Expands writer-director Yrgos Lanthimos's linguistic palette to include English, and widens his hermetic vision from a modest suburban household to an imperious resort, where recently dumped schlub David (Colin Farrell) joins a group of lonelyhearts with exactly one thing in common: they have 45 days to find a romantic replacement …
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 …
"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 …
The chichi ’60s credit design and blunt, bitchy observational chatter that opened the film held promise. While vacationing in Biarritz, a Parisian fashionista (Julie Delpy), desperately in need of having her “chimney swept,” falls for a small-town IT geek (Dany Boon) and fellow divorcée, just days away from accepting a …
There have been musicals about mass murderers (Rent, Sweeney Todd), but none as monotonously tasteless as this talk-singing account of the 2006 killings of five prostitutes in the titular working-class neighborhood. The film is adapted from a stage play, and it shows in every frame. Still, it’s commendable for its …
A monumental achievement in cinema-as-time-travel. Writer-director Julien Temple (Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury) and his frequent editor, Caroline Richards, availed themselves of the opportunity to boil down 800 hours of sparklingly restored archival footage into a chronicle of modern-day London. The duo fling wide "the Gate of God," …
Survival often relies on scheming. With nothing but innate resourcefulness and a pair of run-ins with angelic Clash frontman Joe Strummer (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) to guide him, 15-year-old Shay (Daniel Huttlestone) is left the daunting task of salvaging his bedridden dad’s struggling enterprises: piano shop by day, taxi driver by …
A lone wolf (Jue Huang) returns home after a twenty year absence armed with a modicum of fatalistic narration with which to underscore his search for a love lost. Director Bi Gan credits Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity as his inspiration for this Chinese puzzler. A protagonist carting around a photo …
Not one unintentional gibber, eye-roll, or check of the watch during the 139 minute running time makes it impossible to slam what by all rights should have been a slam-dunk awful Nicholas Sparks rodeo romance. Director George Tillman knows where to place the camera to make the schoolgirls swoon, but …
Not unlike an actual Grateful Dead concert, Amir Bar-Lev’s candid doc runs just slightly over four hours. But don’t expect wall-to-wall concert footage. (If that’s your preference, Shout Factory released a splendid blu-ray edition of The Grateful Dead Movie.) Using never-before-seen footage and interviews, Bar-Lev’s warts-and-all approach fits a band …
An optometrist offering free eye-exams slowly infiltrates the mob chain of command to confront and hold accountable the men responsible for the brutal murder of his brother. What sounds like a pitch for a second-rate HBO series is in reality the first of two intended companion pieces to Joshua Oppenheimer’s …
A nifty idea botched by writer, director Rian Johnson's (Brick) unnecessarily dense plotting. (A calculatedly confusing storyline does not a good movie make.) Tickets should come with a road map (or a comic book adaptation) wrapped around them to help guide audiences through this. In a dystopian universe that resembles …
With but 2 features to their credit (am I the only one who’s never heard of The Last Romantic or Band of Robbers) the Nee Brothers, Aaron and Adam, convinced four of Hollywood’s biggest names (Bullock, Tatum, Pitt, and Harry Potter) to star in what is best described as Fabio …
A woman’s picture that doesn’t adhere to a “chick flick” formula or detail a reckoning with one’s past that ends inevitably in terminal disease. It began for Leda (Olivia Coleman and, in flashback, Jessie Buckley) as a quiet sabbatical at a picturesque seaport in southern Italy. The mincing English professor …