Proof that the intellectually challenged are fun to watch even with subtitles. Commence with a dead cat, an overly-latexed actor buried beneath more wrinkles than a kennel filled with shar-peis, and a neck-breaking 20x1 zoom. It only gets clumsier. At his current age, our titular centenarian (Robert Gustafsson) flees a …
Hollywood continues to pay reparations for Gone With the Wind with this elegiac adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s autobiographical saga of a free black man forced into bondage for a dozen years. They might just as well have named it The Passion of the Slave. Chiwetel Ejiofor suffers well under the …
Score one for mass culture: the animating forces behind The Simpsons aren't about to teach you anything new about the possibilities inherent in illustrated storytelling, but "Maggie Simpson in 'The Longest Daycare'" dominates this year's field through old-school craft and wit, and offers a politically topical Ayn Rand hook to …
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 …
By turns exhilarating and devastating, the 2013 live-action short film lineup serves as a reminder of why movies matter, what they can do, and why they needn't be larded up into three-hour epics that hit all the expected beats. Every entry confronts the blunt fact of death; every entry provides …
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 …
At last. After the "We're too old, but who cares?" middle-aged hijinks of The Hangover and the "We're too young, but who cares?" high-school hijinks of Project X, the Drunken Bromedy genre takes up the entirely age-appropriate collegiate hijinks of 21 and Over. Miles Teller plays the master-bantering mastermind, Skylar …
Just diverting enough, thanks in large part to the weary charm of Denzel Washington's undercover DEA agent, and the earnest charm of Mark Wahlberg's undercover Navy investigator. (The wiseassery Wahlberg uses to cover the earnestness, alas, quickly wears thin.) Thanks also to a willingness to make almost everyone at least …
Television veteran Chadwick Boseman gives a fine, canny performance as Jackie Robinson, the man who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Well, except for when he talks to his wife and infant son: then, writer-director Brian Helgeland’s script drives him into speechmaking about the …
Long ago, Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo pitched itself with the tagline, "Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression." Guess again, chump! When he turns 21, Domhnall Gleeson discovers he can time travel. So he sets about shamelessly manipulating Rachel McAdams into falling in love …
Only in a world with democracy and corruption to spare are gangsters treated like movie stars. Director Joshua Oppenheimer set out to explore the “nature of impunity” by offering celebrated Indonesian death squad leaders a cinematic platform on which to reenact their participation in the genocide of 1965 — in …
A snooty admissions officer puts her career on the line when trying to get the son she secretly gave up for adoption accepted into Princeton. This is 117 minutes of prefabricated shit for people who are constipated. The performances are uniformly lazy; not for one second do Tina Fey and …
The trailer tells it: following the Fukushima disaster of 2011, "The world was told to stay out of Japan. But one band refused to listen. Witness the amazing story of a band's determination to bring happiness to the people of Japan." And the name of that band? It's right there …