The 56th president of the U.S.A.’s do-gooder daughter, Emilie (Maggie Grace), is on a fact-finding trip to a prototype orbital big house where inmates are kept pacified in deep-freeze when she’s taken hostage in a riotous insurgency led by freshly thawed Scots psychopaths (Vincent Regan and Joseph Gilgun). The only…
The Holy Trinity of knockabout numbskull comedy—fritz-haloed Larry, yipping lummox Curly, and bowl-cut fascist Moe—are introduced as they’re ditched on the steps of an orphanage. Twenty-five years later, they’ve grown up to resemble, respectively, television comics Sean Hayes, Will Sasso, and Chris Diamantopoulos, unleashed on the unsuspecting world when the…
Indonesian martial-arts film The Raid: Redemption lives up to its viral hype and the buzz. It’s lean, fast-moving, and filled with game-changing fight sequences that are brutally beautiful — or, maybe better put, beautifully brutal. Rama (Iko Uwais) is a rookie member of an elite special-forces team that has been…
This latest episode in the ongoing American Pie saga, handled by the Harold & Kumar writer-director team of Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, reunites the full original cast at their 13-year high school reunion, as the anticlimactic disappointments of the 30s have begun to sink in. Onetime band-camp nymphomaniac Michelle…
In The Kid With a Bike, Cyril (Thomas Doret), a scrappy 11-year-old living in an urban orphanage, flees school in an attempt to track down both his deadbeat dad (Jérémie Renier) and the bike he left at his dad’s house. On the lam, Cyril carelessly crashes into Samantha (Cécile de…
A historical romance with a then-unheard-of price tag, James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic was the nearest thing to a Gone With the Wind-style cinematic event that the millennials could call their own. Now Titanic has bobbed to the surface yet again in a 3-D re-release, making a play for an audience…
In the first scene of Israel’s Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee, Footnote, Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) — a 40-something Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his 60-something father’s has mostly been ignored — accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about his…
Adrien Brody stars as Henry Barthes, a career substitute teacher whose childhood trauma has left him flamboyantly unable to connect with other people or keep his shit together. The movie spans his monthlong gig at a Queens high school, where the faculty and students share an absurdly uniform collective malaise…
The Forgiveness of Blood tells the story of two sparring Albanian families whose conflicts lead to a death in one clan shortly after the movie begins. The fallout from that bloodshed is the film’s razor-sharp focus. This ranges from the religion-infused cultural dictate that the killer’s family submit to housebound…
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen concerns London fisheries specialist Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor), who’s tasked by the prime minister’s flack (Kristin Scott Thomas) to export British salmon to a Yemeni river at the request of a sheikh (Amr Waked) with a jones for fly-fishing. The sheikh’s real estate assistant (Emily…
An inspirational sports tearjerker in distilled form, this doc lands in North Memphis, where the underfunded, all-black Manassas High School football team sucks wind so bad, they’re a state joke. Enter white volunteer coach Bill Courtney and a handful of walking clichés on his roster (the straight-outta-juvie hard case, the…
Intruders sets up a clever dual narrative that shifts between Juan (Izán Corchero), a young boy in Madrid who’s terrorized by the nebulous, Freddy Krueger-esque Hollow Face, and Mia (Ella Purnell), a pointedly pubescent Londoner who seems to have created the monster in an ongoing school story project but receives…
Like many a franchise-killer, this big, flailing dud of a sequel to 2010’s Clash of the Titans is more (retina-herniating CGI), less (fun), and the same (basic plot) as its predecessor. What it lacks are the very elements that made the first movie such a surprise: wit and nerve. What,…
The fairy-tale movie is “trending” at present, with promise of all sorts of bandwagoning rubbish to come, but Mirror Mirror, one of 2012’s two Snow White films, is an enjoyable exception. This is because director Tarsem Singh is no mere follower, having done extravagant work in the realm of pure…
“If no one watches, then they don’t have a game,” a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins’ astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle, and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author…
The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about love that in no way reassures that love conquers all. Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience,…
Three decades after rummaging through the ruins of the downtown punk scene (Smithereens) and immortalizing Madonna, East Village fashion, and Battery Park’s coin-op binoculars (Desperately Seeking Susan), Susan Seidelman still knows how to capture the chaotic magic of New York. At the outset of Musical Chairs, her camera moves in…
Belting out the anthem “Les Filles du Crazy,” half a dozen women sing of themselves: “They are the soldiers of the erotic army.” The military metaphor proves apt for this spellbinding documentary on the Crazy Horse, Paris’ classy nudie cabaret, founded in 1951. The dancers’ taut, perfectly proportioned bodies suggest…
The television show 21 Jump Street, about cops who go undercover as high schoolers, debuted on Fox in 1987 and ran until 1991. As a sign of the progress made since the Reagan-Bush era, the mixed-bag, big-screen 21 Jump Street mocks the program’s lethal earnestness with retrograde raunch, packing in…
With her ponytail and toggle coat, Audrey Tautou, playing workaholic widow Nathalie in Delicacy, gives off a sexless, cutie-pie charm — not as aggressively as she did in Amélie but still gratingly. The actress, therefore, is perfect for this dainty, inconsequential romantic dramedy, the first film from brothers David and…
Nic Cage has been in a flurry of activity since the IRS closed in on him in 2009, and, like the proverbial stopped clock, his promiscuous work habits land him in an altogether watchable movie once a year. So, then, Seeking Justice: Cage is Will, a New Orleans high school…
A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence — when bodies and identities are still fluid — Tomboy astutely explores the freedom, however brief, of being untethered to the highly rule-bound world of gender codes. About 20 minutes elapse before we learn the real name and biological sex of a…
