There’s no way to get through Craig Zobel’s superb Compliance without being agitated, impatient, upset even—it’s a difficult sit. It’s also the most discussion-worthy and provocative movie of 2012. There simply won’t be another movie that shakes us up like this, haunts us for…
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For a Good Time Call is alternately pushy and sweet, obnoxious and endearing, too broad yet at-times inspired, a Wild Sex Comedy featuring two perfectly nice young women who meet cute, despise each other and then become best-est friends. Oh, and they create a…
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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 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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