Prototypical caper film, rather hurried into the heist itself, and plodding through the calamitous aftermath. John Huston's direction is mildly overemphatic and strongly oversentimentalized. But the bare bones (W.R. Burnett novel) are solid enough. Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, Louis Calhern, Marilyn Monroe.
In a word, stunning. After an eight-year absence, world cinema’s foremost aesthete, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, returns with a vengeance. Shu Qi, Director Hou’s leading lady of choice, stars as a 9th-century enforcer, taught to kill by the nun who raised her and later contracted to take out her former husband-to-be. Viewers …
Pleasantly inane political thriller, with Charles Bronson a reluctant bodyguard to the First Lady -- or as she is known in the trade, "One Mama," or as she is more informally known to those aware of her views on women's rights, "Madame Battle-axe" and "the Iron Maiden": "Let's just say …
An initial piece of foreshadowing — why the Mathers didn’t invite former babysitter Lily (Odessa Young) into their home — paid off in full. The same can’t be said about the mystery identity of the hacker responsible for exposing the sexual secrets of their small-town American burg. What begins as …
Rather tardy anti-Western (at least a couple of decades out of style), with a decidedly unheroic Jesse James, brutal, bullying, backshooting, paranoid, and suicidal, and a slightly more sympathetic Bob Ford, conflicted in his feelings toward the legendary outlaw, idolizing yet inferior, intimidated, frightened, resentful, envious. There are some gripping …
Robert Duvall, directing and writing in addition to starring, indulges here his personal passion for contract killing. No, wait. That's not what the publicity said. It's his personal passion for tango dancing that he indulges. And what better, what more personal, way to express that passion than to have the …
The world's No. 1 hitman, contemplating retirement, going soft, refusing to kill innocent bystanders, developing an amorous attachment to his latest "mark," has been targeted for elimination by the ambitious, amoral No. 2. (Where are these rankings published? Soldier of Fortune magazine?) Something so silly ought to be more fun. …
A former FBI agent (Christian Slater) is brought in to track down a terrorist-killing vigilante. Also stars Donald Sutherland and Elika Portnoy.
The titular creed states that, unlike most people, Assassins know that nothing is true and everything is permitted. It’s hard to imagine true believers in such a creed turning around and saying that their own lives are worth nothing and all that matters is the protection of the Apple of …
Remake of the John Carpenter shoestringer of 1976, about an armed siege on a police station à la the Alamo. But the revised plot, just to give the new team of filmmakers some Creative Input, has been altered for minimum interest and sense. The besiegers are no longer an insatiable …
An effective cinematic antidote to Valium: from the first ominous musical strains to the final smoke-clearing, it exercises an unslackening tug on the viewer. The upper-crust British critics responsible for enshrining this classically styled Hollywood B-picture have been quick to draw parallels to Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, but Assault on …
Remake of the John Carpenter shoestringer of 1976, about an armed siege on a police station à la the Alamo. But the revised plot, just to give the new team of filmmakers some Creative Input, has been altered for minimum interest and sense. The besiegers are no longer an insatiable …
In a not-so-distant future, where resources are scarce and tightly controlled, even the dream of having a child is not a given. Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are one of the few couples allowed to take a mysterious assessment for the right to have a child, having successfully …
For her first film, writer-director Kitty Green finds lurking within the #MeToo movement a tightly packed monster movie that answers the horrifying question: where in the job description does it address predatory sexual behavior? Fresh out of college, Jane (Julia Garner, never out of frame) lands a dream gig as …
Unutterably tedious comic proposition to do with a Wall Street hoax in which a female financial wiz, in order to get her independent investment firm over the hump and off the ground, invents a fictitious male partner -- one Robert Cutty, whose surname is stolen off a bottle of Scotch …