A quartet of screenwriters is credited in Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious,” but just a single action choreographer: If you’ve ever doubted the adage that two heads (or indeed four) are better than one, here’s your validation. No one could accuse those scribes of working overtime in devising the barely-there plot and barely-care dialogue for this […]

There’s no meet-cute in “Office Romance,” but the way its lovers meet is pretty cute just the same. Formidable airline CEO Jackie Cruz (Jennifer Lopez) summons her new company lawyer Daniel Blanchflower (Brett Goldstein) to her office, and he walks in to see what, in cinematic terms, we shall term the full J-Lo: She’s facing […]

The star pairing of “Happy Hours” isn’t just its selling point, but its audience filter. If the words “Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson together again” make your heart go a little soft, then congratulations: This equally soft-hearted romantic comedy has been made directly for you. If, however, you’re unmoved by the prospect of a “Dawson’s […]

The British obsession with the weather goes from an easily mocked national quirk to a world-beating point of pride in “Pressure,” a handsome, efficient WWII drama that doesn’t go quite so far as to say a weatherman won the war, but wouldn’t mind one bit if that’s what you came away believing. The “weatherman,” in […]

Everyone who has ever experienced serious grief knows the strange, unsettling things it can do to time: stretching it or compressing it by turns, consigning some passages of it to a black hole of memory, or sometimes just suspending it entirely. Pretty much all these possible stages and cruel temporal tricks of the mind are […]

How far would you go for a woman who claims with a straight face to be “endeavoring to bring about a change in consciousness through our art?” Not that far, probably: Confronted with that statement, most people would likely make a polite excuse and back away slowly. But most people are not actors, or even […]

Though he’s a prolific screenwriter with a number of popular arthouse titles to his name (“After the Wedding,” “In a Better World,” “The Promised Land”), the directorial efforts of one Anders Thomas Jensen (including “Riders of Justice” and “Men and Chicken”) are rarer birds in all senses of the term — usually fusing antic comedy […]

Virginia Woolf herself was not the greatest admirer of her 1919 novel “Night and Day,” a complex and somewhat elusive work that wove a pensive reflection on women’s suffrage through a quasi-Shakespearean rotation of misbegotten and rearranged courtships — in a style far removed from the angular modernism of her later works. It remains perhaps […]

Some of the most effective horror films craft their scares out of the reassuring everyday. In “Passenger”, the familiar routines and sounds associated with driving become ominous signs of incoming disaster, as a mysterious figure haunts and attacks drivers on the American highways. Norwegian director André Øvredal does not reinvent the wheel with this humble […]

With nothing holding her down but a dead-end job and an aging dad, a small-town Texan girl is swiftly bedazzled by a smooth criminal drifter, and hops into his car to pursue a life less ordinary. The premise of “Carolina Caroline” could be copy-pasted from innumerable American road movies, from landmarks like “Bonnie and Clyde” […]

“When mom goes to work, dad goes berserk!” read the tagline for Stan Dragoti’s 1983 comedy “Mr. Mom.” The line could just as easily be plastered across the poster of “The Breadwinner,” an unimaginative update of the househusband formula directed by Eric Appel and starring the comedian Nate Bargatze, also its co-writer. The broadest of […]

The legacy of William Friedkin’s 1980 erotic thriller “Cruising” is a complex one. A film long vehemently denounced by the queer community it purported to represent, and more recently reclaimed as a rare mainstream portrait of a vanished social scene, it is many things to many people — and in disentangling its onscreen achievements and […]