[8] Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas play a news reporter and cameraman who try to report on a near-disaster at a nuclear power plant where safety measures aren’t being met. While the plant’s owners and the TV station hold them at bay, they work covertly with a sympathetic plant supervisor (Jack Lemmon) to get all the evidence they need to drop the bombshell story on …
[8] Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) leads an all-star ensemble in this surreal, satiric look at the breakdown of suburban existence. The Chumscrubber is an ambitious conceptual piece, not unlike American Beauty in tone and style. But where American Beauty centered on one character’s shaky morality and lost me, The Chumscrubber stems more confidently from one of my favorite thematic tropes — human beings’ desperate need …
[8] Paul Verhoeven (Soldier of Orange, RoboCop) brings his devil-may-care attitude toward sex and morality to this slice-of-life story about three young Dutch boys who dream of escaping their restrained provincial lives by winning motor cross competitions. One of the boys, Rien (Hans van Tongeren), has a real chance of unseating the current champion (Rutger Hauer), while Eef (Toon Agterberg) struggles with his sexual identity in dark ways, and …
[8] A bunch of British people fall in love, out of love, and do lovey-dovey things in the month leading up to Christmas. Now, if you’re like me, that’s a description that will keep you from ever wanting to watch Love Actually. But since a hundred different people have insisted I watch it over the last fifteen years since it was released, I finally gave …
[8] Director James Cameron (Terminator, The Abyss) re-teams with Arnold Schwarzenegger to bring this action comedy to the big screen. Arnold plays a married man who keeps his occupation a secret from his wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. What Curtis doesn’t know is that he’s not really a computer sales person. He’s actually a spy for a secret government agency. When Arnold learns Curtis …
[8] Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as a man and woman who retreat to their cabin in the woods to grieve the death of their young son. Dafoe’s character is a therapist and tries to offer techniques to help Gainsbourg’s character cope with the tragedy. But Gainsbourg spirals beyond grief and into insanity… and violence. Writer/director Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, The …
[8] A curmudgeonly obsessive-compulsive (Jack Nicholson) falls for a charming waitress (Helen Hunt) and strikes up an unlikely friendship with a gay neighbor (Greg Kinnear) in As Good as It Gets, another comedy/drama hybrid from the sometimes brilliant mind of James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News). In lesser hands, this one could have turned out a tonal mess, but Brooks and the cast …
[8] Christian Bale once again transforms himself completely to become former vice-president Dick Cheney in Adam McKay’s (The Big Short) new film, Vice. The film is a pastiche of Cheney’s political career, driven in large part by his relationship with wife Lynne (Amy Adams) and daughters Liz and Mary. McKay is careful to keep Vice a pitch-black comedy at all times, but he also does …
[8] Isabelle Huppert stars as a woman trying to learn the identity of the man who raped her. Based on that description, I pegged Elle for a revenge story, but it’s much more complicated and interesting than that. As the film unfolds, we learn Huppert is the producer of sexually violent video games. Then we learn she’s the daughter of a mass-murderer. It’s indicated that …
[8] Steve Carell stars as millionaire John du Pont in the disturbing true story of du Pont’s attempt to recruit and train wrestlers for Olympic glory. Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo star as wrestling brothers Mark and Dave Schultz. Mark falls under du Pont’s spell pretty easily, allowing du Pont to fill the role of father figure that older brother Dave once filled. But when …
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