Comedy of heartbreak and heartmend, under the imprimatur of producer Judd Apatow, but directed by newcomer Nicholas Stoller, and written by its star, Jason Segel, who envisions for himself the role of a would-be serious composer, cranking out mood music for a network crime drama when he would rather be …
Battle of the sexes update. A bout of drunken casual sex, sans condom, results in a result; and after abortion is given no more thought than it would have been given in 1957, the pair of "completely different people" set about to make it work when it makes no sense: …
Pagan pietism, from the Disney animation studio, to do with a Northwest Indian lad who, in his anxiety to become a man, kills a bear and gets magically transformed into a bear himself, to see how the other half lives: blissed out on nature (the moose practice yoga) and communality …
John Sayles, in his script contributions to things like Alligator and The Battle beyond the Stars, has shown his allegiance to grade-Z science fiction. But in this, a tale of a black extraterrestrial hiding out in Harlem from two white pursuers (one of them played by Sayles himself), his allegiance …
There might be a presumption of seriousness about a ravaging-monster movie in which the monster stays off screen for the first hour, and comes freighted with political symbolism. (To say nothing of the English subtitles! Or of the venerable presences of Jacques Perrin and Edith Scob!) But there is plenty …
Jim Sheridan’s Hollywood do-over of Susanne Bier’s Danish original is a wartime soap opera served up as kitchen-sink realism, photographed by Frederick Elmes with a clear and cold albeit clichéd eye for Middle American mundanity. The Good Brother (Tobey Maguire) is off to war in Afghanistan, currently the Good War, …
Self-admiring con artistry that sets the ideal of the “perfect con” as one where everyone involved gets what he wants. If that includes the wary viewer, the ideal is missed by miles. With Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi, Robbie Coltrane, and Maximilian Schell; written and directed by …
None other than Jacob and Wilhelm, not yet world-famous folklorists, merely ghostbusting con men, whose ruses are not state-of-the-art magic circa the early 19th Century, but rather state-of-the-art FX circa the 21st. When they are recruited by the occupying French army, however, to investigate a case of missing children (a …
True-crime documentary about a death in the family: one of four elderly illiterate bachelor brothers on a farm in central New York goes to bed one night, suffering from a variety of ailments, and never wakes up. Natural causes or mercy killing? The brother with whom he shared the bed …
Odd to see the colossal 20th Century-Fox logo on a blown-up 16mm shoestringer, whose image is all but obliterated by dust-storm graininess. Beneath the surface static, the film elucidates the decently complicated private lives of three Long Island Irish Catholics at various stages of romantic involvement: married, tentatively engaged, totally …
Young Francis of Assisi promoting poverty and naturalness in a Zeffirelli production of unlimited expenditure and frill is a jaw-breaking paradox, although the raucous Italian supporting actors provide plenty of convincing reasons why a sensitive young man should seek a life of simplicity and tranquility. On this difficult path, the …
Chloë Sevigny blows Vincent Gallo. For real. For maybe, at most, a minute of verifiable screen time, short of completion. There is, to be sure, an actual film before the act of sex: a quasi-Seventies road movie (all the way to a sappy Gordon Lightfoot tune, untruncated, on the soundtrack, …
Terence Rattigan's musty, dusty stage piece about the mossbacked tyrant of Classical Languages, eased into an early and pensionless retirement. Albert Finney, with his barrel chest, his pudding face, and his kitchen-sink background, is not as natural a choice for the part as Michael Redgrave (in the 1951 screen treatment), …