After parting ways with the 007 franchise, Pierce Brosnan continues to outsource James Bond in a modish manner that should make Daniel Craig’s blue eyes green with envy. The November Man follows Tailor of Panama and The Matador with this rip-snorting tale of a high level CIA official who drops …
Being dominated by a wealthy, almost maniacal mother was enough to send spinsterly Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) to a sanitarium for an emotional tuneup. Scribbled on the doc’s prescription pad: an ocean voyage, complete with white-hot romance in the arms of an already-spoken-for architect (Paul Henried). Long before makeovers made …
The funeral of Maria’s (Sonia Couoh) estranged mother is what brings her to San Mateo. She is the first of three seemingly disparate characters whose lives are destined to intersect over the course of the town’s long holiday weekend celebration. After her father stops short of physically ejecting her from …
More than twenty years after the bloody Civil War in Guatemala ended, military offenses are at last being tried before a criminal court. It is the job of Ernesto (Armando Espitia), a young forensic anthropologist, to exhume and arrange the skeletal remains of the soldiers, and to gather testimony from …
A novice on the verge of taking her vows (Taissa Farmiga) and a priest with a nasty skeleton rattling around in his rectory (Demián Bichir) travel to Romania to investigate the suicide of a young nun. According to Corin Hardy (The Hallow), repetition is the key to squeezing cold sweat …
How do you know it’s a Disney picture even if you’ve missed the magic castle logo? The protagonist’s mother is dead before the opening credits roll and a mouse shall lead them. Make that King Mouse, a creature made whole only when hundreds of Mickeys stand on each other’s shoulders …
How do you know it’s a Disney picture even if you’ve missed the magic castle logo? The protagonist’s mother is dead before the opening credits roll and a mouse shall lead them. Make that King Mouse, a creature made whole only when hundreds of Mickeys stand on each other’s shoulders …
A battle over a nut cart finds a fiercely independent, self-serving squirrel named Surly exiled from his local park. With rat-de-camp Buddy at his side, Surly is forced to venture out into the big city to gather that summer’s provisions. We are mercifully spared a spate of easy testicular double-entendres, …
Kelp, not Klump! The one Jerry Lewis films that even his staunchest detractors grudgingly give their approval. No other comedic filmmaker, not Chaplin, not even Jacques Tati, knew how to wring gales of laughter through intuitive body placement in the frame quite like Jerry. His visual timing of a gag …
First came Antichrist, then Melancholia, and now Lars von Trier caps his so-called ‘Trilogy of Depression’ with the funniest movie of his career. Stellan Skarsgård stars as a book-learned hermit who hits the jackpot upon discovering a battered and bloodied sex addict (Charlotte Gainsbourg) — one who is eager to …
...violence become one and the same as Gainsbourg, no longer reliant on Stacy Martin to play her in flashback, steps up to the plate with a stinging S&M; relationship she consents to with Jamie Bell in hope of finding the recipe to rekindle her libido. Once our suspicions concerning Seligman’s …
A President who shall remain nameless in a country that, oddly enough, resembles our own asks his fellow Americans to endorse a loyalty oath. The deadline to sign is Black Friday (get it?), leaving a biracial couple and their family to fight about it over Thanksgiving dinner. Chris (writer-director-star Ike …
Hats off to any film that tries (and succeeds) at presenting challenging, off-putting characters from whose palms I’m reluctantly persuaded to eat. Character identification has never been my celluloid raison d'être, but damn if this movie didn’t get to me in a manner destined to cloud critical thinking. Jenny Slate …
It’s a chance to ring-a-ding-ding in the New Year in style with the Rat Pack when Frank Sinatra and a group of Korean war buddies regroup to knock over the five major Las Vegas casinos at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. That's style as in sartorial nuance …