What has the title of a ’50s Republic oater yet plays like a film noir reboot of It Happened One Night? This year’s contribution from SDAFF regular Dave Boyle! Known for his string of inspired romantic comedies (Surrogate Valentine, Daylight Savings), writer-director Dave Boyle now finds himself making a successful …
The making of a boy into a man (and a man of some magnitude, too), as it was done in the Australian High Country in the 1880s. Peripheral figures all have been carved out with well-used cookie cutters: loony old gold prospector (Kirk Douglas, false-bearded and wigged, peglegged, and strapped …
What does it say when they set out to make a Cold War caper and they wind up casting a Brit (Henry Cavill) as the American, an American (Armie Hammer) as the Russian, and a Swede (Alicia Vikander) as the...well, not a Swede? Answer: not much, which is okay, since …
Mysterious deaths cause fear and panic in a village.
How is it possible for Al Pacino to turn in one of the best and worst performances of the year essentially playing the same character? The truth is in the storytelling. For 97 minutes director and generous renegade David Gordon Green delights in following Manglehorn (Al Pacino), a small-town locksmith …
Stephen King fairy tale about a demon-possessed speed ironer at an industrial laundry in (where else?) Maine. And visualized by Tobe Hooper with Terry Gilliam-esque fulsomeness. Quite accomplished, if you care for that sort of thing. Ted Levine, Robert Englund, Daniel Matmor.
Life and love among the literati in New York City, photographed in stiff, heavy, arty black-and-white by Gordon Willis, and flooded with the music of George Gershwin. Woody Allen, having stayed behind the cameras on his Interiors, is back on screen as his own hero. He has evolved less as …
A nosy-neighbor fable about the mounting suspicion that the brand-new widower in the apartment down the hall may also be his wife's murderer. During a routine condolatory visit, the wife next door (Diane Keaton) discovers what looks to be an urn of ashes while searching in the kitchen cabinets for …
A piece of borderline science fiction about a boy who builds an atomic bomb. It fights a losing battle against implausibility, but fights it tenaciously and well. The end result, with a slow build and an accelerating finish, is not at all believable, but hangs together beautifully. Nothing is unaccounted …
The title figure is a satanically whiskered FBI special investigator named Will Graham, who has a Lear Jet at his beck and call, helicopters awaiting him on landing, whole crews of forensics and computer wizards sitting by the telephone to follow up on any of his flashbulbs of inspiration -- …
Malcolm Leigh's documentary of Hindu ritual was made under the auspices of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to accompany an exhibit of the same title. How well it "reflects" and "explores" the Hindu precepts sketched out in a terse verbal prologue is hard for the outsider to know. But he …
Cate Blanchett expertly adopts the personas of derelict, sanitation worker, scientist, housewife, newscaster, elementary schoolteacher, punk rocker, mourner, dance troupe director, puppeteer, society matron, and businesswoman and uses them to deliver excerpts from various classics of the titular form. Many of them have to do with artists and the art …
Fellow day-laborers view new hire Júlio (Bembol Roco) as a professional drifter who lighted on their unscrupulously-managed construction site long enough to spend a few months mixing cement before passing through. In point of fact, it’s romance (and a proximity to the offices of Chua Tek), not randomness that brought …