Author:   Ken Hanke

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Starring: (Voices) Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana, Channing Tatum, Ron Perlman, Christina Applegate, Ice Cube, Kate del Castillo

The Book of Life

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: Animated fantasy grounded in the concept of the Day of the Dead. The Lowdown: Its actual plot may be fairly standard love triangle stuff, but The Book of Life's nonstop array of stunning images and invention — not to mention the freshness of its cultural identity — more than transcends its basic plot.
Starring: Brad Pitt, Shia LeBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal

Fury

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: A post-D-Day war story about a tank crew making their way through Germany. The Lowdown: Violent, bloody, straightforward old-school war movie that overcomes its shortcomings in its battle scenes — with help from three of its five lead actors.

Cranky Hanke’s Weekly Reeler October 22-28: St. Vincent Ouija Wick Pride

Posted on by Ken Hanke

In Theaters. We get two mainstream titles of largely unknown quality this week and two art titles of known and pretty darn high quality — and of far broader appeal than last week’s lone (and already leaving) documentary. Before breaking out the crystal ball to look at the unseen mainstream offerings, let’s take some time […]

Starring: Luke Evans, Sarah Gadon, Dominic Cooper, Art Parkinson, Charles Dance

Dracula Untold

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: The story of how Dracula got the way he is. The Lowdown: Slapdash, but slick, horror done in comic book terms. Too little horror, too much CGI — and yet another attempt to make a great villain sympathetic with an origin story. Phooey.
Starring: Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Bela Lugosi, Leila Hyams, The Panther Woman (Kathleen Burke), Arthur Hohl

Island of Lost Souls

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932) is without a doubt the grimmest and most completely horrific of all “golden age” horror films. That’s a statement that few are going to argue with. (It was banned — much to the delight of H.G. Wells, who hated what the filmmakers had done with his source novel —…
Starring: Steve Carell, Jennifer Garner, Ed Oxenbould, Dylan Minnette, Kerris Dorsey

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: A put-upon young boy gets his wish that his family finds out what a bad day is like when they're on the receiving end. The Lowdown: A very long 80 minutes of obvious slapstick and loud performances pitched to the family-friendly crowd, which should demand better.
Starring: Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, John Williams, Henry Daniell, Una O'Connor

Witness for the Prosecution

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: According to the credits, Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich were the stars of Billy Wilder's excellent film version of Agatha Christie's hit play Witness for the Prosecution. But let's face it, the movie belongs to Charles Laughton as Sir Wilfrid Robards, the ailing but wily barrister defending Power on a murder charge. The premise finds…
Starring: Mark Landis, Matthew Leininger, Aaron Cowan, Jill Chancey

Art and Craft

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: Documentary about a very peculiar art forger — one who makes gifts of his forgeries to altogether-too-credulous museums. The Lowdown: Immensely likable little documentary about a singularly strange man with a penchant for gifting museums with his forgeries of the works of famous artists. It's pretty indifferent as filmmaking, but its subject and…
Starring: Altinay Ghelich Taghani, Soghra Karimi, Zahra Mohammadi, Habib Haddad

Daughters of the Sun

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: This debut feature from Iranian director Maryam Shahriar is a specialized film for specialized tastes. Those with a keen interest in Iranian cinema should probably add at least a half-star to my rating. Others might approach this slow-moving, unrelentingly grim movie about a young rural Iranian woman (Altinay Ghelich Taghani), forced into having…
Starring: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Judy Greer, Dean Norris, Ansel Elgort, Kaitlyn Dever, Emma Thompson

Men, Women & Children

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: Eight intercut — sometimes connected — stories of life in the age of omnipresent social media. The Lowdown: It's a worthy idea and there are some moments of grace, but this takedown of society losing actual human connection through its online and text messaging simulation of interaction is too unfocused and overstuffed to…
Starring: Sammi Davis, Paul McGann, Amanda Donohoe, Christopher Gable, David Hemmings, Glenda Jackson

The Rainbow

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: Ken Russell's last large-scale theatrical work, The Rainbow (1989) was the most elaborate of the three films he made for producer Dan Ireland at Vestron Pictures. In many ways, it was an attempt to recapture the quality of Women in Love from 20 years earlier. After all, D.H. Lawrence's novel was the book…
Starring: Roger Daltrey, Sara Kestelman, Paul Nicholas, Fiona Lewis, John Justin, Ringo Starr

Lisztomania

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: Lisi Russell (Mrs. Ken Russell) joins the Asheville Film Society to introduce this special Budget Big Screen showing of Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975),  a movie she was slated to costar in — that is until her mother found out about it. It is hands down the most unrestrained film ever made by the…
Starring: Beverly Garland, Bruce Bennett, Lon Chaney Jr., George Macready

The Alligator People

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: Yes, it's got a ridiculous title — and boasts an even more ridiculous, yet utterly charming, monster — but Roy Del Ruth's The Alligator People is actually one of the better horror movies of the 1950s. The script by Orville H. Hampton is tightly constructed and reasonably literate (within the limits of the…
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, Kôji Yakusho, Adriana Barraza

Babel

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: Alejandro González Iñárritu and his writing partner Guillermo Arriaga made their bid to move into the mainstream with Babel (2006), a film that was nothing if not ambitious. Taking their standard approach of multiple stories that ultimately connect to create a larger picture, they moved a step further by making the stories global…
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens

Gone Girl

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: When a man's wife goes missing, the attention shifts from sympathetic to suspicion that he murdered her. The Lowdown: Deeply cynical, darkly funny, sometimes brutal, very powerful filmmaking that may make you a little queasy, but will almost certainly entertain you to no end.
Starring: Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Alfre Woodard, Tony Amendola, Kerry O'Malley

Annabelle

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: A young couple are menaced by a creepy doll that's possessed by a demon. The Lowdown: Fairly perfunctory horror that purports to be the origin story of the doll seen early on in last year's The Conjuring. There are a few good shocks, but a lack of atmosphere and a truly awful script…
Starring: Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Evelyn Ankers, Reginald Denny / Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Lionel Atwill, Dennis Hoey

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror / Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: These are the first two movies in Universal's famous Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. The studio opted to bring the duo back by streamlining and updating the concept. Instead of costly period pieces, they would make Holmes and Watson contemporary and build a series of classy B-pictures around them.…
Starring: Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Stellan Skarsgård, Jean Reno, Toni Collette, Christopher Plummer

Hector and the Search for Happiness

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: A disgruntled psychiatrist goes on a journey — literal and spiritual — to try to understand what makes people happy. The Lowdown: It's too long, takes too long finding its footing and doesn't offer any new answers, but Hector and the Search for Happiness is a pleasant little movie that wears its heart…
Starring: Robert Powell, David Warner, Eric Porter, Karen Dotrice, John Mills, Ronald Pickup

The Thirty-Nine Steps

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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In Brief: Often touted as being a faithful adaptation of John Buchan's novel, Don Sharp's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1978) — the only version of the story where 39 is spelled out — might better be called "more faithful than the earlier versions." As a film, it's not in the same universe as Hitchcock's 1935 version,…
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Robert Patrick, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Sheen, Rosemarie DeWitt, Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia

Kill the Messenger

Reviewed by Ken Hanke on
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The Story: Fact-based story of reporter Gary Webb, who linked the CIA to using the drug trade to fund Nicaraguan militias. The Lowdown: Slick, glossy crusading reporter movie with a strong lead performance, but also lacking in being anything other than a basic example of its genre.