Oliver Assays’ Clouds of Sils Maria is an opaque conceptual trip, a thematically dense exercise in self and industry reflections, a nod to both Fassbinder and Bergman and a showcase for its actresses, namely Juliette Binoche as an internationally renown actress undergoing an identity…
Read More
The creepy teen cyber thriller Unfriended is patently ludicrous and low-concept—six teens connected via video chat are stalked and dispatched by an Internet troll that turns out to be the vengeful ghost of their bullied best friend, who killed herself over their online taunting.…
Read More
Smart, stylish and enthralling, the artificial intelligence thriller Ex Machina fires on all cylinders as a first-rate piece of science fiction, superbly written, performed and mounted as the debut feature from screenwriter and first-time director Alex Garland. As science fiction, it employs some hard…
Read More
Where are you in life versus where you thought you would be? Or perhaps where the world says you are supposed to be? Noah Baumbach’s refreshing While We’re Young is a Woody Allen-esque, sidewalks of New York comedy, but one that sparkles with insights…
Read More
Good intentions do not a good movie make, and the well-meaning Desert Dancer, the true story of Iran’s Afshin Ghaffarian, who challenged his country’s ban on dancing by forming a clandestine dance troupe before being beaten down by Iran’s political climate and eventually escaping…
Read More
Everything that worked in 2011’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel—a fully-lived in collection of senior characters going through crisis, reinvention, love and death played by a sterling cast of grand thesps investing a perfect blend of humor and pathos—is missing from its formulaic, by…
Read More
Trai Byers, the Yale-trained grad currently starring on Fox's surprise hit Empire, which has dominated ratings for seven straight weeks, is having a moment. With the one-two punch of a featured role in the Oscar-nominated Selma and now a high-profile turn as the CFO…
Read More
Colm Feore’s towering, career-defining work as King Lear in Stratford Festival’s currently playing movie adaptation of last summer’s theatrical production is a raw, powerful portrait of Lear as a man of family and state, in that order, a younger and more vigorously vital patriarch…
Read More
Prolific Hollywood screenwriter and director Richard LaGravenese’s new picture, the bittersweet The Last Five Years, based on the off-Broadway musical and starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan as young Manhattan transplants who fall into and out of careers, love and life together, was a…
Read More
Part Zalman King soft core, part David Cronenberg mind fuck and all ludicrously misguided, the stylish S&M fantasia Fifty Shades of Grey is being marketed as a young adult love story—just in time for Valentine’s Day—and as such, one wonders just what sort of…
Read More