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 …
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. …
Why retire at 70, particularly when you’re Pulitzer Prize-winning Alice Hughes (Meryl Streep) and you have a manuscript that’s due soon — though nowhere near completion — and a new literary agent (Gemma Chan) with fingers crossed that it will be a followup to your most famous work? Perhaps a …
There’s a very good chance that the love of Isabelle’s (Juliette Binoche) life will always be someone else. The divorcee goes through men quicker than Billy Jack could kick apart a patient procession of would-be attackers, and that includes her ex-husband (Laurent Grévill). There’s the piggish banker (Xavier Beauvois), whose …
Whither were thee in ‘73? Watching American Graffiti. It's no coincidence that Paul Thomas Anderson nostalgic tale of coming of age in the Valley opens the same year as George Lucas’ terrestrial masterwork (and with a filched cherry bomb in the boy’s room). The controversial age gap between our heretofore …
Another behind-the-scenes, semi-biographic glimpse into Hollywood’s past, along the lines of My Week With Marilyn. Up-and-coming Life magazine photog Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) is prescient enough to sell his editor on a layout featuring a relatively unknown, yet divinely dynamic youngster named James Dean (Dane DeHaan). (Stock thinks the youngster …
Owen Susskind’s father feared that autism had “kidnapped” his son until a viewing of The Little Mermaid caused the child to break a one-year silence. An Aladdin puppet show soon followed — Dad does a spot-on Gilbert Gottfried — in which father and son began conversing in “Disney dialogue.” But …
In order to snare a handsome, pedophobic divorcée, a young unwed party girl pretends that her roommate is the mother of her child. Krysten Ritter, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Kat Coiro, is enormously appealing as the baby momma. Ritter and co-star Kate Bosworth have the makings of a …
Were it not for Laura’s (Maggie Baird) inability to fit her faithful guitar in a Goodwill box, the 46-year-old housewife and mother of three might never have reignited her passion for music. With her youngest, most outwardly troubled son, Shane (Finneas O'Connell), in tow, Laura begins making the rounds of …
Melissa McCarthy slips into her blithe, doe-eyed, over-talking, PG-13 mode for a comedy about a freshly divorced soccer mom who dropped her daughter off at college and decided to stick around and complete her degree. When Rodney Dangerfield went back to school he did so in an obnoxiously amusing and …
Two long-term buds — a clingy-and-looking, perpetually aspiring musician (Leighton Meester) and a mutually dependent, mostly plugged-in environmental lawyer (Gillian Jacobs) — feel the foundation of their friendship begin to seism when the former is asked to take a back seat to the latter’s latest suitor (Adam Brody, the real …
After a tour of killing Jerrys in the Great War, bachelor Tom (Oscar nominee Michael Fassbender) returns to Australia, where he plans on settling down as a lighthouse keeper. Isabel (Oscar winner Alicia Vikander) is the town looker, making her, in accordance with Hollywood’s rule of keeping up surface appearances, …
Give Hollywood enough time (and enough sequel money) and they’ll ruin anything. The Buzz Lightyear character came to be a household name thanks to four installments of Toy Story. The delusional doll that thought he was the character upon which he is based now has an origin story to call …
It’s Celebrity Apprentice meets Abbott and Costello when an orange-haired billionairess (Salma Hayek) bankrolls a pair of makeup artists (Rose Byrne and Tiffany Haddish), only to landmine their thruway to success with seemingly insurmountable tasks in the hope of gaining control of their company. It’s hard to believe that a …
It’s Thelma and Louise make a Great Escape over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a pair of mismatched mental patients (Valeria Bruno Tedeschi’s aristocratic windbag and Micaela Ramazzotti’s maybe-Mom-murderer) exchange their lives inside a Tuscan nuthouse for a flighty soap opera on wheels. (With panoramas as breathtaking as these, it’s a …