Movie Reviews

The Story:  Three stories set in three different countries are intercut with each other. The Lowdown: A fascinating, flawed and occasionally maddening film with a terrific cast giving solid performances. It's wildly ambitious — probably too much so — overstuffed, overlong and yet compelling in ways that better films often aren't.

The Story:  Documentary on movie critic Roger Ebert. The Lowdown: Something of a mixed bag — and one that dodges the hard questions and comes across more like a celebration of its subject than an actual portrait. It nonetheless does a good job of capturing much of the essence of a man who loved the…

In Brief: Since Stephen Frears had a movie up for a Best Picture Oscar — Philomena — last year, it's apt  that his first big hit, My Beautiful Laundrette, should be getting another look. This multicultural, multisexuality comedy-drama-romance kicked off Daniel Day-Lewis' career and made the first mark for a production company called Working Title. It was also…

In Brief: No one and nothing is quite safe at Mrs. Rittenhouse's (Margaret Dumont) swanky Long Island house party when the Marx Brothers show up. Worse, one of them, Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding (Groucho), is her guest of honor. Zeppo is his secretary and, as usual, mostly fades into the background, while Signor Emmanuel Ravelli…

In Brief: This year's feature winner at the Twin Rivers Media Festival is an extremely likable — mostly due to its energetic cast — sex comedy that benefits to some degree by name performers, Gary Busey and C. Thomas Howell, in key supporting roles. The fact that it's mostly gorgeous looking in bright, pop art…

The Story: After discovering her husband’s infidelity, a down-on-her-luck former fast-food employee and her alcoholic grandmother set off on a road trip. The Lowdown: An ugly, unfunny comedy of the supposedly raunchy R-rated variety that’s little more than noisy and grating.

The Story: Story of a dysfunctional, motherless family in Texas, focused on the older, delinquent son. The Lowdown: An indie-basic tale of disaffected youth and their alcoholic dad in rural Texas. Some aspects are pleasing, but you've seen it all before.

In Brief: Back in their day, the Hammer horror films were considered to be quite graphic and bloody. Today, they seem positively restrained, but don’t sell the studio at its best short — and Terence Fisher’s The Gorgon (1964) is definitely Hammer at its best. Premise-wise you mightn’t think so, but somehow transporting a monster from…

In Brief: As good as it is on its own merits, Blood Simple worked as the Coens Brothers' announcement of themselves to the moviegoing world — showing off, to the best of their ability on a low budget, exactly what they had to offer the movies. So much of what they indeed proved they did…

The Story: The last remnants of humanity, broken into class structures, are all aboard a super train that endlessly circles the otherwise frozen world — until revolt breaks out. The Lowdown: Brilliant, creative, exciting, suspenseful — and with much more on its mind than the usual blockbuster, Snowpiercer is a front-runner for one of the…

The Story: On their final night living together, three best friends find an extraterrestrial that shadowy government agents are after. The Lowdown: While it has its heart in the right place, this tween adventure flick is far too derivative and far too distracting within the confines of its found footage artifice to be more than…

In Brief: Harry Lachman's Dante's Inferno (1935) may be more of a curio than anything else, but what a curio it is. It was an expensive production with most of the money being spent on an elaborate vision of the title Inferno (based on Gustave Dore's engravings) — and the film would be worth seeing…

The Story: Fact-based hooey about a police sergeant who becomes involved in a case of demonic possession in the Bronx. The Lowdown: A somewhat atmospheric but way too long horror picture that has nothing new to offer.

In Brief: Horror meets the biographical film in Ken Russell's Gothic (1986) — a stylish and very wild and woolly take on Lord Byron's (Gabriel Byrne) house party at the villa in Switzerland with Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson), Percy Shelley (Julian Sands) and Dr. Polidori (Timothy Spall). This, of course, was the famous party that…

In Brief: Will Rogers' last movie, and his third in collaboration with director John Ford, is one of the comedian's most popular and one of his best. Rogers plays a patent medicine salesman with dreams of being a steamboat captain — dreams that are put on hold when his nephew (and future riverboat pilot) comes up…

The Story: Giant robot Optimus Prime must stop an old nemesis and his former allies — mankind. The Lowdown: A loud, noisy, stupid and incredibly angry movie that’s far too long and only occasionally interesting thanks to its screwy worldview.

In Brief: Mystifyingly popular film version of an equally mystifyingly popular Neil Simon play about an attempt to reunite two aging vaudevillians for a TV special. Almost as mystifying is the reason for doing this, since the one-time partners cordially detest each other, but without the attempt, there's no story. The sole point of calm…

The Story: Documentary about cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky's incredibly ambitious, never-made film of Frank Herbert's Dune. The Lowdown: One of the most entertaining documentaries in living memory — especially for movie fans. It paints a compelling and enjoyable portrait of what may have been a milestone of 1970s filmmaking had it actually been made. That…

The Story: After a drunken one-night stand, a comic finds herself pregnant, faced with a suitor she doesn't want and an impending abortion. The Lowdown: Yes, it's been critically lauded, but personally, I found this abortion-themed rom-com mostly tedious, unfunny and cursed with an unlikable main character.

The Story: The Beatles perform a televised concert, have various adventures and nearly lose Ringo in the process. The Lowdown: Here we have one of the greatest — and arguably most important — films of the 1960s getting a two-day (Saturday and Sunday) re-issue in honor of its 50th anniversary. Oh, it's not like A…

In Brief: The Asheville Film Society's annual birthday salute to British filmmaker Ken Russell (1927-2011) reaches back to Russell's first shot at international fame, Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the third film in Michael Caine's Harry Palmer (the "thinking man's James Bond") series. Caine had been impressed by Russell's TV work and had him hired for…