The combination of Stephen Gaghan (Traffic, Havoc, Syriana) and Matthew McConaughey (Mud, Dallas Buyers Club, Interstellar) was the secret recipe we needed, we just didn't know it. Gaghan, more a writer than a director, works in the dark. That is to say, his stories are very heavy, sometimes highlight the worst in us, and so can be a bit daunting even when they're strong. McConaughey, who can be a complete goof ball, has also ...Read the entire review

Imagine a film whose first half resembles a Neil Simon play set in a Western frontier cabin. Characters sitting in their designated seats, important conversations delivered one at a time, in-the-door-out-the-door comedy, a ruse that's readily apparent but not quite decipherable. And then imagine a film whose second half equals the terror & vomit-inducing injury of the pawn shop basement scene in Pulp Fiction. Blood, shotguns, testicles, that feeling in your stomach that you never want ...Read the entire review

Grand cinematography shot on Ultra Panavision 70, a new soundtrack from legendary and prolific composure Ennio Morricone, and a cast with a legacy that spreads from Reservoir Dogs to Django Unchained hallmark the latest film from Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight. That's a lot of front-loaded, sight-unseen prestige going on there for the latest installment in the director's violent and darkly comedic oeuvre, complimented by the recent success he had with his Jamie Foxx revenge vehicle that proved himself capable of infusing his signature style with the mythical swagger of gunslingers, dastardly villains, and personal vendettas. The journey to getting this film made and the fanfare following it to the cinemas is, of course, quite noteworthy, and ...Read the entire review

In 2001, Antoine Fuqua directed Training Day. The film would earn Ethan Hawke an Oscar nomination and Denzel Washington a Best Actor win. Since then, Fuqua has been struggling to produce another hit. Tears of the Sun, King Arthur, Shooter, Olympus Has Fallen, The Equalizer; all action, all gritty, all received with the same lukewarm sentiments, but none living up to the standard he inadvertently set for himself fourteen years ago. What may have been missing all those years was a film with dark realism, a plot that audiences could believe and support, a human story that meant something more than gunshots, speaking to us in...Read the entire review

I don't really like to be scared. I enjoy horror as a genre, but for me it's more about the entertainment of the frequent poor quality, the imagination behind the monsters, the over-the-top deaths, the creepy cabins. I don't necessarily want ghosts popping out from under beds, angry after one hundred years of curse, ready to steal children's souls. So creature features, slashers, b-movies, campy flicks; that's what I go for. Ghosts, hauntings, sing-song rhymes, the boogie man; too in-your-face, too sensationalist, and, if I'm being honest, a bit too scary. It Follows just happens to be about none of these things, becoming a horror of...Read the entire review

I went with my family to see Paddington as part of my son's birthday. It wasn't a movie I sought out or ever thought would be a fine film; I went because it was the only age-appropriate kid's movie playing at the time. It was the first time my son had been to the theatre, so for that reason this film will always be memorable to me. So I went in not expecting much, knowing that I would remember this event whether the movie was good or bad, but never expecting actual quality to come across the screen in the form of a fuzzy bear with a British accent. Perhaps it was the English setting, the classic storybook feel, the simple characters, or the i...Read the entire review

With a large crop of Oscar-worthy films out this year, it's inevitable that some excellent ones are going to get swept under the rug. Earlier in the year films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood, and A Most Wanted Man made splashes. Later, it would be Birdman, Whiplash, Gone Girl, The Theory of Everything, and Interstellar that would impress. Then, around Christmas, we were walloped with Unbroken, Into the Woods, Selma, Foxcatcher, American Sniper, and A Most Violent Year. There are just too many well-crafted movies; some just won't make the cut. The Imitation Game might be the one t...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

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

Bill Murray has a free pass in my book. He's done so much with his career and given us so many hits to love until we die that he gets the benefit of the doubt in every film going forward. That might not be fair, but he's earned it. Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Scrooged, What About Bob?, Groundhog Day; classics all. And then in his later years Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, Hyde Park on Hudson; visceral roles that proved that he's much more than a funnyman. But there's that old adage "what have you done for me lately?" and I think that applies here, as Murray hasn't had any ...Read the entire review

The irrepressible and irascible Bill Murray stars in St. Vincent, his entry in the grumpy-old-man genre, something that in and of itself carries no shame, though you might want to come to this with a tad bit of cynicism anyway: St. Vincent is a comedy that pairs the grumpy old man with a kid.

Murray plays Vincent, or Vin to his friends, a long-time New Yorker who lives on his own in the suburbs in a house with a driveway and a white picket fence. At the start of St. Vincent, a besotted Vin backs his car over said fence, demolishing it and his mailbox. Shortly thereafter, he slips on a piece of ice while feeding his cat, bangs his head, and nearly dies. As a set-up to a motion picture, it's one hell of a crystal ball into my future. Glad I drink my whi...Read the entire review

I first read The Giver when I was around 11 years old. Since then, I've probably read it four more times. In my book, that makes it one of the greats. I won't say it's the most well-written novel in history, though Lois Lowry does a fine job, but it's a story that sticks with you & stands out as a stroke of genius. What makes it so wonderful and so rereadable is that it changes each time you check it out. Whatever age you are, whatever experiences you've had, wherever you are in life right now; these things affect how you view the story, what you take as the moral, and which way you interpret the ending. It's a very subjective book...Read the entire review

Delays in the American release of Snowpiercer means its cataclysmic science-fiction event will no longer have a chance of being prophetic, but no matter. Bong Joon-ho's English-language debut is still likely to take the crown as the most original, entertaining movie of the summer of 2014.

Snowpiercer takes place in a so-close-you-can-almost-see-it future where, following a disastrous attempt to curb global warning by introducing a cooling agent into the ecosystem in July 2014, the entire Earth froze completely. The only surviving humans climbed into a massive train mounted on a circular track. For the last eighteen years, they have rounded this path once every 365 days. In terms of social structure, life has carried on much as it has for centuries: the poor peop...Read the entire review

It's a fairly common joke, almost a parlour game, to fantasize about what you might do with a time machine. Standard answers are to kill Hitler or view some historic event, maybe revisit a favorite memory. After watching Errol Morris' documentary about Donald Rumsfekd, The Unknown Known, I think I'd go hang with a post-1984 George Orwell and show him this movie. It might actually blow his mind a little too much to realize how prescient he really was.

I say this because a major component of 1984 was how language would eventually be manipulated to the point where it lost all meaning. Rumsfeld does this in a lot of ways, though it's arguable how much he does this for the purpose of pulling the wool over the eyes of the public and how much he does it to convi...Read the entire review

If you see Philomena without your parents, you're probably going to go home and tell them to go see it immediately afterwards. Especially your mom. Or your grandmother. It could be a "whole family" selection for the day after Thanksgiving.

This is yet another "based on a true story" drama. It stars Steven Coogan (known in family circles as Octavius in the Night at the Museum movies) as Martin Sixsmith, a disgraced reporter and political spin doctor who stumbles onto the story of a lifetime--though one he only tackles begrudgingly. At a party, the catering waitress (Anna Martin Maxwell) tells him that her mother, Philomena (Dame Judi Dench, Read the entire review

You might want to check your own bank balance before you buy your ticket for Inequality for All. Depending on how significant the percentage of what's there will go toward your admission, some of this money-minded documentary might hit you pretty hard. "How much is in your checking account?" is a regular question that the film's central commentator, Robert Reich, asks of the regular citizens he interviews. The answer never amounts to much.

Reich knows of what he speaks when he talks about tough economic times. He was the former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, and is currently a lecturer at UC Berkeley. Jacob Kornbluth's film is based on Reich's writing and lectures. The subject is the growing disparity between the wages made at the very top of American industry...Read the entire review

Preamble: As a big Wong Kar-Wai fan, I feel I need to write two reviews of his new movie The Grandmaster, his first since 2007's much misunderstood My Blueberry Nights. As with that film, his English-language debut, The Grandmaster seems to have arrived on U.S. shores with baggage it doesn't really deserve to carry. In this case, a much ballyhooed and bemoaned new cut made specifically for American audiences.

Having seen both the original international version and the new theatrical release, prepared by Wong in deference to his North American distributors, I'm faced with the conundrum of writing a review that recommends whether or not my specific readership should go see The...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

My reviewing duties at DVD Talk allow me to screen a wide variety of films. By happenstance, I have watched a number of tough films of late, both narrative and documentary. These films speak to cruelty and compassion, and pose disturbing, perhaps unanswerable questions about human nature. Bully is such a film. Lee Hirsch's documentary reveals the subjective effects of bullying through intimate portraits of several middle and high school children. The stories are sad, and parents recall the ...Read the entire review

Waxing excitedly about a Quentin Tarantino movie is almost starting to feel like a knee-jerk reaction. As a writer, I've been here, done it before. Tarantino makes it pretty easy, though. It probably doesn't hurt that he only makes a feature film every couple of years, but when he does, they are insanely easy to like. He represents the filmmaker as a showman, the cineaste who entertains first and foremost, but with a flair all his own. There is a scene in his latest, Django Unchained, where Christoph Waltz, playing the bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz, is talking about buying a slave to put in the fight ring, and he expresses his desire to have a gimmick to sell the warrior. The man he is going to buy from, Leonardo DiCaprio's Calvin Candie, corrects him and says first he ...Read the entire review

Damn, it's hard to be a gangster. Particularly in this economy. Don't be fooled. When your wallet's empty, the bad guys are feeling the pinch, too.

Or so we come to learn in Killing Them Softly, the new feature from Andrew Dominik, the long-awaited follow-up to his masterful The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The writer/director is working from a novel by author George V. Higgins here. Higgins also wrote the source material that became the cult 1970s crime film The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a film it'd be ...Read the entire review