In two minutes, the Beatles captured the empty life of sad singleton Eleanor Rigby. Director Ned Benson is devoting three films to her namesake — a New York divorcée (Jessica Chastain) — and this first entry, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, barely explains her at all. Wan and adrift,…
“I’ve spent my whole life playing it safe,” whines Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), the middle-class milquetoast at the center of This Is Where I Leave You. Yes, well, so has director Shawn Levy, but on the basis of his latest vacuous trifle he has no apparent intention, as Altman does,…
Some movies seem to be put on this Earth just for actors. You look at the synopsis of a picture, and you think, “Well, it could be OK,” but then you notice who’s in it — maybe a performer you like but haven’t seen in awhile, or someone you never…
The Drop, the richly textured, beautifully acted film collaboration between Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam (Bullhead) and novelist-turned-screenwriter Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), takes place in the present, but its heart lies in the noirish past of both movies and literature. In that shadowy realm, tough guys are endlessly quotable, and…
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…
Four years ago, comedian Bill Hader told his agent he wanted to do a drama. It took awhile. “I used to think typecasting wasn’t a thing, and it totally is,” Hader admits. “That’s an industry feeling: ‘How can I take that person seriously when I know they’re capable of such…
“I’ll always be anti-authoritarian, as long as I live,” says Terry Gilliam, the comic provocateur who’s been taking aim at the establishment for over four decades. The only thing that changes: his targets. In Life of Brian, it was religion. In Brazil, the government. And in his latest film, The…
What’s fascinating, new and neglected across all major video platforms. Among other things, cinema has always been a ready-made self-eulogizer — Hollywood was making two-reeler silent comedies about the craft of moviemaking before the viewing public even knew what it entailed, and documentaries about famous and forgotten threads of film…
#454887520 / gettyimages.comJustin Long, Kevin Smith, Haley Joel Osment and Genesis Rodriguez of Tusk pose for a portrait during the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.This summer, a prankster stole Kevin Smith’s Twitter account and tweeted, “Before this comes out I want to state that I am a gay proud man.”…
My last day in Venice always makes me blue. On the way to my final screening, a tourist with an Eastern European accent I couldn’t quite identify stopped me a block or so from the sad and shuttered Hotel des Bains and asked me if it was open. “I have…
Cymbeline is the misunderstood schoolchild of Shakespeare’s plays, the misfit who speaks up at odd times and sometimes says the wrong thing, awkward in all kinds of obvious ways. It’s a special-needs play, but the beauty of it is right there in its bones, not least because in it we…
Most of us would agree that there’s only one Al Pacino. But this year in Venice, there are actually two: Pacino appears in two films at the festival this year, David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, about a lonely Texas locksmith stuck in a romantic dream, and, playing out of competition, Barry…
In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads, individuals who murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of being communists after a military takeover in 1965, and invited them to re-enact their crimes in the…
The gent at the Delta check-in counter back in New York sighed when he saw where I was headed. “Romantic Venezia!” he said, and the comment stopped me short, because film festivals located in the most beautiful settings in the world have a way of making you forget – almost…
You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs’ fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it’s going to be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in…
If older man/younger women matchups make many people uncomfortable, the older man/much younger women combo tends to make them apoplectic. It would be impossible for Nabokov to publish Lolita today, now that all of life, and all of art, must be arranged, categorized and restricted as a way of protecting…
Forrest Gump has turned 20 and is celebrating its birthday with a week-long IMAX release. It’s a significant milestone for the six-time Academy Award winner. Today, 1994 is as far away from the present as the Vietnam War was from it. Forrest Gump was a fable without a moral, the…
The Identical is Elvis slash fiction that could have been written by a spinster church organist. Its premise is intriguing: What if Jesse Presley, Elvis’ twin brother who was stillborn at birth, was in fact secretly given to a traveler minister (Ray Liotta) and his infertile wife (Ashley Judd)? What…
Every other year or so, someone comes down the indie-movie pike with an idea for an unconventional zombie movie — as opposed to the workaday ones, where the dead simply return to life and chew on limbs and stuff. Life After Beth, the debut film from writer-director Jeff Baena, strives…
Genius is hell, both for the blessed and those stuck in the shadows, cursed to spend a lifetime smashing their heads against the glass. In its presence we find ourselves dwarfed and dumb, like moths. We know we’re before brilliance we can’t comprehend — and we know we’ll never have…
For women especially, it’s wholly out of fashion to have sympathy for middle-aged white men. In both real life and fiction, the thinking goes, 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…
After The Princess Bride made Robin Wright a star, she shocked Hollywood by saying no. No to The Firm and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. No to Jurassic Park, Dirty Dancing, Born on the Fourth of July and Batman Forever. She even said no to the cover of Vanity Fair…
