… You Were Never Really Here follows the disjointed, tormented inner journey of Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a former soldier and law enforcement official who now works as a kind of hammer-wielding vigilante-for-hire, finding missing people (usually, it seems, kids)
… Bad Samaritan — with its title sounding very Grisham — tells the story of a low-level thief who breaks into a fancy-schmancy house and discovers a woman being held captive in a plastic-lined, camera-surveilled room
If the original cut was a couple of Desplechin distinct movies loaded into a woodchipper and then splatted all out on the screen, this new, longer Ismael’s Ghosts at least can be said to beef up the splats
The new season finds Maeve (Thandie Newton), the host who played madam to Westworld’s bevy of robot whores, scouring the park for the daughter she was given in a previous “narrative” … and who continues to haunt her dreams
It centers on Villanelle, a deranged assassin — Russian, of course — working on behalf of a shadowy organization, and Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), the British-born, American-raised MI5 officer who must track her from London to Paris to Moscow
The Devil and Father Amorth’s showdown between the (alleged!) forces of good and evil unfolds in a sort of sacred conference room, brightly lit and packed with family members, who dutifully hold the possessed to her chair
For the young cowboys at the heart of Zhao’s film, mounting a horse and galloping across a field represents more than just freedom — it becomes a communion with the past and the future, allowing these riders to imagine and inhabit their best selves
The House of Tomorrow sticks to a time-tested coming-of-age template that’s as common in the indie world as the superhero origin story is in the studio world
… What makes O.G. so fresh and appealing is how, while it’s a laugh riot, the characters are both written and portrayed as grounded, fully realized folk
This epic, the first of two final Avengers films, finds the Class of ‘12 — the core Avengers — getting together for one last rager, joined by select newbies and spazzes from the ranks of sophomores and freshmen
The problem with I Feel Pretty isn’t that it’s offensive but that it’s often plodding and unfunny, almost as if its creators are afraid to have too much fun with such a loaded premise
It’s quite a number.
The film — which is nowhere near as interesting as LaBeouf’s performance — is hopelessly reductive about its subjects’ psychology even as it mocks the press of 1980 for being reductive about its subjects’ psychology
Set in Cannes (which, big surprise, is also where it premiered), Claire’s Camera opens with three scenes depicting the firing of a young woman, Man-hee (Kim Min-hee), from her job at a Korean film sales company
The film opens with a dreary series of fake-outs and fantasies, culminating in a gunfight and car chase that suggest Broken Lizard would rather be making a different kind of movie
Lost in Space is nearly Steven Spielberg airy, telling the story of a super-smart family selected to populate a Utopian space colony but who get lost somewhere along the way
Fresh ideas are rare in the horror game, so it’s not surprising that Truth or Dare quickly devolves into a riff on the Final Destination films, which had Death wittily and methodically hunting those it failed to nab in plane crashes and other disasters
This is an intimate portrait of the artist in recent years as she returns to Jamaica, the country of her birth and childhood, for a family reunion
… This is a movie where everyone in Johnson’s radius accuses his character of hating humanity, when the actor himself can’t help ingratiating himself to everything …
Brad Anderson’s talky-smartish thriller Beirut, like the first half of Million Dollar Arm, sets Hamm’s sharpie loose in a country — in this case a fractious Lebanon — where the rules aren’t his
Working from a novel by Willy Vlautin, Haigh has committed himself to making a boy-and-his-horse movie that’s scraped free of everything false or sentimental about the genre
“Part two is even crazier than part one.”
