THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Everything and nothing happens in La Ciénaga, the debut feature from Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel (The Headless Woman). Spanning the space of one aimless summer, this avant-garde drama captures the boredom and the heat for one extended family forced together by circumstance as life changes and petty concerns swirl all about.

The narrative kicks off with an accident. At a pool party, middle-aged mother Mecha (Graciela Borges) falls face first, smashing her drinking glass against her chest. Was she drunk? Did she tri...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Guy Maddin has always been a filmmaker torn between his nostalgia for old cinema and his forward-thinking filmmaking techniques. His appropriation of antiquated styles in movies like Brand Upon the Brain! and The Saddest Music in the World were clever allusions, throwbacks clearly made using current technology with a progressive and irreverent approach to narrative. Something has always driven the Canadian director...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Casting back in my memory, I think I first heard of Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the same time I first heard of Douglas Sirk, back in the late 1990s or so when Martin Scorsese and others were trying to introduce Sirk back into the conversation. So, even though it would take me longer to actually experience the cinema of Fassbinder (I was drawn in by the stories I heard of Berlin Alexanderplatz) than it would Sirk, who...Read the entire review

It's easy to push against a movie like Jupiter Ascending. You can call it messy and overlong and a bit nonsensical and make a thing about how the studio delayed it 9 months from last summer and spun the story by saying it was required to give the Wachowskis time to finish all the special effects.

Because all the endless reboots and remakes and double-downs have made us cynical, and so why support a movie full of crazy ideas and passion that doesn't take itself too seriously? Why, indeed.

Look, Jupiter Ascending is not a great film. It's full of strange logic and ridiculous off-hand concepts and it drags in spots and actually really is overly long. But it's also an original creation, plucked fully from the over-achieving brains of the people who brought us Read the entire review

There can be an invisible beauty in the construction of a story. When a complicated tale is put together in just the right way so that all the pieces move in tandem, leading one to the other, each development feeling perfectly natural while also seeming impossible to predict what happens next--or, more importantly, so involving you never even think to stop and try.

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return) is in command of just that kind of storytelling skill. His new movie Leviathan has a large narrative, populated by many characters, but is also extremely intimate. The chararacters gravitate around each other and their shared terrain, acting unto their own motivations, but yet also having a specific...Read the entire review

Every year when the Oscar nominees are announced, there is always chatter about why certain movies get nominations in particular categories and not others. This can be controversial, such as the talk around Selma this year, or Ben Affleck not being nominated as director for Argo a couple back, when the missed opportunity is for work that seems worthy. No such mystery exists in the case of Still Alice, however, which got one nod this year: Julianne Moore for Best Actress. All it takes is watching Still Alice to see why: Moore's performance is exceptional, and the movie is not.

Based on the best-selling novel by Lisa Genova, Still Ali...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the previous standard-definition DVD release, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

In 1962, French-director Francois Truffaut sat down for a series of extended interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, later published as the essential tome Hitchcock/Truffaut. In 1968, Truffaut set out to pay tribute to his hero by making Hitch's kind of movie, adapting a novel from crime writer Cornell Woolrich (I Wake Up Screaming, Rear Window) and hiring legendary composer Bernard Herrmann (Read the entire review

Forgive me if during this review I fall asleep at random intervals, but Blackhat was so deadly dull that the very prospect of reliving it for the next several hundred words is already making me a little drowsy.

The quick rundown: Blackhat is the latest in that quasi-genre of "cyberthriller." Namely, a mystery-type action-sorta movie about guys playing cat and mouse online before presumably someone gets punched in the nose IRL. In this case, a hacker wormed his way into a Chinese nuclear power plant and shut down one of the reactors and nearly caused a meltdown, while simultaneously driving up the price for soy and earning himself a small fortune. The feds in both China and the U.S. put their heads together to try to figure out who did it and why. Are these seemi...Read the entire review

Here's some things we know: Chris Kyle was a decorated American solider, a Navy SEAL who was considered the deadliest sniper in U.S. combat history. A Texan by birth, he did four tours of duty in Iraq. He took a lot of lives, he saved a lot of lives. He was a father of two and a husband. Some say he was a good guy, some chafed at his rougher edges. After surviving war, he struggled with returning home, only to have a marine suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder murder him.

Kyle co-authored a book about his life with two other writers, and that book has now been adapted into a movie by writer Jason D. Hall (Spread) and director Clint Eastwood. American Sniper deals with all of the above, except fo...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

The Two Faces of January, Hollywood's latest adaptation of author Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Purple Noon), certainly comes with a solid pedigree, but that only proves no matter how strong the source material or how expertly one sets up the shots, a bull's-eye is never assured.

Set in 1962, The Two Faces of January is basically a contest of wits and masculinity. Rydal (Oscar Isaac, Read the entire review

It is often said that certain books are "unfilmmable." Whether it's an issue of length (Infinite Jest, for instance) or the way the author approaches language as an essential part of the telling (James Joyce's Ulysses), there are novels that just don't lend themselves to the cinema. Which doesn't always stop filmmakers. The Wachowskis and Thomas Tykwer tackled David Mitchell's stylistically ambitious Cloud Atlas and ended up pleasing many of that book's fans (including me); whereas six years earlier, Tykwer tackled Patrick Süskind's Perfume and basically fell on his face. No one is sure what he was expec...Read the entire review

THE SHOW:

The renewed vigor that appeared at the end of the second season of The Legend of Korra sticks around for Book Three: Change, which hits the ground running and rarely lets up, making it the most focused and action-packed cycle of the animated television show so far.

The Legend of Korra - Book Three: Change picks up not long after the major spiritual events of the previous season. Korra (voiced by Janet Varney) has created a stronger link between the physical and mystical realms, and the effects are both good and bad. Her home, Republic City, has been overrun with out-of-control vines, a predicament that has earned her the ire of the populace. The ma...Read the entire review

Last year, J.C. Chandor made a splash (sorry) with All is Lost, a movie that followed Robert Redford across the ocean as the lone yachtsmen struggled to stay alive during a storm. Its scope was small, but its ambition was huge--a situation that is reversed for Chandor's follow-up, the dreary A Most Violent Year. The writer/director is working on a larger canvas with a talented ensemble cast, but his goal appears to be little more than aping his forebears.

Set in 1981, A Most Violent Year stars Oscar Isaac (Inside LLewyn Davis) as Abel Morales, a self-made business man who pulled himself up from the New York streets...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Interesting fact: Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria and Sydney Pollack's Tootsie, both comedies where actors cross-dress in order get a job, were released in 1982. I couldn't say what was in the air around that time that two of the biggest hits of that year would involve performers of one sex--namely, Julie Andrews and Dustin Hoffman--pretending to be another sex, but it kind of blows my mind that I had contact with both films in their theatrical runs when I was a wee lad of ten years old. I'm not sure I saw all of Victo...Read the entire review

Alan Turing has had quite a renaissance in the last couple of years, as his accomplishments and travails have been celebrated in the media and the Queen of England apologized on behalf of the man's home country for the persecution that led to his suicide some sixty years ago. Though, as my friends who are more in touch with computer-type things tell me, Turing should have been on my radar long ago. Cinema fans know his work indirectly. You know that scene in Blade Runner where the replicant reveals himself after as series of abstract questions? "The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't"? That's a version of what is called the T...Read the entire review

Hollywood takes its semi-annual stab at reviving the movie musical with the latest from Rob Marshall (Chicago), an adaptation of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim's much-beloved grown-up take on fairy tales.

All the gang is here: Jack and his beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood. In Sondheim and James Lapine's version, these Grimm stories intersect, taking place in one kingdom, the ups and downs of each affecting the lives of others, all in service to the theme that sometimes wishes aren't exactly all they are cracked up to be. "Happily ever after" is not an infinite experience.

Tying all the folklore together ...Read the entire review

Cautiously, gently, and without pushing it too hard, I will say that for those who have been waiting for Tim Burton to return to making the kind of quality oddball films that defined his early career, before he became a cheesecake factory of remakes and reboots, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised by Big Eyes. It's no Ed Wood, but af...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

The slang term "23 skidoo" is a reference to making a fast getaway, of getting out while the getting is good. If only someone had walked onto the set of Otto Preminger's 1968 generation-gap comedy Skidoo and shouted "23 skidoo!" just before cameras rolled. Had cast and crew scattered, never to return, a lot of veteran performers could have saved themselves some embarrassment.

Skidoo stars Jackie Gleason as Tough Tony, a one-time mob hitman, now retired. Our lone glimpse of his criminal escapades is shown as a black-and-white silent film in the vein of the Keystone Cops. A throwback to the good ol' days. Just one of many tone deaf jokes about the difference between then and now, the old and the young. Tony's daughter, for instance, has fal...Read the entire review

Bennett Miller has made a name for himself carving erudite dramas out of real-life topics, directing the late Philip Seymour Hoffman into an Oscar in Capote and making the mathematics behind baseball riveting in the Aaron Sorkin-penned Moneyball. I mention his collaborators, because despite a remarkable cast and other respectable contributors (including Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman), Miller's latest directorial effort, Foxcatcher, is missing something. He never finds that same spark.

This time around, Miller mines the true story of an Olympic gold medalist and his rich benefactor and the way their relationship turned sour. C...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Sometimes it's easy to see why a movie doesn't hit with audiences, particularly when it's a sequel. There are legions of bad Part IIs and even worse Part IIIs, so many would-be franchises sputter on the second time around. Then again, sometimes a sequel delivers exactly what an audience liked the first time, and so handicapping its box office failure can be a little trickier. While I know that the common wisdom was that Sin City's moment had passed and that people wanted A Dame to Kill For eight years ago, let's be honest, Dumb and Dumber To took even longer to stink up cineplexes and audiences paid cash to see that anyway. There's no wisdom to any of this.

Some of the v...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

The Canadian crime film Whitewash is essentially a confined-area drama set in a wide open space. Thomas Haden Church (Sideways) stars as Bruce, an alcoholic snowplow driver who, at the start of the movie, runs over a man with his plow. It's first thing in the morning, the rest of the town is asleep, and so no one sees him take the body of Paul (Marc Labréche) and bury it in a snow bank. Rather than continue to cover his tracks, in his haste to get away, Bruce ends up getting his plow stuck in the snow deep in the woods. There he remains trapped, unable to take the plow back, afraid to otherwise answer for where he's been and why the missing man's car is...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

The Young Savages was the second directorial feature from John Frankenheimer, a pioneer of live television, and his first of four collaborations with Burt Lancaster. That it's the weakest of their team-ups should not be altogether surprising then, as Frankenheimer goes through some growing pains trying to apply his learned techniques and the social drama of his TV work to a larger canvas.

Lancaster stars in The Young Savages as Hank Bell, formerly Bellini, an Italian kid from a tough New York neighborhood...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Equal parts modern western and prototypical sports picture, Nicholas Ray's 1952 drama The Lusty Men is an interesting sideshow story about a particularly hard-living group of fellows and the consequences their choices have on the women in their lives.

Robert Mitchum stars in The Lusty Men as Jeff, a champion of the rodeo circuit who returns to his Texas hometown after an injury takes him out of competition. Looking to make a little money and maybe even save up to buy the house he grew up in, Jeff signs on at a nearby ranch. There, he befriends Wes (Arthur Kennedy), a newlywed who has designs on the old property himself. Wes and his wife Louise (Susan Hayward) have been content with the slow and steady path to homeownership, but meeting ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

This is a bit of a weird one for me. Let's begin by getting all the disclosure taken care of. Rude Dude is a documentary about Steve Rude, an influential comics artist perhaps best identified for having co-created the sci-fi superhero Nexus in the 1980s. I read Nexus back then and was fortunate enough to end up working on the series as an assistant editor when it was being published by Dark Horse in the 1990s. That put me in contact with Steve Rude and Mike Baron, the book's writer, on a regular basis. As the movie demonstrates, they were both pains in the ass in their own way, but I enjoyed working with them and liked them as people.

In addition to tha...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from previous DVD releases and not the Blu-rays under review.

Three of Audrey Hepburn's most beloved films are brought together here under one cover, compiling previously released Blu-ray editions in one sleek package. Though the bundling doesn't necessarily have a strict theme, the set will satisfy viewers who enjoy the actress' penchant for fairy tale romances. All three movies are a Cinderella story, after a fashion, with the actress playing a more mature and sometimes cynical character in each subsequent release.

Sabrina (1954): Audrey Hepburn's second film was the first of hers I saw, though if I recall I watched Sabrina for Humphrey Bogart, whom had beco...Read the entire review

I'm always in for a new Jean-Luc Godard movie, especially since, anymore, there are several years between his feature-length efforts. It's been four years since he released the acclaimed Film socialisme, and it was six years between that one and Notre musique. That both of those films showed the eighty-three-year-old auteur was as engaged and vital as ever makes it all the more disappointing that his latest, Goodbye to Language (Adieu au language in his native French), is the end result of an artist spinning his wheels.

Anyone fami...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Sam Peckinpah's career was on the wane when he made 1975's The Killer Elite, a studio contract picture about professional contract killers. Think about that for a second. There's a satisfying synergy there.

Reportedly, Peckinpah was brought onto the film by the head of the studio to prove that the old dog still had some fight in him. The resultant movie proves him right, at once fitting in with the status quo of mid-1970s action pictures but with the right kind of touches to make it feel like a Peckinpah movie. There's plenty of male bonding and slow-motion violence, of course. There's also a coherent narrative and, funnily enough, ninjas.

That's right, ninjas. Albeit not very good ones. When a lady ninja dons her black mask to skulk off into...Read the entire review

You don't have to know jazz to enjoy the new music documentary Keep on Keepin' On, though by the end of this story about trumpet player Clark Terry and one of his protégés, Keep on Keepin' On will certainly give you a taste for it. As Terry's wife Gwen says, Terry is like a living history of the art form.

Born in 1920, Terry began his career in Duke Ellington's orchestra before taking a 12-year-old Quincy Jones under his wing and jumping ship when his pupil started his own ensemble. In addition to being a celebrated player, Terry became an educator, teaching generations of musicians how to play jazz. Keep on Keepin' On picks up with Terry as he approaches 90. His diabetes is getting the better of him, but he's still teaching. One of his more recent and...Read the entire review

While I was watching Big Hero 6, a fire alarm went off in the middle of the movie and a calm, mechanical voice suggested that everyone should leave the theater. It was right when the young superhero team was going into battle for the first time, arguably what was intended to be the second most exciting sequence in the movie. The fact that I found the flashing lights on either side of the screen more interesting than anything on it and secretly wished there was a real fire so I wouldn't have to sit through the rest of the digital cartoon should tell you most of what you need to know about my feelings about Big Hero 6. No such luck for this tired old grump.

The latest 3D animated feature from Disney is their first to work with characters that have been under their...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

The 1956 western The Young Guns is essentially a cowboy capitalization on the juvenile delinquent fad. Russ Tamblyn (Twin Peaks' Dr. Jacobi) stars as Tully, the troubled son of a bad-to-the-bone outlaw. Tully has been trying to get by amongst decent folk, but too many of them can't forget where he comes from. After being pushed too far by a vindictive sheriff's deputy (Myron Healey), Tully packs it in and heads off to Black Crater, the mountain hideaway of outlaws like his old man.

Up there, the boy discovers that other offspring of wanted criminals have taken over the community. Their fathers are off pillaging and fleeing from the law, leaving a generation...Read the entire review

Interstellar is a whole lot of movie to take in. Clocking at nearly three hours, and featuring a fair amount of unsignaled left turns, there were points where I felt I was merely keeping up. Inception-mastermind Christopher Nolan, who is Interstellar's driving force, is clearly a fan of 2001, right down to its agitated classical music cues and inscrutable climax. While this new space odyssey may be more explicit in its explanations, that doesn't necessarily make some of its pretentions that much more clear. I feel I need another viewing. And a whole lot more time to think.

But press deadlines and opening dates prev...Read the entire review

A nightcrawler, in addition to being a blue mutant with teleportation powers in the X-Men, is a freelance news reporter who spends the dark hours chasing calls on police scanners in hopes of getting salacious footage to sell to the local television news. It's a nocturnal vocation where the more bloody and twisted the situation, the better.

In the movie Nightcrawler, Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal,Prisoners) is a strange loner eager to find a career. When he spots a stringer, as nightcrawlers are also called, filming an accident on the side of the freeway, he asks the man (Bill Paxton, Edge of Tomorrow) for a job. When the a...Read the entire review

As I type, it's a week before Halloween, and I've just finished watching the scariest horror movie of the season: the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour.

It's with a chilled quiet and gritted teeth that I make light, whistling by the graveyard, dancing to keep from crying. Because if you can watch Citizenfour and not be shaken down to your very core, you're made of tougher stuff than I. Cinematic analysis at this point seems unnecessary, regardless of how much there may be to criticize in the technique (and really, not much). Laura Poitras' film is so vital, so substantial to the world right now, any conscientious critic will just want to underline how important it is that everyone see it, how crucial to avoid throwing it on the scrap heap of the well-meanin...Read the entire review

"Did you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

That's the line that popped into my head as I left the theater after watching Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). It kind of arose spontaneously as I was wrestling with my initial reaction to a film that I feared had lost me in its final quarter. I was still hoping to maybe straighten those feelings out, to find whatever it was that was eluding me about how the story had turned out, but instead of the missing connection, I kept hearing, "Did you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" At the time, I couldn't even place where it was I was lifting the question from. I punched it into Google when I got home, and up popped an infamous video of John Lydon exi...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Though this Fritz Lang wartime thriller is sometimes billed as a film noir, it isn't really. Hangmen Also Die concerns itself with noble people, the Czechoslovakian underground who were trying to oust the Nazis from their homeland. Traditional film noir is about people with a questionable moral code who don't so much try to beat down the immoral society they are trapped in, but rather try to carve out a peaceful coexistence within it. Lang was one of the originators of the noir style, however, and so Hangmen Also Die nestles comfortably amongst the others thanks to the look the director...Read the entire review