Fine acting and an accomplished visual style give John Hillcoat’s Lawless, based on Matt Bondurant’s family memoir The Wettest County in the World, a much-needed boost to a fairly routine period picture about three Prohibition-era brothers running moonshine afoul of corrupt lawmen and heinous…
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Premium Rush is a dizzying sleeper of a movie about bike messengers in Manhattan trying to deliver a package that everyone seems to want. It’s a quintessential New York movie, a whirligig action ride featuring fearless couriers who zigzag through traffic uptown, downtown, from…
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Malik Bendjelloul’s stirring documentary Searching for Sugar Man is about mystery and mythmaking and rock-n-roll iconography told through the lens of a dashed career, that of a mellifluous Chicano songwriter and guitarist, primed to explode, who was discarded, dead and prematurely buried—only after which…
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Since I saw it at a press screening a few weeks ago, I’ve had a bit of a crush on Celeste and Jesse Forever. To say it’s likable would be a vast understatement, because it’s a movie that gets inside your heart—or more to…
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Total Recall, the remake of Paul Verhoeven’s middling 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle which is now being mislabeled as a classic of sorts, stars Colin Farrell as a factory worker who attempts to undergo a memory implant procedure only to discover that he might really…
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William Friedkin’s film of Tracy Letts’ corrosive play Killer Joe, about a white trash Texas clan that hatches a plan to murder their matriarch for—what else?—a paltry insurance policy, is a movie with good acting, much violence, nary any social context and scant redemption…
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This review contains spoilers. While it’s probably true that a movie can recover from a weak beginning, a shaky ending proves a more formidable challenge. Such is the case with director Rodrigo Cortes’ Red Lights, about a pair of university scientists out to debunk…
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Fantasy and reality collide in Ruby Sparks, a fractured love story about a wunderkind young novelist suffering from writer’s block who manifests his perfect muse from the keys of a battered old typewriter. What he does with her once she arrives is what makes…
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Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna, a retelling of Thomas Hardy’s classic 1871 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles set in modern-day India, is a sumptuous picture featuring a solid performance from the very beautiful Freida Pinto as the tragic heroine struggling with issues of love and class. …
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I’m not sure it’s possible for any movie to live up to the deafening din of hype and expectation faced by Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, on the heels of its 2008 predecessor’s $1 billion haul at the box office and legion of…
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