Unpretentious, un-epic Western, adapted from a novel by the hard-boiled mystery writer Robert B. Parker. It bears more than a passing resemblance to a pseudonymous variation on the Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday legend, the 1959 Warlock, without itself qualifying as a variation on that legend. We have again the two-man …
By way of a review, Scott Marks presents the How to Make a PG-13 Horror Film Checklist: Spooky house, pre-credit flashback to Super8 footage, two attractive teenage-ish leads, a Kristen Stewart replica, paranormal security-cam footage, a first-time director manning the till, a plot that crumbles faster than a piece of …
Director and co-writer Xavier Giannoli plucks a war-ravaged journalist (he’s just lost his photographer friend in an explosion, and suffered ear damage to boot) off the battlefield and sends him into terra very much incognita: the Vatican’s canonical investigation into the veracity of a French teenager’s claim to have seen …
Iranian film that follows up, rather than re-enacts, the factual case of twin girls who were kept locked at home with their blind mother for twelve years, never let out, until the neighbors alerted the Welfare Department. Because the principals play themselves, the film never loses its air of documentary, …
An Agatha Christie who-done-it, but almost equally a when's-it-going-to-be-done-and-who's-it-going-to-be-done-to. And the social observation during the waiting period isn't keen enough to ward off dreadful boredom. Nor is the cast enough, though it's certainly sizeable, and encompasses such stalwarts as Peter Ustinov (as Poirot once again), Piper Laurie, Carrie Fisher, Lauren …
A young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), eager to make his name as a hungry second son of a wealthy family in 1970s New York, comes under the spell of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today. Cohn sees in Trump …
Hexes, hexagrams, and such, in rural Pennsylvania (or the moss-green Norwegian locales that pass for it) in the 1920s. "Inspired by a true story," but not very truly inspired: a slow starter, a slow finisher, and a slow in-betweener. With Donald Sutherland, Chad Lowe, and Mia Sara; directed by R.L. …
An aspiring racer enters a complicated love story for money and ultimately marries. He also has another love story, and the confusion and chaos reins when the racer takes on another job for money. Directed by Sudheer Varma, starring Nikhil Siddhartha, Rukmini Vasanth, Divyansha Kaushik, and Harsha Chemudu.
A French gâteau of cloying overelaboration, relying on its characters' inexplicable behavior to prolong its plot's instantaneous tedium. A hurrying passer-by, after hours in a public park, stops to save a would-be suicide and thereafter goes to infinite lengths to help him out, giving him a place to stay even …
Fun, fast-paced French film d’animation that manages to keep its ideas from getting lost amid the steampunk aesthetics, frequent chases, and occasional explosions. Indeed, while those ideas sometimes manage to trump the people, they also explain the aesthetics: someone has figured out the value of knowledge without quite comprehending the …
Not bad for its type. But the type is the college-kid elimination derby, set this time at a weekend party on an isolated island estate. "It's just like an Agatha Christie," remarks one of the guests. Or to be specific, quite a lot like And Then There Were None (or …
A high-school senior with an unhealthy interest in the Holocaust recognizes a fellow bus rider as a former concentration-camp commander. (The amazing coincidences don't stop there: the ex-Nazi will later share a hospital room with one of his Jewish prisoners.) The boy, a moral midget, offers his silence in exchange …
Last year’s King Arthur movie may have flopped, but director James Wan — whose horror beginnings (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) show up in ways both annoying (frequent use of explosion-as-jump-scare) and delightful (there’s a reason H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Dunwich Horror makes a foreground appearance early on) — seems to …