Robert De Niro’s oddly peripheral scenes constitute perhaps the most flavorless paycheck turn of his career.
There are sufficient rewards to engage a viewer who hasn’t encountered this quintessential Victorian, death-steeped romance since sophomore English.
Somewhat misleadingly titled, Making the Boys functions in part as a clips-and-interviews biography of Mart Crowley.
Starting dully and ending ludicrously, The Adjustment Bureau is an odd duck of a would-be-lightweight fantasy.
For its first third, Hall Pass zips along crudely but amiably on its sitcom-episode conceit.
Xavier Dolan’s slight sendup of lustful hesitation succumbs to blue balls.
A near-definitive, personal work of cunning artifice, buffed to a digital sheen and supplemented with persuasive views of its iconoclastic creator.
Zero Bridge is an anecdote, but a weighty and frequently evocative one.
The film is a noisier but arguably less idiosyncratic experience than attending an actual Midwestern business convention.
An unadorned but felicitous release of one of the wittiest films of the 1980s.
Everything you could want to know about creating an ambitious, well-crafted rom-com in a mass-media whirlwind setting is supplied here.
As the titular, tragic prostitute, Anna Magnani executed one of the great roles of her career in Mamma Roma.
Hysteria is the steady tone of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor.
Consistently throughout Petition, director Zhao Liang’s discernible presence, and personal engagement with his subjects, pays off.
Stellan Skarsgård’s large, pensive mug looks thoughtful, if not particularly cerebral, in repose.
Paying painterly, loving homage to a cinema legend, it envelops its audience in Sylvain Chomet’s artful animation and quaintly realized world.
James L. Brooks’s wit and his facility for creating credible heart-mind-libido conflicts have both steadily waned.
Spalding Gray is the picture of an honorable but defeated man for whom the filtering of anguish through imaginative theatre wasn’t, ultimately, enough.
The Company Men is comfort food for the corporate class in crisis.
A minor work and a masterpiece from the silents’ most kinetic clown, with peeks at the magician’s methods.