No animal experiments here, unless you count the 30’s vogue of exotic women with leashed capuchin monkeys as pets. Warner Bros. played home to many of the great gangster films of the 1930’s, but monster movies were Universal Studios’ stock-in-trade. Humphrey Bogart was WB’s last choice to star as the …
Leave it to an icky girl to ruin an otherwise festive guys-only hunting party. Every film may be forgiven its one coincidence, the singular little side trip from logic required to kick the plot into motion or to unite seemingly disparate characters. Revenge offers up a young woman who, after …
There is not much new to be learned in this update on the possible global resurgence of electric cars. What once was a genuinely moving look at the destruction of a fleet of revolutionary zero-emission vehicles is now an infomercial. Oil companies killed the electric car, but you have General …
The discovery of a handgun in a Hollywood Boulevard garbage can leads a semi-lucid homeless woman (Bella Merlin) to Tijuana, where she embarks on a semi-lucrative career as a drug mule. After a grocery store shootout brands a security cop (Hoze Meléndez) a hero, the mob hires him as an …
The point of home movies is to commemorate happy events. But for filmmaker Sasha Neulinger, the memories were unbearable: a glance here, a gesture there... Hidden within the stack of VHS tapes were pieces of a ghastly childhood. For years, three family members (two uncles and a cousin) took turns …
Trailers for this troubled Blake Lively action drama debuted a year ago and the release has twice been pushed back. We open on a portrait of a happy family waiting to combust. Three years earlier — before she was forced to groom her locks with a patented K-Tel Hair Magician …
Clint Eastwood worked five years putting the film together, and there’s not another actor out there who’d make a better lead than Paul Walter Hauser. Their similarity is uncanny, but it’s much more than that: Jewell is not a celebrity along the lines of, say, Ray Charles or Mr. Rogers. …
A family crisis reunites an aged rocker/grocery clerk (the rhapsodical Meryl Streep) with the husband (Kevin Kline) and children she had years ago abandoned in favor of a life on the road. Jonathan Demme, no stranger to rockumentaries (Stop Making Sense), weddings (Rachel Getting Married), and/or American dreamers (Melvin and …
This dour and avoidable semi-dramatic rethink of The Guilt Trip finds Helen Hunt – cosmetically stretched tighter than a bongo drum, thus the one expression – half-convincingly donning three creative hats (writer/director/actor). Hunt the actress hikes up the wiseguy earnestness as the erudite, singularly unlikeable mother of an equally brainy …
The appeal of Ice Cube (Trespass, Three Kings) as an action star began to thaw somewhere around the time of Torque and the two Are We Disinterested Yet? kidpics. Drive Along is enough to put the freeze on any man’s career, preferably that belonging to Mr. Cube's co-star, chatterbox Kevin …
Director Chloé Zhao’s predilection for casting non-professionals made for a better fit in her debut feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me. It’s true that, when left alone on a screen to break in a horse or rehab a busted bronco buster friend, Brady Jandreau’s naturalism proves eminently watchable. But the …
Mads. It’s not only our star Mr. Mikkelsen’s first name, but a perfect description of what his character Markus is left with a mean case of after a trio of math geeks — statistical engineer Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), expert computer hacker Lennart (Lars Brygmann), and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro), the …
Larry Smith is the only true American hero to emerge from cinema this year. For Smith, movement is life. After living with Parkinson’s for 20 years, the small town baker and retired police officer decides to confront motion disorder head-on by doing “something big before it’s too late.” In Miller’s …
The first obvious point of reference would be Stardust Memories, Woody Allen's career-derailing capper to a financially successful run that saw such hits as Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Annie Hall. Set in large part at a Felliniesque film festival, it was the first time Allen …
Cinema’s answer to a picture-postcard rack, the franchise operates solely on the premise that audiences will return so long as the cast is appealing, the location enticing, and the romantic subplots not too demanding. I liked it better when they called it The Love Boat. For once, the multiple plot …