Rob Morrow's directing debut, casting himself as a New York artist with Tourette's Syndrome, an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a major crush on the pregnant girlfriend of his oldest pal, an altruistic doctor ignorant of the pregnancy during his volunteer tour of duty in Burundi. Earnest effort, full of bad little …
The high concept: what if your YA dystopia actually felt more like a utopia? What if, instead of sterile, mechanized conformity or brutal, desperate want, you lived in an idyllic glade whose civilizational contours you had forged yourself? What if your overlords kept you well supplied, but otherwise, left you …
Director Wes Ball’s final installment of this YA dystopia trilogy about a zombie plague-ravaged world, the plucky teens lucky enough to be immune, and the desperate scientists who want to harvest that immunity by any means necessary is... not great. But it’s better than it has any right to be, …
Part two of Wes Ball's (The Maze Runner) adaptation of the hit YA trilogy runs and runs and ultimately stumbles on its way to part three. But first, there’s lots of running, both from evil authority figures who want to harvest our heroes to help fight against the zombie plague, …
Jang Tae-Yu directs this story of women in business. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Based on the David Henry Hwang play, based on a true story: a young French diplomat in Communist China enters into long-term intimate relations with a Peking Opera star, never realizing "she" is a "he." A story hard to believe -- and John Lone looking jowly and beardy (and sounding …
Plenty of surface interest for those who enjoy looking at drizzle, cigarette smoke, opium haze. Under the dense atmospheric conditions, Robert Altman's snowed-in Western about the encroachment of capitalist enterprise on a tacky frontier town is exceedingly difficult to make out. Julie Christie and Warren Beatty are in the fog …
The Kevin Costnerrection (that's not quite as catchy as McCaughnasance, is it?) continues its post-Hatfields run with this based-on-a-true-and-inspirational story about a knockabout coach who transforms Hoosiers into a track movie.
That's McKellan as in Sir Ian.
Documentarians Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui strive mightily to dress an essentially tragic life in celebratory garments. They have some reason, starting with the astonishing professional rise of their subject: fashion designer Alexander McQueen, a “sweet boy from the East End” who breaks into the business in the most mundane …
Another head-in-hands contemplation of Kids These Days: a teenage revenge tale, written and directed by newcomer Jacob Aaron Estes, wherein a chubby middle-school bully gets lured into an ambush and takes worse punishment than planned. The kids -- the bully, his whipping boy, a girl their own age, and three …
Terminally adorable teen cancer comedy destined to be best remembered for what it doesn’t do: shoot straight. One need not scratch much beneath the smattery parental units to expose a soulless core. The dying girl’s horny, alcoholic mom (played to one-note sitcom perfection by Molly Shannon) spends more time flirting …
Filmmaker Richard Linklater fictionalizes, mythologizes, the Mercury Theatre’s mounting of a modern-dress Julius Caesar in 1937, the titular “me” being a stagestruck high-schooler who in one week lands a small speaking and singing part in the Broadway production, falls head over heels for the company secretary, sees her stolen out …
Quirky comedy, without question, but quirkiness these days is no scarcer than shark's teeth, and it becomes necessary to distinguish between the pointlessly quirky and the pointedly. The issue still teeters in the balance when, for instance, a scraggly, trashy-looking white male, kicked out of the house by his black …
A home-schooled teenager, raised in the wilds of Africa, is let loose as an innocent in the American public school system, and the worn-out subject of adolescent cattiness and bitchery receives an infusion of fresh blood, or at any rate a megadose of caffeine. The snap-crackle-pop script (from a book …