Half a century of unrequited love, too much time for Javier Bardem to span persuasively, ceding the early years to a younger unmatching actor (Unax Ugalde), then acting awkwardly younger than he looks, then donning a series of stick-on mustaches from coal black to salt-and-pepper to sooty gray. To make …
A Danish cancer patient (Trine Dyrholm) catches her husband diddling a co-worker two days before they’re set to leave for their daughter’s Italian wedding. In the eyes of the audience, that frees her up to undertake an affair with her kid’s future father-in-law (Pierce Brosnan). A supposedly heartwarming comedy that …
A plain girl seeks love. Directed by Jason Paul Laxamana. In Tagalog and English.
Life’s circumstances cause a recently married gay couple (Alfred Molina and John Lithgow) to seek temporary housing with relatives while looking for a new place to live. Lithgow is deposited with Marisa Tomei and her maladjusted teenage son while Molina lands on the couch of a pair of hard-partying cops …
A seven-year slice -- more like a mince -- of the life of British painter Francis Bacon and his S&M relationship with his model, George Dyer. John Maybury's attempt to recapture in live action the "atmosphere" of a Bacon painting, without actually showing any, relies on the cold mechanics of …
Say hello to Darious Lovehall (Larenz Tate) and Nina Mosley (Nia Long), two confused lovebirds who discover that you can never underestimate the power of a love jones. Lovehall is a young black poet in Chicago who starts dating Moseley, a beautiful and talented photographer. While trying to figure out …
Director and co-writer Andrey Zvyagintsev fixes his unblinking, pitiless eye on the way that, in the words of the film’s miserable wife (who is also, what do you know, a miserable daughter and miserable mother), “love and happiness lead to pain and disappointment…a miserable heap of shit.” The heap in …
When Andrew Sarris classified a chapter of his Pantheon-defining "The American Cinema" as “Subjects for Further Research,” he had filmmakers like Kinuyo Tanaka in mind. The celebrated actress, known for her collaborations with Kenji Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff, Ugetsu, The Life of Oharu), was also the second woman in Japanese …
Addressed to "Dearest," signed by "Yours," and found between the cushions of a bookstore sofa, the typewritten billet-doux triggers an older-woman-younger-man affair, and other misunderstandings. The locale is called Loblolly-by-the-Sea, an accurate indicator of the general level of tweeness. Blythe Danner, without any old-age makeup, plays the mother of Kate …
The death of Jamie Lee Curtis's mother, and the obligatory sifting-through-belongings, turns up a packet of letters, tied together with the customary faded ribbon, from a secret lover. These, read aloud on the soundtrack in the sotto voce style which silly actors fall into when reciting Emily Dickinson or Robert …
What is there to say? That Kristen Stewart can act — that she can inhabit a character perhaps more naturally than any actress of her generation? Okay. That if you want some raunchtastic talk and desperate, grindy onscreen sex in the current cinecultural climate, you’re more likely to find it …