A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia’s splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile-pukes its outrages with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. De la Iglesia doesn’t share those directors’ interest in making clear just why characters do the…

Today it’s hard for us to fathom why preachers used to rail so vehemently against jitterbugging. Even with cultural context — black music infiltrating white America; the revolution of rhythm over melody — the athletic whirligig swing-time boogie craze of the ’30s and ’40s now looks as wholesome as the…

Since 2002, the year Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, the other Spider-Man, the hero of the actual comic books, has joined the Avengers, revealed his secret identity to the world, and become a highly paid inventor who has engineered, among other marvels, a limitless energy source science has dubbed “Parker…

How much can you take away and still have a movie? Steven Knight’s Locke is an experiment in reducing contemporary scree storytelling to its irreducible essentials, which isn’t quite the same thing as being an “experimental” film, despite the ravishing early reviews from England. It shows us just one actor,…

At first, before the murders, the story might sound like some nihilistic last-century tropical sitcom, what Sherwood Schwartz would have come up with if he’d been into Nietzsche. In 1929, German physician Friedrich Ritter, brain aflame with the promise of the superman, convinced his lover, Dore Strauch, to abandon Berlin…

Looking for a chance to shout, “Only in America!”? Only in America — or an American movie — could the story of the first two Indian players to be signed to a Major League Baseball team get spun as an L.A. sports agent’s journey toward realizing the importance of family…

At their worst, the four documentaries that have examined the tragic case of the West Memphis Three have felt like the work of master ironists. Telling the story of three Arkansas teens convicted of child murders just because two of them wore black and had an interest in the occult,…

Has it ever occurred to contemporary commercial filmmakers that maybe audiences could take a movie’s word for it that a character has been tortured? That perhaps implication and skilled acting could communicate the idea with sufficient power so that we might all be spared the screaming and limb-breaking and slow-motion…

The most perfect works of art are those suspended between conception and realization, the ones that seize you up with how great they’re gonna be. (Well, those and Busby Berkeley numbers.) Alejandro Jodorowsky’s daft, daring, surrealist, possibly impossible adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s spice-mining science-fiction novel that later proved unadaptable…

First, the pleasant surprises. In puffing up the slight, absurd Mr. Peabody and Sherman shorts from Jay Ward’s The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into an 82-minute 3D save-the-timestream child-distractor, director Rob Minkoff and his many writers have preserved a few of the hallmarks distinguishing the Dada, deadpan, almost primitive original,…

That Bible miniseries, originally aired on the History Channel, won notoriety by casting an actor who resembles Barack Obama in the crowd-pleasing role of Satan. The producers — Roma Downey, who plays Mary here, and Mark Burnett, who pioneered the watch-skinny-people-suffer genre with Survivor — insisted that this was a…

When we first meet the hero of Son of God, a kind of chintzy melodrama about the horrors of capital punishment, he’s approaching a fisherman with a classic boiler-room pitch: “Just give me an hour, and I will give you a whole new life,” Jesus (Diogo Morgado) promises Peter (Darwin…

Think back to the worst thing you did in high school. Shoplifting? Busted with a joint? Trespassing while lit up on Boone’s Farm? Now, imagine you pulled your rite-of-passage no-goodnik routine in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the early 2000s. You get busted, the cops get involved, you get hauled to the…

Almost a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is a spirited zip through Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the last decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, In Secret boasts vigor and…

Here’s the last thing I ever would have expected out of Pompeii, that sword-thrust of 3D gladiator-vs.-volcano madness coming right at your disbelieving eyeholes. An hour or so in, when Vesuvius exhausts its portentous rumblings and blows its top (3D!), I legitimately wasn’t ready. Yes, all that third-act destruction is…

Almost a pop history of Western culture’s relationship to female orgasm, Charlie Stratton’s In Secret is a spirited zip through Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, a sex-and-sin morality tale of the sort that has been the template for the last decade of Woody Allen dramas. Unlike those, In Secret boasts vigor…

Just as animated characters who look too human creep us out, could there be a phenomenon we might call the RomCom Uncanny Valley, a case when movie stars’ gorgeousness fully outshines our ability to believe their characters’ humdrum relationship problems? Radiant lovers make radiant love — and then argue about…

Marvelous footchases over, under, and through the stalls of a sprawling Asunción marketplace invigorate this twisty life-on-the-streets crime thriller, but it’s the adept human touch of Paraguayan directors Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori that makes those freewheeling sprints so marvelously tense. (Or simply marvelous, in the case of one…

A grim and hilarious hallucination in monochrome, Ben Wheatley’s small-budget historical freak-out A Field in England ticks madly between unities-honoring classical drama, language-drunk existentialism, cock-brandishing Elizabethan ribaldry, and the muskets-and-sorcery madness of some as yet unconceived Vertigo comics series, one where the old ball-and-powder somehow has anachronistic power to blow…

There are four good things we can say about I, Frankenstein, another muscles-and-rubble comic book adaptation just un-terrible enough not to alienate its core audience, yet never consistently grand or surprising enough to win over anyone else. First, Aaron Eckhart brings it, scowling like a champ beneath his jigsawed scar…

Ordinary life comes to look like a humiliation in the late reels of Lenny Cooke, yet another heartbreaker of a doc in which a compelling basketball story powers a discomfiting examination of a crisis facing young American men, so many of whom are encouraged to develop skills and interests having…

There’s hunger, and then there’s hunger, and every kind of both fuels the desperate young Cuban men who scrap through this nervy, sensual feature. The first hunger is the obvious one: Good food, like almost everything a family needs, isn’t easy to come by in late-era Havana, so husband and…