Fear Strikes Out the Great Santini in this “love me daddy” baseball pic that earns points for spending less than 5 percent of its time on the diamond and refusing to end in open competition...so far as the playing field is concerned. We never see the five consecutive wild pitches …
A snooty journalist (Steve Coogan), remiss when it comes to covering human interest stories, rides shotgun on a road trip with a bemused mother (Judi Dench) in search of the son who, decades earlier, was taken from her and sold for adoption by corrupt Irish Catholic nuns. Coogan tries his …
Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a single street photographer working the crowd at the Gate of India in Mumbai, convinces Melonee (Sanya Malhotra), one of his shyer subjects, to pose as his fiancée in order to silence his meddlesome friends and grandmother. Love takes time, and while writer and director Ritesh Batra …
For the dog-loving completists among us who this year alone have suffered through Show Dogs, Alpha and A-X-L comes a bone in the form of Don Hardy Jr. and Dana Nachman’s winning documentary look-see into a quintet of hounds vying to make a difference in people’s lives. From their birth …
It’s a romance that could have begun by answering an ad in the personal section: “Man in wilderness seeks the companionship of a foraging pig.” Somewhere in the woods of Washington State, Robin Feld (Cage) lives a life of mangy-haired seclusion. His sole source of companionship is his pet pig. …
Barbara Brenner, highly persuasive breast cancer activist, argues her disease is “the poster child of cross-marketing.” Léa Pool’s gutsy documentary calls into question what exactly the pink ribbon culture does to bring about change. (With billions raised, why have breast cancer rates in North America risen to 1 in 8?) …
Play keep-away! Jessica Biel's reward for her brief, vanilla-flavored performance as Vera Miles in Hitchcock is a lousy dye-job and a starring role opposite a wrong man in this feculent rom-com. Gerard Butler stars as Biel's ex, a once-mighty sports figure whose recent run of bad luck finds him coaching …
Instead of getting his chance to clear the bar set by a smokejumper father seasoned in the art of smothering, Superintendent Jake “Supe” Carson (John Cena) is stationed in Reading, CA, a minor hazard town, relatively speaking. Built like Popeye, the ablutophiliac Supe’s workday consists of tidying the firehouse and …
Every decade or so, narrative cinema explores the despondent underbelly of the porn industry from the point-of-view of one of its ingenues (Star 80, Meet Monica Velour, Lovelace, Starlet, etc.). Pleasure offers a more honest depiction than all the aforementioned combined. Bella Cherry’s (Sofia Kappel) reason for jetting over 5,000 …
Jackie Chan’s comedies have an innate worldwide appeal. Who doesn’t love Jackie Chan? Passive until pushed, he’s nice to small children and animals and only kicks people when they ask for it. Not since Buster Keaton had a comedic performer literally broken bones to earn our laughs. (Count the bruises …
Police Story 2, a more traditional, but nonetheless superb action comedy, opens with Jackie being demoted to traffic cop. Chu and his gang return eager to do battle along with a new threat in the guise of a gang of mad bombers. Faulting the film for not being as tightly …
Jackie Chan’s comedies have an innate worldwide appeal. Who doesn’t love Jackie Chan? Passive until pushed, he’s nice to small children and animals and only kicks people when they ask for it. Not since Buster Keaton had a comedic performer literally broken bones to earn our laughs. (Count the bruises …
After her doctor issues a death sentence, Martha (Diane Keaton) packs up and moves to a retirement community in Georgia where it’s presumably much cheaper to shoot than New York or L.A. While unpacking she discovers a megaphone and high school uniform and decides to go out cheering. That is …
For her first feature, Kirsten Tan enters the mainstream with this saga of Thana, a disentranced, unhappily married man who, convinced that the elephant he spotted while wandering the streets of Bangkok is the same one from his childhood, purchases the pachyderm and proceeds to walk it some 300 miles …
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. Yes, I have received and do value the word of Pope Francis, in particular his holiness's unwillingness to duck tough issues like gay rights, the Holocaust, and what he perceives to be, “today’s globalization of indifference.” (Though he asks that people make eye-contact …