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Orient Express: In Shanghai Calling, An Expat Sheds His Empire State Of Mind...
Bill Paxton in Shanghai Calling. With binoculars trained on revising the immigration laws in Obama’s next four years, the new focus is on China. Shanghai Calling is an interesting U.S.-Chinese...
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Low Tide: Safe Haven is a Romantic Thriller That Washes Out Before Sunset
In Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 classic The Bad and the Beautiful--—one of the greatest films ever made about the inner workings of the Hollywood movie industry—Walter Pidgeon played a studio executive...
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It’s Inescapable: She’s Lost That Loving Feeling
An odd, uneasy political thriller called Inescapable is the first feature by Syrian-Canadian filmmaker Ruba Nadda since she made waves with the intriguing 2009 cross-cultural romantic interlude Cairo...
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An Original Classic: Adam Guettel’s Musical Lines Run Deep, But For This...
Adam Guettel. (The Guardian) You wouldn’t call him a chip off the old block, but Adam Guettel’s musical genes are unmistakable. Yes, his grandfather was the great Richard Rodgers, and his mother was...
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Is This Real Life? The End of Love‘s Touching Moments Are Overshadowed by...
Nobody really wants to see your home movies but you. Struggling actor-writer-producer-director Mark Webber would be wise to keep that in mind after the tepid reaction to his sincere but inconsequential...
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In Stoker, Deranged Gothic Overtones Stoke This Critic’s Sicker Side
Stoker. “Just as a flower cannot choose its color, we are not responsible for what we’ve come to be. This is what it means to be free.” Stoker, the first English-speaking film by Korean horror-flick...
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Phantom Is Lost At Sea
Ed Harris in Phantom. Like George Washington, I cannot tell a lie. I confess that movies about submarines are not my cup of brine. A new one called Phantom is no exception. Worse, it’s about a Russian...
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Mother’s Ill-Advised Trip for a Quick Buck Takes a Harrowing Detour on Road...
Written and directed by a New York-based filmmaker from Boston, about a Spanish-speaking blonde from Austin, Texas, played by an Australian, set on the border of southern Texas and filmed in Oaxaca in...
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An American Warlord Grapples with a Society’s Reluctant Emergence from...
Japanese atrocities in the Pacific during World War II have been well documented, and we know how the U.S. retaliated by destroying great portions of Japan with the A-bomb. But what happened to...
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Oz’s Countless Computer-Generated Bells and Whistles Don’t Quite Capture the...
“So much happened before they got there.” How I loved that original tag line in the first full-page ad that preceded the Broadway opening of the smash-hit musical Wicked. And it applies again to the 3D...
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In Everybody Has a Plan, Viggo Mortensen More Than Plays His Part, but Can’t...
One Viggo Mortensen is more than enough. Two Viggos, too much. In Everybody Has a Plan, a dreary little misfire from Argentina in which he speaks fluent but mumbled Spanish, he plays identical twin...
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Joan Carr-Wiggin’s Character Study Receives a Failing Grade
The people responsible for a hapless load of bunk called If I Were You can only be described as delusional. They think they have made an actual movie, when nothing in it qualifies. This facile and...
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Gravity-defying Performances Commandeer Upside Down
True originality is so rare that it’s a treat to welcome a movie as completely different and provocative as Upside Down. It’s unlike anything you have ever seen. This is a fantastical futuristic love...
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By Their Bootstraps: Holland Taylor Steps Up to the Podium and Delivers a...
When the well-honed, snowy-thatched actress Holland Taylor strides onstage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater like a Texas tornado with her big hair, small ankles and gold Lone Star pin,...
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Hunky Dory Deserves a Rapturous Round of Applause
Set in Wales in the summer of 1976, this sweet, benign little British musical from the producer of Billy Elliot stars Minnie Driver as a high-school drama teacher facing daunting challenges while...
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Emily Mortimer Inspires in Triumphant Tale of Leonie Gilmour’s Harrowing Journey
Exquisitely acted by the pristine beauty Emily Mortimer and lushly photographed with the literary sensibility of a Merchant-Ivory saga, Leonie is the true story of the life of Leonie Gilmour, a...
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Pulled from the Bloodshed of Vietnam, Soldiers Come Home to Lives They Didn’t...
July 1969. The war in Vietnam rages on, but all eyes are on Cape Kennedy and the first moon launch. When girlfriend Janie dumps him in a Dear John letter, Dalton (Austin Stowell), a model soldier with...
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Gangland Drama My Brother the Devil Offers New Take on Overshot Slums
Set in the violent multiethnic working-class housing projects of East London, My Brother the Devil is about two British-born sons of an immigrant Egyptian bus driver struggling to keep their priorities...
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Endurance Test
Don’t go to Hands on a Hardbody, the new musical at the Brooks Atkinson imported from a critically praised run in California, expecting titillation (the hardbody is a red pickup truck) or a revelation...
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Our Floundering Fathers
Derek Cianfrance, one of the screen’s most gifted and innovative new directors, proved to be a master storyteller with a rare and unflinching emotional directness with Blue Valentine, the hauntingly...
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