Movie Reviews

In Brief: Tying into the article in last week's Xpress on the making of the film, Thunder Road (1958) is back for one show at the Fine Arts Theatre. The drive-in perennial is locally famous for having been shot around Asheville (with the Asheville area playing the part of Tennessee). But its real claim to…

The Story: Captain America becomes an outlaw after Ironman sidles up to the U.N. to force superheroes to become registered government agents. The Lowdown: A generally entertaining and faithful comic book adaptation that suffers from some spotty direction and too much superhero padding.

The Story: Biographical film on Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his friendship with Cambridge professor G.H. Hardy. The Lowdown: Thoroughly standard biopic that doesn't challenge the viewer but is uniformly entertaining, splendidly acted and strikingly intelligent.

In Brief: I won’t say that seeing When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) for the first time was a revelatory experience, but it was sufficiently rewarding that I’d like to see more of Mikio Naruse's work (which dates back to 1930). If nothing else, it’s striking to see a filmmaker of that vintage fixated on…

The Story: A 15-year-old Dublin boy decides to form a rock band to impress a slightly older girl. The Lowdown: Good-hearted, charming, winning little movie with doses of genuine magic — and an authentic sense of time and place and youthfulness. It might restore your faith in the musical film. One of the very best…

In Brief: Ernest Hemingway claimed that he wrote the character of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls with Gary Cooper in mind — an interesting turn of events since Hemingway was no fan of A Farewell to Arms (1932), which had starred Cooper. Regardless, I guess we can assume this gives Sam Wood's…

In Brief: Before you roll your eyes over "yet another movie about Nazi hunters," you should know that this third film in the 2016 Asheville Jewish Film Festival is something very different. The People vs. Fritz Bauer (2015) is a fact-based work about the machinery behind both protecting and capturing Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. But…

The Story: Several tenuously connected groups of people examine maternal relationships in the days leading up to the titular holiday. The Lowdown: Garry Marshall has done it again! And, by “it,” I mean waste the movie-going public’s time and money with an ill-conceived and poorly executed cash-grab.

The Story: Some sort of alien cat creature and his defective robot sidekick fight an evil oligarch intent on remaking the galaxy in his image. The Lowdown: A 90-minute commercial for the reboot of a 15-year-old video game, Ratchet & Clank is a real clunker.

The Story: An octogenarian — with some kind of dementia — is sent to hunt down and kill a former Nazi guard from Auschwitz. The Lowdown: A pretty preposterous concept that almost transcends its unbelievable premise by virtue of Christopher Plummer's performance — and which is rarely less than entertaining.

The Story: After his new kitten is kidnapped, a heartbroken stoner and his square cousin infiltrate an LA gang to get him back. The Lowdown: A decidedly overdrawn and one-note comedy with a few high points, but a whole lot of disappointing lows.

In Brief: Fritz Lang's first talkie, 1931's M, definitely shows its age in terms of the technical aspects of early sound — though there's no denying it's a big improvement over his final silent, The Woman in the Moon (1929), which I've been working my way through for years. However, it still has the power to grip…

The Story: A young reporter befriends Ernest Hemingway and spends time with him in Cuba shortly before the author’s suicide. The Lowdown: Unadulterated veneration of Hemingway during a stage in his life when he probably didn’t deserve it, Papa contributes nothing novel to the author’s posthumous mythos.

In Brief: This week, the Asheville Jewish Film Festival is showing the Israeli drama Apples from the Desert (2014). Moran Rosenblatt stars as Rebecca Abravanel, an only child who is unfulfilled by her strictly Orthodox life in modern Jerusalem, under the patriarchal hand of an unbending father (Shlomi Koriat) and a subservient mother (Reymond Amsallem).…

In Brief: By the time Ermanno Olmi made Il Posto in 1961, the Italian neo-realist movement (born more of circumstance than a desire to change film) was pretty much a thing of the past. His choice of making a film more or less in that style, however, seems more grounded in his work as a documentarian than…

The Story: Desperate for money, a touring punk band takes an ill-considered gig playing a neo-Nazi compound where they accidentally witness a murder that pits them in a struggle to survive against overwhelming odds. Predictably, most of them do not. The Lowdown: A brutal and relentless film, Green Room is a remarkably well-crafted genre effort…

In Brief: The opening-night film for this year's Fine Arts Asheville Jewish Film Festival is Aviva Kempner's Rosenwald (2015), an appealing film about the Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. The film is very much of a piece with Kempner's Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg (2009), which had the advertising tagline, "The Most Famous Woman You Never Heard Of." That's exactly…

In Brief: Designed as a follow-up to the original The Pink Panther (1963), A Shot in the Dark (1964) finds Blake Edwards and co-author William Peter Blatty turning to Harry Kurnitz’ play of the same name as a basis for the sequel. Using the play as a springboard gave the film the kind of form and structure that’s…

The Story: Elvis Presley’s aides orchestrate a meeting with President Richard M. Nixon when the King decides he wants to become an undercover hippie-busting federal agent (or, if you believe his wife’s account, was convinced that a federal badge would allow him to carry guns and drugs with impunity while traveling). The Lowdown: Based on…

The Story: Fantasticated — nearly phantasmagorical — biographical film on jazz great Miles Davis. The Lowdown: A radical — but completely accessible and richly entertaining — approach to the much disdained biopic genre. Propelled by a towering performance by director, co-writer and star Don Cheadle, this is what movies ought to be all about. See…

The Story: As two supernatural sisters attempt to take over the Enchanted Forest, a group of daring fighters tries to stop them. The Lowdown: Despite a good cast and some neat visuals, a pointless attempt at forcing a new series on the world, one that simply doesn’t have the verve or story to be of…