Although it’s more faithful to the characters of The Jungle Book than any of the Disney adaptations, Andy Serkis’ long-delayed Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle owes as much to bastardized interpretations of Joseph Campbell as it does to the stories of Rudyard Kipling. Mowgli, the wild child raised by wolves in central…
The retro-psycho Thirst Street brought the prolific Nathan Silver within spitting distance of the indie mainstream (in production values, if not style or subject matter), but he returns to the micro-indie world with his latest black comedy, all the while continuing the earlier effort’s interest in delusion, diffusion,…
“You old guys are trying to get with it. Is that what this movie’s about?”
—The Other Side Of The Wind
What can we really say about a life? It’s a question that is asked time and again in the films of Orson Welles, and which critics have often found themselves asking about Welles himself. Among the great American movie directors, his body of work is the most famously incomplete, compromised, and meta. The finished…
The week before Halloween is horror-movie season. But what could be scarier than the B-list action movies of Gerard Butler, which present us with a world where the lives of millions or even billions have been put in Gerard Butler’s hands? In Hunter Killer, our scowliest movie star plays a submarine captain who is, …
Patrick Wang’s unlikely two-part comic epic A Bread Factory is set in Checkford, New York, a quiet town where residents gossip over coffee at Sam’s diner about the goings on at the school board, the town council, and the Bread Factory, the community arts center that is the soul of the town. Long ago in Checkford’s…
To the extent that Jim Hosking’s cartoonishly grotesque characters can be called human, they paint an unflattering portrait of the species. They are dopes and bullies, middle-aged virgins and horndogs with bad hair, disgusting habits, ugly thrift-store clothes. The Greasy Strangler, his debut feature, pitched itself…
Stories confined to a single location had a special place in the career of Alfred Hitchcock, who saw them as opportunities to experiment: with long takes in Rope, 3D in Dial M For Murder, and studios sets in Lifeboat and Rear Window, one of his celebrated and most imitated films. But one wonders what the master of…
Jim Cummings’ deeply discomfiting comedy Thunder Road takes its title from the majestic opening track of Bruce Springsteen’s breakthrough album, Born To Run, but its spirit recalls the Boss’s throatier cries from the heart and yawls of confused blue-collar emotion. In a terrific opening scene (basically a remake of…
To millions of young readers in the 1990s, the covers of Goosebumps books promised stories of gooey green slime, monsters, and boys and girls in big shirts and Converse sneakers who had been subjected to freaky transformations or sent to the wrong summer camp. But what lie between these covers was mostly pap, cranked…
The main characters of Tamara Jenkins’ Private Life, Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), are a fortysomething Manhattan couple who have spent a small fortune trying to have a baby—an obsession that their friends and relations liken to an addiction. She is a novelist who put off having kids for too long…
Joseph Frank Keaton, nicknamed “Buster” from early childhood, started making movies in 1917 and continued working all the way until his death in 1966. But his legendary reputation as a comedian rests entirely on a prolific period that lasted from 1920 to 1928, when he released 19 ingenious short films and 12 features …
Hell Fest has the makings of a fun variation on the slasher formula, with a killer running loose between the plastic body parts and spooky, sweet-smelling fakery of a Halloween haunted house—the place where giggly young adults actually come to be chased and scared by people with cleavers and chainsaws. But even…
Is it that hard to make a lowbrow comedy? More crummy sitcom than movie, Night School casts Kevin Hart as Teddy Walker, a high school dropout who enrolls in a kooky GED class after losing his job as a gas grill salesman. (It literally goes up in flames in a belabored pyrotechnic stunt.) If going back to his old…
That our lives have an effect on total strangers is hardly news to ethicists, economists, or practitioners of the Golden Rule. But if goopy, everything-is-connected movies like Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself are to be believed, this simple fact of living in a world full of other people attests to nothing less than the…
Hale County, Alabama, which has a population of just under 16,000, is best known as the subject of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans’ classic and influential book about the white rural poor. One can presume that this fact played a role in the conception of RaMell Ross’ Hale County, This…
