If most recent documentaries assaying ’60s and ’70s rock and roll are any indication, filmmakers expect viewers to approach pop music history not with open minds but with empty heads. Case in point: the curiosity that led me to watch “Stones In Exile,” a recent non-fiction film on the making of the Rolling Stones beyond seminal…
Bright and attractive, ceaselessly curious about their world and about the words, emotions and sensations connecting them to it, the three unnamed siblings in Greek director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ remarkable new film “Dogtooth” would be the picture of healthy development — were they on the threshold of puberty. But the oldest daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia),…
If ever there were ever a book destined to both invite and elude a satisfactory film adaptation indefinitely, Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp magnum opus “The Killer Inside Me” is it. Much like Walker Percy’s 1961 novel “The Moviegoer,” the spare prose, snapshot precise detail and intimate first person narration of “Killer” project a film directly…
In the Ozark Mountain foothills depicted in “Winter’s Bone,” circumstances have awarded 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) a dubious promotion from high school student and eldest sibling to de facto head of the household. Her mother is nearly catatonic, and her father — who like much of her extended family and clannish impoverished community is involved…
You can tell right off the bat that “Splice”‘s genetic engineer couple Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are a poor fit for button-down corporate science, Canadian horror movie style. No cool Cronenbergian remove for these two! They live together in a warehouse loft, drive a vintage Gremlin, wear t-shirts with iconoclastic slogans printed…
