Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary Searching for Sugar Man, which made a splash at Sundance earlier this year, charts the too-strange-to-be-fiction story of Rodriguez, a wunderkind Detroit folk guitarist who by all rights should have become a superstar with the release of his album, Cold Fact,…
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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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Few films approach the ferocity of Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe, featuring Matthew McConaughey as a Texas sheriff and contract killer who agrees to knock off the matriarch of a (putting it nicely) working class family looking for a quick insurance payout. Loaded with scheming…
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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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In filmmaker Rodrigo Cortes’ Red Lights, Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy are skeptical scientists whose mission is to disprove paranormal phenomena, which leads them down a dark path once they set their sights on Robert De Niro, playing a renowned master of ESP who…
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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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Zoe Kazan’s screenplay for Ruby Sparks combines fantasy and reality in a novel way, exploring complex relationship dynamics in a story about a blocked writer who manifests his dream girl out of thin air, only to discover that he’s not ready to accept that…
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You have to hand it to Ruby Sparks’ directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, partners in life raising a family, working fourteen-hour days together on set and then going home to dinner and teenagers before going right back to work together—apparently their secret formula…
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