Young Adam (review)

Yes, it’s the nudie Ewan McGregor film. Yes, another one. But the NC-17 rating is absurd — the nudity is casual and brief, the sex is consensual and mostly under cover of clothing or blankets; there’s nothing pornographic about this soft, sly little film based on Alexander Trocchi’s 1954 novel. Where it’s disturbing is in … more…

Two Brothers (review)

Jean-Jacques Annaud (Enemy at the Gates), creator of the beloved modern classic The Bear, is back with another stunning animal tale, a heartbreaking fable of friendship, family ties, and the human impact on the natural world. Guy Pearce (Till Human Voices Wake Us) portrays an early-twentieth-century big-game hunter in Cambodia who inadvertantly separates a pair … more…

SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (review)

To call this immeasurably terrible movie “stupid and nonsensical” would be an insult to stupid and nonsensical movies. So thoroughly wrongheaded that it demands a new redefinition of the word “bad,” it features perhaps the worst script I’ve ever come across, which appears to have been written by an extraterrestrial who not only does not … more…

Stander (review)

A familiar modern Robin Hood story gets a vicious kick of authenticity in this true tale of a white cop in 1970s apatheid South Africa who goes rogue. Andre Stander (The Punisher‘s Thomas Jane, in the performance that may finally earn him the recognition he deserves) was the youngest captain on the Johannesburg police force … more…

Ned Kelly (review)

The story of Australian cult figure Kelly — a 19th-century Robin Hood–esque outlaw, child of an underclass of Irish immigrants — is a tricky film, punctuated by bursts of staccato surrealism and bitter humor, hard to love unreservedly but easy to appreciate for its ambition. Heath Ledger (The Order) finds a wary, cautious groove as … more…

Millennium: The Complete First Season (review)

It’s End Times thrills for secularists in X-Files creator Chris Carter’s crime drama, which explores millennial paranoia from a decidedly worldly perspective while also managing to maintain an unrelenting, uncanny creepiness. It’s clear, throughout these 22 episodes from the series’s debut 1996-7 season, that retired FBI criminal profiler Frank Black has some paranormal simpatico with … more…

Laverne & Shirley: The Complete First Season (review)

It’s hard to imagine that this idiotic sitcom was ever intended for adult consumption: its putative heroines come across, at best, as mentally retarded, and at worst, as whiny, shallow bimbos. But that’s hardly a surprise: producer Garry Marshall would go on to make a career of denigrating the female gender with films like The … more…

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (review)

Legendary British director Mike Hodges (Croupier) and screenwriter Trevor Preston strip the mobster film down to its bare essentials, and the result is stark and relentless. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but daring filmgoers will find a shattering exploration of the psychological assault of crime on the criminal. Clive Owen (Beyond Borders) finds … more…

The Door in the Floor (review)

“A sound like someone trying not to make a sound.” Four-year-old Ruth (Elle Fanning: Daddy Day Care) isn’t describing the shushed fury consuming the adults around her, but she might well be. Her parents’ marriage is collapsing, quietly and at long last, the strain of life-altering tragedy finally catching up to them, but they barely … more…

Daughters of Afghanistan (review)

Since the fall of the Taliban, Islamic fundamentalism has “reasserted itself in a sinister way,” according to Canadian journalist Sally Armstrong, and in this powerful, angry film she documents precisely how little has changed for women in that ravaged country. Through the eyes of four Afghani women — including Dr. Sima Simar, who was, for … more…