The graduating class of Lake Howell High meets for its ten-year reunion. The student body appears to have been created in a petri dish: Hitler couldn't have engineered a more physically unblemished graduating class. In addition to the Tatums (Channing and Jenna Dewan), there's Ari Graynor, Justin Long, Max Minghella, …
Director Clint Eastwood goes from flying first class (Sully) to riding the rails in unreserved coach for another real-life tale of transitory heroism. And this time, instead of relying on Oscar-winner Tom Hanks to land his Airbus in the freezing waters of the Hudson River, he turns to the actual …
While brevity demands that a short film keep its focus tight and on-point, it has the opposite effect on a documentary. In a short doc, it is enough for the viewer to be presented with a detailed, engaging slice of life, with no point required save the sharing of lived …
Another Oscar season, another opportunity to wonder aloud why it is that, in this age of supposedly dwindling attention spans, there has not been an explosion of interest in the short-film form. The live-action slate features a trio of heartrending horrors: It Wasn’t Me (child soldiers in Africa), Helium (terminally …
Darlene Love is the Jackie Robinson of session groups, a black backup singer who worked furiously to crack the majors by lending her formidable talent (and tonsils) to everyone from Bobby "Boris" Pickett to the Chairman of the Board. Forced to "ghost" for Phil Spector under whatever band name he …
Moody and delicate — and imposing, if you surrender to it. Eric Mendelsohn’s second feature (Judy Berlin came out in 1999) considers a summer day in suburban Long Island. Kasper Tuxen’s light-entranced imagery wraps sensual sites around people whose feelings often fail to find words: an alienated husband (Elias Koteas), …
Lee Aronsohn was attending the University of Colorado “looking to major in sex and drugs.” Little did the future sitcom writer/producer realize that he was planting the seeds that, four decades later, would flower into this fond endeavor to recapture fleeting youth. A local band, going by the name of …
Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu details a squalid quest for an illegal abortion in the final years of the Ceausescu regime, and discloses, in passing, a good deal about a way of life, and in particular about the foundation stone of the black market. Altogether a strong film, in the mode …
It’s a case of lackluster presentation taking a backseat to historical importance when Dan Kraus and double-Oscar-winner Paul Haggis take us inside San Francisco General Hospital, Ward 5B, the first inpatient facility in the country designed specifically to provide compassion and treatment to AIDS patients. The was 1983, a bygone …
After a pithy, 60-second opening treatise on the virtues of living in San Diego, this locally produced, low-budget romantic drama settles in for ten minutes of expository narration, courtesy of star Tom Sizemore directly addressing the audience. Ride it out, and you'll be rewarded with a highly watchable, character-driven throwback …
A bright young man at a fancy tech company (Domhnall Gleeson) gets picked to visit the company’s founder (Oscar Isaac) in his country home, er, homey concrete fortress. There, he is introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), a sweet and pretty robot who might just be the world’s first Artificial Intelligence. …
After The Bridges of Madison County, after A Perfect World, after Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood the director opts to relax a little. But not right off the bat. The first half-hour or so (of a characteristically unhurried two hours) is as focussed and concentrated an opening stretch as anything this side …