Tommy Chong has his cellphone pressed up tight against his ear, trying to find out where the person on the other end of the line is; at 85, his hearing isn’t what it used to be. Sitting across from him in the booth of a restaurant, located right off the …
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As far as high concepts scenarios go, Thomas Cailley’s The Animal Kingdom has been blessed with a primo what-if premise: France is in the middle of a pandemic. (No, not that one.) A good deal of the population has been stricken with what doctors and scientists have been calling a …
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You remember Road House, right? The 1989 movie where Patrick Swayze is a professional New York City bouncer imported to Missouri to work at the most raucous road house bar in the Show Me State? The kind of film in which the hero does tai chi, reads philosophy and coos …
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A road trip. A mix-up. A fast-talking hero, prone to tossing off bewilderingly verbose sentences. Some criminals who run the gamut from eccentric to psychotic to painfully inept. (Sometimes, they’re all three at once.) Dangerously sudden violence. Dangerously dark humor. Dangerously outrageous hairdos. The feeling that you’re watching a vintage …
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So, where were we? Oh, right. House Atreides, the noble family that oversaw the rule of the spice-rich planet Arrakis, is no more. Its patriarch, Duke Leto, is dead. His heir Paul Atreides, and the young man’s mother Lady Jessica, are both presumed to have been killed as well. House …
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Movies are designed to dazzle through sound and vision. That leaves three out of five senses untapped, at least until cinema reaches its inevitable maximum-immersive “feelie” stage. The Taste of Things, the latest from the French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, is one of those rare works that gives you the …
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You may know Kōji Yakusho as the oyster-slurping mystery man from the noodle-Western extraordinaire Tampopo (1985). Perhaps you remember him as the depressed suburbanite who ballroom dances his blues away in the international feel-good hit Shall We Dance? (1996). He’s the reformed felon in the Cannes-winning character study The Eel …
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Pity poor Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton), and not just for the unfortunate name. Her mother was murdered by an ax-wielding serial killer; Lisa was in the house, hiding in a backroom when it happened. Dad (Joe Chrest) remarried soon after, which meant that Lisa suddenly found herself spending her senior …
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It’s easy for children to be feel apprehensive and overwhelmed by the world. (To be fair, it’s also easy for a lot of adults to feel apprehensive and overwhelmed by the world, which, you know — thank god for therapists!) You could do a lot worse than to show a …
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You do not fuck with Mads Mikkelsen. There are a number of takeaways to be had from The Promised Land, the excellent prestige drama-cum-bloody payback flick straight outta Denmark. The rich in 18th century Scandinavia were as entitled, immoral, and sociopathic as they are in 21st century everywhere. Just because …
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