization of movies. Everything in it is just for show, most of all the convoluted, contrived, and confusing plotline. Even with …
Model prisoner vs. malformed warden. Some rugged action, subverted by unmanly supplications for pity. The cast (except, principally, Donald Sutherland's warden, trained at the Kafka School of Penology, with further studies at the De Sade Management Institute) is solid. An especially eye-catching turn by Tom Sizemore as the hero's toady …
A family running a boarding house suspects their new tenant is Jack the Ripper.
A sinister presence enforces three rules upon Anglo Irish twins twins: be in bed by midnight; don't let strangers in the house, and if one attempts to escape, the life of the other is placed in jeopardy. If you get them wet do they turn into Gremlins?
Director and co-writer James Mangold takes another stab at the adamantium-clawed superhero (after 2013’s Japanese noir The Wolverine), this time turning him into an ailing Western hero tasked with transporting a very special youngster to safety, and winds up making the best superhero movie in years. It helps that the …
Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) plots to knock over the Motor Speedway that fired him. It’s Ocean’s 6 7/8ths when a band of country-set play actors affect bad haircuts and even worse Huckleberry Hound accents for this sneering caper comedy from the quasi-retired Steven Soderbergh. In the very least, Hal Needham’s …
A simple after-the-holocaust premise: a 23rd-century domed city where the passive citizens are uniformed in colors of either raspberry or lime sherbet, and where nobody is permitted to live past thirty. And a simple chase plotline: two lovers, fleeing their inevitable fate, outrun the official executioners (called, coyly, "Sandmen"), outbattle …
Three listless storylines, intercut for a semblance of kineticism, are cleverly set at one-year intervals, 1999 through 2001, in separate corners of North Carolina. (Writer-director Tim Kirkman is a native North Carolinian.) Kip Pardue, an HIV-positive pretty boy, devotes his remaining days to saving the turtles at Kure Beach. Tess …
Cripplingly cheap comedy with the promising premise of a sort of Hindi Idol talent contest — the competitors singing cover versions of Bollywood hit tunes — sponsored by “the largest suppliers of pork loins on the East Coast,” a/k/a “The Loin King.” It has almost no assets beyond the funny …
Jacques Demy's contemporary fairy tale about a French cabaret dancer and unwed mother (Anouk Aimée) who optimistically awaits the return of her American Prince Charming. The almost overwhelming bittersweetness comes from its deliberate soft-pedaling of palpable realities, its policy of little white lies. (In the more bitter, less sweet sequel …
"Men are always looking for something better. Women settle for what they get." That's the war cry of Lola (Greta Gerwig), after being unceremoniously kicked to the curb by her dreamy but hopelessly hollow boyfriend, Luke (human-Oreck Joel Kinnaman), three weeks prior to the ceremony. Lola is constantly finding something …