DEMOLITION is off from the first frame and never grounds itself enough to make a coherent argument. Hard to tell whether it’s Jake Gyllenhaal’s perplexed expression as he endeavors to show himself empty of emotions after the accidental death of his wife or the ill-thought storyline that appears to go in one direction and then unexplainably veers into another. Jean-Marc Vallée, who previously directed the excellent

On Monday night at the Alamo Drafthouse I caught a screening of GUN CRAZY, the influential low-budget 1949 B-movie starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall as a pair of bank-robbing lovers on the run. If you don’t know Dall, he was a Ben Affleck lookalike who starred in two minor classics in about eighteen months and then barely acted again—the other classic being Alfred Hitchcock’s ROPE. If you don’t know Hitchcock, then I really can’t help.

MARGUERITE ET JULIEN, which comes out this week, had everyone talking before its premiere at the 2015 Cannes Festival--the story deals with incest, after all, a taboo subject which should probably always remain taboo. Adapted from an original screenplay written by Jean Gruault for none other than French new wave master François Truffaut, MARGUERITE ET JULIEN stars French actors Jérémie Elkaïm and Anaïs

The story of Olympics legend Jesse Owens has always stuck with me. Not because of the glory of winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin games, setting records in front of Adolf Hitler. It has stuck with me because it haunts me – that a man could be a national hero one day and then struggle in the longer RACE of life. RACE doesn’t cover much of Owens’ life outside of his athletic peak. Being a pretty lame inspirational

People walk all over Jesus, partially because he can’t fight back, partially because he lets them. His best friend is a prostitute who shakes him down for money and hogs his measly apartment to service clients. People have an uncanny ability to not notice him when he walks in a room—unless they need him for something, of course. The gay, femmy son of a famous ex-boxer, Jesus makes ends meet turning the occasional trick and fixing the wigs of Havana transvestites

The praise critics have showered on Todd Haynes’s CAROL gives me pause. Have I seen an entirely different film or is there something in this one that escapes me? A. O. Scott of the N.Y. Times sees CAROL as “fetishistically precise in its recreation of the look and sound of the past.” Sorry, but the fingernails with their bright red polish, the lips with their bright red lipstick, the precisely-coiffed heads, women wearing high heels

Of course, the historical Hugh Glass, legendary nineteenth-century frontiersman left for dead by his fellows after surviving a horrific grizzly bear attack, never had a half-Native American son. But neither did he violently confront the traitor who left him for dead and murdered the aforementioned imagined son. It’s also improbable that during his journey he was rescued and aided by a lone Pawnee elder. We know this because we have authentic