Indecipherable exegesis, anyone? From the relative safety of a highrise bathed in the apocalyptic glow of the burnt-orange evening sun, Harper (Jessie Buckley) watches in horror as her husband plummets past the living room window to the ground below. With no explanation, a cut whisks us to the English countryside …
A compressed telephoto shot — think Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck walking the crowded streets of Manhattan — opens the film. But instead of a male hustler flattened against a noontime throng, it becomes a matter of singling out our titular frum amid a sea of bearded Hasidim. With the one-year …
Long on atmospherics, short on narrative, Zachary Treitz's grainy history lesson is at once anti-war, anti-story, anti-character, and pro-mumblecore. Overgrown Francis (David Maloney) schemes on a future as a tobacco farmer while seemingly responsible older brother Henry (a stone-faced Tim Morton) ups and enlists. When a clumsy stab at front …
An Australian politician/absentee father (Anthony LaPaglia), afraid that news of his wife’s nervous breakdown leaking out will ruin his chances for re-election, throws the missus in a “looney bin” and hires an earthy, in-the-ozone hitchhiker (Toni Colette) and her attack dog to babysit his five hypochondriacal daughters. Finally, Uncle Buck …
Undersexed parents electronically spying on their oversexed teenage kids as a metaphor for the lack of value and worthiness of the human race. If asked why the need for a two-hour chalk talk on cosmicism and the utter insignificance of humanity, Jason Reitman, like the clueless parental figures he contrived …
One person’s art is another person’s Meow Wolf, a “radically inclusive” collective in Santa Fe, New Mexico where outsider artists gather to express themselves. In no time the group discovers such heretofore profane concepts as structure and budget and before long they’re putting on equally incoherent interactive art with a …
Trashy fun abounds in this above-average big screen telenovela that introduced the world to Salma Hayek. (Her breakout performance is as assured a calling card as any left on film.) The multi-character narrative comes split into four consecutive chapters, with the individual threads all commencing at one location, at the …
Mexico City has 45 government operated emergency service vehicles to serve a population of approximately 9 million. That leaves a wide open market for private care, and this is the story of one such hospital wagon and the family that’s been in business for 20 years. They race to be …
George Clooney’s relationship with sci-fi fantasies has been spotty at best. A finely condensed Cliff’s Notes abbreviation: Solaris was Steven Soderbergh’s aesthetically bountiful endeavor to distill Tarkovsky for the masses. Theatre ushers loved the film, as low audience turnout left little to clean up between shows. Gravity was an Awards-season …
Lapsed cultist Geppetto (Michael Shannon), and vacationing state trooper Jiminy (Joel Edgerton) kidnap Pinocchio (in this case an immaculately conceived nine-year-old starchild played by Jaeden Lieberher) and race to reunite the lad with the Blue Fairy (Kirsten Dunst) and his mother ship. Is it really a good idea to leave …
I had one film under my belt and a hankering to make it a double-feature. The sun was about to set on Midnight Sun, I checked into the last screening on the last day of its theatrical run, half-expecting to make an early exit. It’s kismet, I tell you, like …
What the opening murder/suicide of Dani’s (Florence Pugh) parents and sister brings to bear on the Swedish vacation that follows is negligible. It’s included mostly because writer-director Ari Aster (taking a backward-step after the chilling Hereditary) thought it would be cool to start in the garage and follow a tube …
What the opening murder/suicide of Dani’s (Florence Pugh) parents and sister brings to bear on the Swedish vacation that follows is negligible. It’s included mostly because writer-director Ari Aster (taking a backward-step after the chilling Hereditary) thought it would be cool to start in the garage and follow a tube …
What happens when producers do double duty as screenwriters? Midway through Midway, it hit me. First-timer Wes Tooke, guilty on both counts, makes it so the special effects are more interesting than the characters and events they were meant to update for contemporary audiences. The cast, on the other hand, …
What would you do when, thirty years after the fact, the cancer-stricken mistress (Catherine Deneuve) who drove your father to suicide reappears, begging for forgiveness? In the case of Claire (Catherine Frot) — the titular childbirth assistant skilled in the art of munificent conduct — it’s time to clean out …