Common factory girl Marian Martin (Joan Crawford) stands outside the depot, watching as the train slowly pulls into the station, living vicariously — as though each passing compartment window represented a silver screen with a different story emblazoned across it. (It’s one of those “magic of the movies” moments that …
From Abby to The Possession, studios with an "anything for a buck" attitude have spent over 40 years dutifully repackaging The Exorcist. Director Ole Bornedal's (Nightwatch) based-on-factual-events entry in the pea-soup cavalcade of horror tells the tale of a young girl (the simply dreadful Natasha Calis) who purchases a Dybbuk-in-the-box …
Brandon Cronenberg’s second feature will no doubt confirm those nasty rumors that daddy David set his son on the road to dreamland every night with Videodrome projected on the nursery wall opposite the baby’s crib. With all the omniscient intensity (and some of the uncomfortability) associated with having a mind-altering …
Characters speak across office desks and restaurant dining tables as Janusz Kaminski’s camera lackadaisically encircles them in what could be Steve Spielberg’s stagiest work to date. And not since 1941 has the director slathered on the comic relief with such a leaden hand. Meryl Streep is superb as usual playing …
A hunch-playing, coarse-grained, and otherwise universal model New York detective (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) travels to London to ID the bodies of his daughter and her husband, butchered on their honeymoon by a couturier killer. But wait. It’s not the stitchery of one body-parts-transposing ghoul, but two. A young couple that, …
Two calves butt heads just long enough for momma cow to move in and drive them apart. Even Hitchcock couldn’t have directed cattle to perform with such unrehearsed ease, yet it’s a wise director who sees in this happy accident a foreboding preamble for the tension to come. Montana, 1925. …
What are the chances of a talented 38-year-old caretaker/would-be singer (the bewitchingly baptized Samantha Montgomery, aka Princess Shaw) — who is lucky if her original videos attract 64 views — being discovered by an Israeli musician (Ophir Kutiel aka Kutiman) who’s currently at work creating “visual symphonies” out of random …
A highly watchable compendium of live streaming videos from China. At their most rudimentary, these black-and-white shorts are reminiscent of the first films made by the Lumiere Brothers: one camera in a fixed position focusing on one object, in this case a tower crane transporting equipment from one place to …
What’s slower than watching two guys paint broken lines down the center of a highway? This dramedy about a pair of equally dashed road workers (lead maintenance man Paul Rudd and his slumberish brother-in-law, Emile Hirsch) who combat boredom and isolation with petty bickering. Director David Gordon Green (*Snow Angels*, …
Thespian rhymes with lesbian. Ain’t that a hoot? Seldom has confronting homophobia head on appeared more proudly patronizing or signaled less pleasure than here. It would be one thing were this a satire warning fatuous celebrities to stick to their craft and avoid poking their noses in politics. (Were that …
The Promise follows The Ottoman Lieutenant and Queen of the Desert as the third film in almost as many weeks set in the Ottoman Empire near the end of World War I. They saved the best for last. When the Turks learned that former studio head Kirk Kerkorian planned on …
A natural gas salesman (Matt Damon, not director Gus Van Sant) uses the economy as a bully stick to convince a small town into accepting his company's offer for drilling rights to their properties. He is opposed by a charismatic stranger (John Krasinski) who takes advantage of an open-mic night …
Somewhere, Joan Rivers is rolling in her grave. While on her way to becoming a household name in 1973, the comedian conceived the story of (and along with Agnes Gallin, co-scripted the teleplay for) a black comedy about a young meeskite (Stockard Channing) who undergoes plastic surgery after a car …
A passionate admirer of Luis Barragán, artist and filmmaker Jill Magid extends a unique overture to convince the estate of the Mexican architect to bring his archive, which was bought by a Swiss furniture company, back to his native country. Archive gatekeeper Frederica Zanco has spent the last twenty years …