Julia doesn’t cover a lot of new territory for the already initiated, but it’s still a delightful bio-doc made with plenty of love. In a society where celebrity chefs are household names and hyper-specific neighborhood food tours abound, it’s easy to forget that viral foodie…
Nine Days angles toward profundity, but is a largely maudlin, intellectually bankrupt genre-exercise of self-congratulation. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, prisoners sit facing a wall on which the shadows of puppets are projected; with no conception of a world beyond their own, the prisoners…
I Carry You With Me is an unpleasant mix of manipulative pap and trivialized stakes, and it’s done no favors by its docu-fiction structure. I Carry You With Me, the debut narrative feature from renowned documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing (The Boys of Baraka, Jesus Camp)…
The Truffle Hunters is a considerably handsome film, but one unfortunately absent of much personality or character. The Truffle Hunters is a relatively modest festival contender, though one can see why it’s found traction on the circuit, with major play at Sundance, Toronto, and now…
The Human Voice is a recent high water mark for Almodóvar, a masterful exercise in depicting both interior and exterior surfaces. In the late 1920s, the French poet, filmmaker, novelist, and playwright Jean Cocteau wrote a new play and brought it to the stage in…
The Father can veer into indulgence, but largely works as a nuanced, compassionate portrait of aging’s ravages. Like the captain of his soul, Anthony — played by Anthony Hopkins, his renowned namesake — is in charge at the helm, stoutly defending against the elements and…
French Exit is an absolute disaster. The end. It takes truly talented people both in front of and behind the camera to make something as abysmal as French Exit, a misfire of epic proportions. Director Azazel Jacobs, while not exactly a household name, certainly showed…
The Climb is perhaps overly familiar but boasts a chemistry-rich lead duo and a winning commitment to its comedy-by-repetition mode. The Climb opens on the image of two friends on a French bike tour: Mike (Michael Angelo Covino, also acting as writer-director here) and Kyle (Kyle…
The Traitor operates as both biopic and mob flick, reveling in the murky complexity of its central figure. A biopic of Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta (played splendidly by Pierfrancesco Favino) — nicknamed “the boss of two worlds” for being a snitch for the Italian government,…
With Pain and Glory, Pedro Almodóvar has made his own 8½, seamlessly melding autobiography and fiction here to the point where they’re nearly indistinguishable. Even though the protagonist is a film director named Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) who’s modeled on Almodóvar himself, this comes across not as…