Here’s a question the rest of us are lucky never to have had to think about: How many people does it take to bear away the corpse of a grown gorilla? Early in Virunga, Orlando von Einsiedel’s stunning heartbreaker of a doc, we see men, a dozen or so, carrying…
Director Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour boasts an hour or so of tense, intimate, world-shaking footage you might not quite believe you’re watching. Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie’s a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it’s underwhelming as argument…
Knocking out the first-rate forgeries that fooled sixty American museums? That was a curiously mundane miracle, something for Mark Landis to do while watching TV. A frail and ascetic Mississippian who resembles Michael Stipe playing Truman Capote, Landis sketched and painted minor Currans, Averys, and Cassatts with one eye on…
Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple of murders — or does it? — but rather than corpses, it’s time and space and human connection that get most memorably diced, here. Working from Georges Simenon’s 1964 novel of a wrong man accused — or…
The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi’s too-familiar ain’t-he-irascible comedy-drama St. Vincent features scene after scene of Bill Murray actually trying to make you laugh. How long has it been? He plays Vincent, a drunk-driving Brooklynite whose look suggests that…
The “Dracula Begins”-style sword-and-fangs curio Dracula Untold plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace, swapping out all that bare-neck sensuality for some video-game ass-kicking?” Or: “Remember what the Star Wars prequels did for Darth Vader? Let’s foist the same kind of tragic…
Vital, illuminating, and terrifying, Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam probes with clarity and thoroughness one moment of recent American history that has too long gone unreckoned with. Here, in then-contemporary news footage and startlingly frank latter-day interviews, is the wrenching story of how it came to be that in…
Before its regular-joe hero gets bitten by a radioactive equation and becomes the Equalizer, who’s sort of the Rain Man of puncturing Russian mobsters’ windpipes with corkscrews, Antoine Fuqua’s eye-gouging, brain-drilling, crowd-pleasing latest gives you a reel or two to remember what movies felt like back when they were about…
Surprisingly moving for a film assembled from such familiar scenes, Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins mushes together queasy/quirky indie family drama and the beats of a romantic comedy. You know the outline just from eyeballing the poster: Kristen Wiig’s Maggie and Bill Hader’s Milo find their way toward loving each…
They’ve done it at last: made a Liam Neeson-stomps-some-ass flick where, as the credits roll, there’s more stuff to be glad you saw than Neeson himself. Based on one of those Lawrence Block novels that’s pretty smart but also too invested in the mechanics of rape and torture, A Walk…
The sex scene almost makes it worth sitting through Atlas Shrugged III, the last and least of the cheapjack adaptations of Ayn Rand’s brick-thick celebration of taking your ball and going home. About an hour in, after she’s toured and left the hidden Colorado enclave of the captains of industry…
Even the most inspiration-averse will have eyes as moist as blowholes by the end credits of Dolphin Tale 2, a good-hearted kids’ drama whose earnestness and surprising moral complexity put other sunny-weepy sea-mammal flicks to shame. After the story wraps up, the filmmakers work a trick that’s become common in…
Since it’s the kind of slow-building movie whose very premise is something of a spoiler, a pretty delicious one, let’s get the consumer-guide jazz out of the way first. Hilary Brougher’s YA-ish horror satire/romance/whatzit Innocence, adapted from Jane Mendelsohn’s novel, boasts a wicked setup, some strong performances, several gloriously bloody…
Here’s what an R rating gets you these days: a few splattery headshots, some glimpses of cable-TV-style background nudity, a couple kids and families popped by assassins, a brace of fucks, in dialogue, and one un-bracing fuck, in bed, mostly clothed. During its longueurs, this engagingly grim spy-versus-spymasters time-passer offers…
For women, especially, it’s wholly out of fashion to have sympathy for middle-aged white men. The thinking goes as follows: They’ve reigned supreme long enough. Who cares about their anxiety over their receding hairlines, their poochy stomachs, their inability to attract young babes? That tinny plink you hear, as they…
Weep at another whiff of an Elmore Leonard adaptation, one that nails down neither the peppery laughs nor the street-crime desperation that are key to the writer’s work. Rather, Life of Crime is too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a…
According to inspirational sports movies, winning demands you train hard, play with heart, be a team, and not care about winning. So it goes in the sturdy, crowd-pleasing When the Game Stands Tall, a profile in saintliness puffed up from a true story: the Northern California Catholic school whose football…
Maybe you think you know what Woody Allen did or didn’t do in that summer house all those years ago. Maybe you look at his history — shacking up with a Stuyvesant high-school girl in the late ’70s; marrying his longtime partner’s adopted daughter in the ’90s — and simply…
Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…
Perhaps fitting for a celebration of a musician whose polyrhythmic extravaganzas tended to run twenty-plus minutes, Alex Gibney’s doc Finding Fela takes a while to get started. The opening scenes focus on rehearsals for Broadway’s Fela!, and early on, Gibney shows us more footage of stage-Fela Sahr Ngaujah than of…
“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen has taught us, and apparently what his heart wants these days is to not have to bother with writing second drafts of film scripts. His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, plays like a sumptuous vacation, its stars larking in ’20s finery about…
James Brown stripped pop to its rhythmic essentials: the groove and the grunt, the bridge and the scream. Tate Taylor’s Get On Up likewise reduces James Brown — and the biopic form — to all that matters most. Here are the highs of the man’s life, both artistic and recreational…
