A group of disparate British retirees is lured to the Indian subcontinent for cut-rate surgery, low-overhead living, or reasons they hope to keep private. They find themselves together under the roof of the titular hotel. The cast is led by Judi Dench as a long-sheltered widow looking to stand on…
An emancipation story that takes place mostly on the road and on the run, Natural Selection tells the story of how a God-fearing 40-something woman found the greatest love of all. Linda (Rachael Harris) has been living a life of quiet deprivation with pious Abe (John Diehl), who holds fast…
Single mother Grace (Eva Mendes) toils as a maid and a waitress to keep her petulant daughter, Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez), in private school in Seattle. Although the teenager’s name translates as “anxiety,” she exhibits no fear or apprehension when, inspired by an English class on rites of passage taught by…
At the start of the long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick The Avengers, a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube is in the hands of NASA. Called the Tesseract, Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer. The cube soon starts spewing gamma radiation, heralding the…
In Oscar nominee Chico & Rita, the life of Cuban pianist and composer Bebo Valdés seems to have been translated first into fairy tale and then through the filter of cinema before it wound up as a work of animation. The result has only a loose resemblance to Valdés’ story…
“Animals are such agreeable friends — they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms,” George Eliot once wrote. That’s certainly the appeal of Freeway, a stray mutt rescued by Beth Winter (Diane Keaton), unhappily married to overweening, distant surgeon Joseph (Kevin Kline) in Darling Companion. The handsome pooch is also…
With an incisive understanding of character, believably naturalistic acting, and lengthy scenes that don’t feel stretched out so much as given room to breathe, In the Family proves that smart direction and an innate feeling for one’s material trumps potentially precious subject matter. Writer/director/star Patrick Wang’s film chronicles the efforts…
The Five-Year Engagement is as comfy and cute as the bunny costume Tom (Jason Segel) wears at the New Year’s Eve party where he meets Violet (Emily Blunt). The movie opens in San Francisco, on their one-year anniversary, the night Tom proposes. They postpone the wedding so they can get…
The year is 1837. A newly crowned Queen Victoria, voiced by Imelda Staunton and animated in clay as a shrewish little turnip of a woman, decrees war on buccaneering. Well down her most-anted list is the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant), an only middling terror of the trade routes who’s a…
In Safe, a preposterously enjoyable — or enjoyably preposterous — action-thriller, Jason Statham headlines as disgraced NYPD supercop turned small-time cage fighter Luke, whose refusal to take a dive gets his wife murdered by the Russian Mafia. Banished to a remorseful life of homeless shelters and paranoia, our chrome-domed badass…
On her first day at Seven Oaks College, transfer student Lily (Analeigh Tipton) is scooped up by a trio of prepossessed coeds who school her on campus culture and their own oddly refined sensibilities. Cardigan-clad ringleader Violet (Greta Gerwig), prim Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), and petite Heather (Carrie MacLemore) preach the…
Drawing baths and listening to classical music, refined soldier-of-fortune Martin (Willem Dafoe) is sent Down Under by a military-biotech firm that wants him to bring back a Tasmanian tiger. Although the crocodile-jawed creature was declared extinct in the 1930s, sightings hav e been reported, and the company wishes to exploit…
A blanket of white covers Montreal inside and out in Monsieur Lazhar, the understated and affecting Canadian drama that earned an Oscar nomination this year for Best Foreign Film. The schoolyard where Alice (Sophie Nélisse) and Simon (Émilien Néron) exchange their usual morning jabs is capped with snow, and their…
The Lucky One is the seventh movie based on a Nicholas Sparks book — two more are in preproduction — and, well, it’s no Notebook. In fact, it’s the most leaden of the bunch. Zac Efron stars as U.S. Marine Sgt. Logan Thibault, who’s on his third tour of Iraq…
Disneynature’s latest Earth Day release hunkers down in an Ivory Coast rain forest, taming its beasts-in-the-wild raw material into a family-friendly (though not totally sugarcoated) heroes-and-villains adventure. Chimpanzee follows energetic young primate Oscar, still reliant on his mother, Isha, for food and protection. Conflict arrives via a fruit-and-nut-based turf war:…
Jenny and Tom (Rachel Blanchard and James D’Arcy) meet on the rebound during a redeye flight from L.A. to New York and strike up one of those weirdly intimate and confessional in-flight relationships that exist only in movies about flying. Around them are a few supporting players (including Anthony LaPaglia…
As in his directorial debut, Mid-August Lunch, Gianni Di Gregorio stars in this quiet comedy, this time as Giovanni, a man in his early 60s forcibly retired nearly a decade ago and whose only employment today is playing gray-haired errand boy to the still-active women who surround him. Giovanni lives…
Based on Original King of Comedy and Family Feud host Steve Harvey’s self-help primer Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, this adaptation often plays like a book on tape. The women characters, advising one another about 90-day rules and “controlling the cookie,” begin their lines with “As Steve…
Making up for its 40-minute run time in turgidity and sheer size, To the Arctic, whose 70-mm IMAX presentation stretches postcard hokum to JumboTron size, is a travelogue doubling as an eco guilt-trip. Director Greg MacGillivray (Everest) buries the viewer in an avalanche of helicopter-view majesty while narrator Meryl Streep…
A horror comedy with a structural twist intended to emit an air of being something more, Cabin in the Woods has an off-putting vibe of cocky self-confidence, a “Don’t you get it?” conviction that it’s something special. As with people, it’s not a charming quality in a movie. The basic…
Bully is something of an outlier among awareness docs: It has a clear and calm approach to storytelling and some interest in the quality of its handheld images. Weaving together five far-flung year-in-the-life accounts, Bully affectingly lays out its worst-case scenarios. Subjects include a middle schooler from Sioux City, Iowa,…
Tucked away in the basement of a Tokyo office building, in a drab corridor attached to a subway station, the restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro seats only a handful, boasts three Michelin stars, and is presided over by renowned 85-year-old sushi chef Jiro Ono. For hundreds of dollars apiece, you can get…
